Crypto’s Last Week
This edition of “Crypto’s Last Week” accounts for some of the most notable, and crypto-related — institutional, investment, or regulatory — news published between Saturday, December 12, 2020, and Friday, December 18, 2020
Blockchain has been a revolutionizing technology, bringing promising updates to industrial procedures that have become obsolete and inefficient. Among these industries, the most affected is finance, and within finance, public offerings have been widely criticized when compared with the efficiencies and security brought by blockchain’s own digital offerings, security token offerings, or the infamous initial coin offerings have been the most discussed.
In this instance, Swiss crypto bank Sygnum has recently announced the tokenization of its shares seeking to lay the groundwork for its future public offering, using what is considered as the most advanced technological tool to offer a “fully regulated, highly efficient and potentially more inclusive alternative to traditional public offering options.”
This important announcement is said to position Sygnum as the first bank in the world to participate in the tokenization of shares, but also to be the first company looking to go public using this technological innovation. Said tokenization process is being executed by Sygnum’s tokenization platform, Desygnate, which will issue digital representations of shares and associated legal rights and obligations on a distributed ledger.
The advantages brought to this institution and investors as a result of the aforementioned tokenization of its shares, includes digital transfers of data to update the ledger with information such as capital increases or share transfers, reducing the manual labor routinely seen to update such information in the shareholder registry, while minimizing counterparty risk related to cash settlements and the facilitation of more efficient and less time consuming secondary market transactions.
DFG Founder and CEO, James Wo, recently discussed similar points during his panel participation at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit, similarly referring to digital offerings as the best solution to a number of issues from access to funding and inclusion of those previously unable to participate in the funding stages, to the efficiency brought to the process thanks to blockchain and the digital registration of sensitive information that can be accessed by all authorized parties whenever necessary.
Decentralized finance or DeFi has been a trending word throughout 2020, with substantial attention and capital volume entering the space. Most of the attention has gone to Ethereum and the companies that use this network’s smart contract platform to develop and bring to life a wide variety of concepts from decentralized exchanges to lending and insurance.
And while Ethereum native projects have garnered all the attention in this young and disruptive technology, Bitcoin has also had its fair share of DeFi development through platforms such as RSK, a general-purpose smart contract platform that promises to bring this futuristic industry to the leading digital asset in the market. Bitcoin.
The RSK network is similarly decentralized with an alleged hash-power or hashrate second only to that of its base protocol. Therefore it is easy to understand why certain groups of developers within the industry are focused on developing the future of decentralized finance on the original and most secure blockchain network known to date.
It is interesting to see how Bitcoin-based projects are aiming to increase their participation in the latest and possibly most fruitful industry being developed on blockchain. Announcements such as the recent Sovryn launch will hopefully continue to add nuanced factors to the DeFi race and push the underlying need for innovative solutions for a fast-paced ecosystem that has gathered attention in all realms of global markets.
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