Eko Securities Exchange

Securitizing African commerce in the age of tokenization.

[Eko Securities Exchange @ekosecurities]

Version 2.0 of our whitepaper is out, under a new title: "The collapse of the post-trade stack: re-engineering African capital formation."

With feedback from institutional market operators and crypto-native investors in Africa and abroad, we've made four changes to the exchange's design:

Settlement: Trades will settle on a Layer 2 rollup that posts its records to Ethereum.

Issuance: New instruments will be issued directly on the blockchain, and existing shares and bonds can be mirrored as digital twins.

Identity: Licensed brokers, custodians, and banks will be able to verify investors, and investors will be able to prove they're eligible without revealing personal data.

Liquidity: Assets issued on the exchange will be able to move to other blockchains and serve as collateral in outside lending markets.

Read the whitepaper for the technical detail behind each change: https://t.co/nyNj0iV9Kv

[Ife. @IfeJohnseen]

I’ve gotten questions about our first product on @ekosecurities: programmatic receivables financing. PSPs, fintechs, and banks get cash without waiting to be settled, and investors get short-term yield. Three more are coming. Read the whitepaper. https://t.co/RaMwbFdflD

[Eko Securities Exchange @ekosecurities]

Africa's liquidity gap is estimated to be between $35 billion and $100 billion, yet over the last 25 years, the continent has accounted for just 1% of the equity raised worldwide.

@IfeJohnseen explained why when he announced Eko Securities Exchange at Moonshot by @TechCabal: "Africa has economic activity that the world could finance, but so little of it has been structured into something the world can invest in."

Tokenization can change that. In his words, it "allows us to structure assets, establish ownership, and distribute securities globally."

Watch the full announcement.

[Eko Securities Exchange @ekosecurities]

@iamtundekelani You can read or download it here https://t.co/SI6CjUOfED

[Ife. @IfeJohnseen]

Africa's liquidity gap is estimated to be between $35 billion and $100 billion. The continent's housing deficit is projected to reach about 130 million homes by 2030.

Who is going to raise that much money? Who is going to finance 130 million homes? Money on that scale has to come from investors around the world, and investors need an exchange where they can buy and sell what they fund.

Watch my full announcement of @ekosecurities to find out why I believe Africa is the greenfield for the next generation of capital markets.

[Eko Securities Exchange @ekosecurities]

Each African market keeps its own ledger, so settlement is slow and moving capital between markets is costly. Our first whitepaper sets out how we’re building a blockchain-native exchange to change that. https://t.co/pbsXDNhV1g

[Eko Securities Exchange @ekosecurities]

Africa is not short of economic activity. Goods move and money crosses borders every day in enormous quantity. When that activity is financed through private deals, an investor outside those deals cannot buy into it or sell it on.

That gap has a cost, and businesses here pay it. A company moving money across the continent puts dollars into a corridor before a single trade arrives, and those dollars wait there earning little. A founder who built something valuable can wait years for a chance to sell any part of it, and a business that could raise money from an investor abroad raises it instead from the few investors it can reach, on their terms.

Investors charge more for arrangements they cannot exit, and the businesses here pay that price in the cost of the money they raise.

Eko Securities Exchange Limited exists to close that gap.

The next generation of African exchanges will not simply trade what already exists. They will create markets for assets that have none today. A recurring funding requirement can become an instrument an investor can buy, and a stake recorded on a private company's register can become a security. New industries will produce asset classes of their own.

That changes what an exchange is for. An exchange stops being a record of the economy and becomes part of how the economy is built.

With our origination partners, we will originate assets from real economic activity and securitize them into instruments that investors can buy and sell. We will list those instruments on the exchange, and licensed partners will distribute them to eligible investors.

Nigeria is our home market. It is not the limit of the ambition. With today's technology, the continent does not need fifty-four copies of the same market infrastructure. One deep exchange can support products connected to activity across the continent, subject to the law in each place, and connect them to far larger pools of capital than any single African country has.

Tokenization opens new ways to own and settle securities. That is why we are building this now and not twenty years ago.

The infrastructure nobody has built yet is the opportunity.

We are building Eko Securities Exchange Limited around the securities African businesses will create.

Eko Securities Exchange Limited will turn privately financed African economic activity into securities that investors around the world can buy and sell.

Read more and contact us at https://t.co/PLaln9yvNj.