If you’re planning on being in NYC for
@blockworksDAS , or if you’re already there, or on the fence… Consider applying to join our CEO @davehendricks and the RWA Day team for a special evening:
RWA Night 2025 NYC! 3/19 6-9PM very convenient midtown below 42nd location
150 of the best builders, buyers, and investors in Tokenized RWA.
A night to meet new partners and projects…and forge new relationships. And have some food and drinks. Apply here: https://t.co/8I76eQckb8 Sponsorships available at all levels
Happy to read that our longtime partners and friends at @tZERO have developed some amazing IP that focuses on different approaches than what we have developed and commercialized at @Vertalo_.
We have always been 'different by design', but not to avoid IP issues.
OTOH, if we were @Securitize, @SuperstateInc, or @TokenySolutions we would be far more concerned.
@tZERO has been around for a looonnng time. Prior Art, the same as us.
Quite the release today. 🍿
Not "synthetics bad." "Third-party bad." @davehendricks of @Vertalo_, who holds organic over synthetic, still blesses this one: issuer-sponsored, tied to a real entitlement. The lane the xStocks SpaceX wrapper missed, and the one @Exodus just shipped.
I expect 'Issuer-sponsored Synthetics' to become a thing. Those are just forms of derivatives, maybe with different rights or targeted for different markets (think 'depository receipts'), like ex-US.
As usual, I agree with @jprichardson, as I do most if not all of the time. @exodus is literally the case study for the progression of a private exempt offering graduating through several steps:
>Non-marketable (like most Reg D etc),
>then limited liquidity via private markets ATSs,
and then with all the kinks worked out,
>Going public.
As a transfer agent and provider of services to Exempt Private companies, and as a steward for their investors' data, my allegiance is to the truth of who owns what and their rights to trade/transfer it - under the rules set by the issuer. Investors sign docs and it is a caveat emptor world.
Our work is focused on 'primitives', meaning book-entry, verifiable equity (or debt) holdings. Not diligencing offering documents. We are not legal counsel or the compliance function. We are definitively anti compliance-aware tokens, too.
If an Issuer of Tokenized RWA Synthetics wants to work with us, @Vertalo_ will happily take the call.
If that Issuer wants to sell synthetics, and they have investors who want to buy them, we can accommodate that. However, if those synthetics do not tie back to the primitive (issuer or 3rd party sponsored), that is an issue between the synthetic issuer and the investors who signed their docs.
It makes no difference to us, as we are not the deciders on what issuers want to issue or investors want to invest in. We just keep the record, we are not the SEC.
Investors need to understand these nuances.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Private Assets are a 50x larger market than public
Tokenizing privates is easier from a technical and regulatory perspective
Public shares do not suffer from a 'democratization' problem. They are easy to buy and sell. Tokenization, today, does little more than inject friction into that process.
The IPO process has been broken and dead for 4 years.
This is a smart move by Citi
Here's a throwback - Vertalo's Tokenized RWA issuance March 2018. We launched it at Polymath's 'Polycon' conference.
https://t.co/0Zvu2evC5A
Vertalo's original RWA Tokenization
8 years, 92 days ago @Vertalo_ tokenized it's equity and a utility token for the platform called 'Talos'
Our original investors still own these tokens.
We have not made them tradeable...yet.
108 page PPM
Cayman Reg D and Reg S
This experience - we started as an issuer - inspired me to pivot from the first version of Vertalo towards the mission: building a tokenization and transfer agent platform to help issuers (and their investors) manage tokenized offerings.
Since it's hard to do right.
@ZeusRWA@HarryTran_RWA
A regulated U.S. transfer agent just published the technical case for why they built on Aptos.
@Vertalo_ breaks down why Aptos earned integration into VSP, the Vertalo Securities Protocol — the infrastructure behind cap tables, corporate actions, and shareholder recordkeeping.
We’ve spent the last 8 years telling them a similar thing, but without the current ‘Native Token’ nomenclature, and without the synthetic concept clouding things like ICOs did to scare ppl away from anodyne implementations of DLT in a regulated context.
We did so with the express goal of helping them understand that there was a clear distinction between tokens issued as part of a exempt securities offering (or any such similar), and subject to usu and customary restrictions, as compared to tokens issued as an unregulated crowdfunding with no recourse, escheatment, rights, etc
We issued our own tokenized equity (Reg D/S) under this structure in March of 2018, so this was not a theoretical discussion. We had already proven it, and walked the talk.
From our own experience, and predicting that this would eventually become a big thing, we decided to take what we learned and turned it into a software company. And built all the TA and Tokenization capabilities to offer it to others. And giving away tokenization for free (since that’s the easy part).
6.5 years ago (Jan 2020) we introduced the Div of Trading and Markets to the concept of an SEC registered TA offering digital dematerialized and tokenized shares living side by side on the same ledger, Pari Passu, with no PII onchain.
Happy to share that deck with anyone who wants to see the receipts.
We are glad to see much larger companies come to the same conclusion, lean into it, and press on this common sense approach.
Thanks!
Move on @Aptos enforces asset correctness at the language level—resources can't be duplicated, destroyed, or mishandled.
For regulated entities, that's not a feature. It's essential.
The full stack for markets and machines, at the record layer.
He nails some of the ‘why’
But the ‘when’ has a dependency on ‘how’
The loudest voices are farthest away from the sausage factory.
Love the enthusiasm, but as he notes much spade work to be done…
Personally I think this is still much more practical and applicable in illiquid private markets for the near term. That’s where the clinical trials work has been and will continue to be conducted while the public equities links are worked out
Not nay sayin - don’t want to trigger the fan boys - just setting expectations, as someone who’s been doing this for a long time
Something he mentioned once in passing and never uttered again. It was an error, he knows that.
You kinda proved my point about ‘announcements’.
Announced, mentioned, press releases, etc etc are the participation trophies of our industry
I spoke directly to Hester about this one utterance.
She agreed with me that the SEC would not be setting standards. Not putting words in her mouth tho.
I’m happy to continue this. I will not run out of material. Been at this more than 9 years. In the rooms.
@ThomasFarley@davehendricks Honestly, once you successfully integrate EQ, there might actually only be two of us who have the integrated/synchronized architecture
We know the players and their gaps
There are very few players equipped to commercialize and scale this.
I appreciate you wanting to clarify, but the correction has nothing to do with priors.
Neither UBS, Swift, or BCB have anything to do with equities tokenization under the SEC’s purview.
Moving funds is a completely different animal transferring securities
Compliance aware Securities Tokens may eventually leverage Chainlink’s ACE (again I don’t put much stock in announcements which are almost always pay for pay log rolling), but that’s just some more complexity that needs to be ironed out
So if you love Chainlink, have at it
If you love compliance, have at it
But it does not have much relevance to the SEC and our securities regime here
Feel free to rationally correct me
Again, it’s a great idea in THEORY.
However the compliance functions in the smart contract cut not just both ways but in other, unanticipated ways.
They are super high friction, super high gas cost, and are prone to failure in trade/transfer execution.
If done on Ethereum, trades can take 13 mins to legally settle, if not longer
More reasons than that but right place to start
@Ekebodom@ChainlinkJedi@davehendricks 'The Empire Strikes Back'
Go ahead and pump your bags, and the slow motion re-centralization. So many frogs lazing around in the pot while the temperature is turned up.