With World Blockchain Forum’s Securities Tokens and ICOs event coming down the pipeline, I've been receiving a lot of questions concerning security tokens. Most of these conversations are hinged on the differences between utility versus securities, and how the crypto capital explosion of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will effect their investments as regulators start to figure out what’s going on under the hood.
To put the capital raising taking place in the cryptocurrency markets into perspective, ICOs raised over $6 billion in 2017, and have since exceeded that figure in 2018 alone. For a market with very little working products, there sure is a lot of capital being poured into it!
Blockchain technology was first invented with the development of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is a peer to peer digital currency and payment network that enables individuals to store, retrieve, and transact anywhere in the world across any border without needing a 3rd party to facilitate the settlement of transactions.
Blockchain technology has come a long way since it’s first inception as a Bitcoin payments ledger. So much so, that most of the information online about the use cases for blockchain are polarized between grand visionary futures of an interconnected internet of value and warnings of financial doom resembling the financial bubbles of the past.
As usual with popularized technology, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is probably the most glossed over issue with blockchain systems in the industry today. While we can all imagine the benefits of automated contracts, distributed value systems, and individual digital ownership of assets, we should all be equally as concerned about them. For example: