Let’s spend today looking at one of the more promising coins currently making the rounds right now: OWN.
What does it do?
- Enables businesses to raise capital by turning physical equity assets into tokenised assets. This is the basis of STOs, and why I’m so excited about them.
- Security Tokens, and STOs (Security Token Offerings) are looking to disrupt the global equity market.
- Currently, raising capital is expensive, slow and complex. It can take years for an IPO and it involves brokers, advisers, lawyers, registries, clearing houses, etc. Not mention, all charge a fee.
- Usually a portion of the capital raised is lost to fees. To counter this, OWN offers the base service free to owners and investors, while revenue is raised from premium services and third party providers
- This in turn opens up investment opportunities in private companies by providing a liquidity network, hence the secondary marketplace for the sale and purchase of unlisted shares.
- OWN also offers advisory services for business owners and investors.
- The OWN platform will run on a dual blockchain equity network, with a public blockchain layer for storing transaction data and a private blockchain for storing sensitive investor data. This helps to ensure privacy is at the core of the ecosystem.
Value prop for issuers
- Own lets you run anything from a small private sale through to full public equity offering by providing regulatory compliance, reporting, investor KYC, investor communications, and shareholder voting.
- The platform can also manage ongoing dividend payments. Dividends can be calculated and paid automatically via smart contract in fiat, crypto, additional shares, or through corporate rewards to encourage shareholders to make use of products and services.
Value prop for investors
- Establishes an immediate secondary market for the resale of investments purchased through the platform, providing instant liquidity.
- The digital share registry (DSR) platform is proprietary, but the apps and blockchain code are open source and will be freely available for developers to utilise.
- Third party interface has already been built for GDPR compliance (global data regulations).
Token metrics
- 50% of tokens were for investors, 20% retained for operational reserves, 5% for token sale costs including marketing and legal and 25% to founders.
- CHX is not used to purchase investments. This is done with fiat, BTC or ETH.
Summary
For me, this is the type of business where blockchain really adds value. Business models that rely on private, permissioned databases and networks (e.g. banking, custodial services, energy) are precisely where DLT will disrupt and disrupt the existing value chains. This is the uber and Airbnb model taken to the next level, connecting owners of a surplus asset (investment funds) with the user of the asset (companies) in a secure and trusted model that eliminates most of the cost and friction.