Dave Hendriks, CEO of Vertalo and Co-founder and CTO William Baxter gave an interview for TezTalks #3. They talked about how they started on Ethereum and switched to Tezos, also they talked about the STO use-case and market and what they are working on.
Initially, issuing a security token (STO) on Ethereum cost $100,000.-. Vertalo wanted to make the process more efficient and a lot cheaper. Vertalo first started working on Ethereum but when Dave Hendriks started to look into Tezos and was impressed about the direction Tezos was going. In his opinion, Tezos is an improvement on Ethereum and focused on a part of the market that Vertalo was interested in. This was a reason to move Vertalo's attention to Tezos and start building and integrating their platform on Tezos.
Vertalo aims to make investing in security tokens simple and attractive to everyone and they do so by eliminating the need for investors to understand the underlying blockchain technology. Investors that use Vertalo don't need wallets and don't need to be able to understand any of the issues that are holding up mass adoption of cryptocurrencies today. If you're not tech savvy, investing in cryptocurrencies is still a huge challenge. Investing in STO's should be less of a hassle. Blockchain is used as the underlying tech, to make processes more efficient, cheaper and assets more liquid. End-users should not be bothered with storing public and private keys.
People who want to invest in for example real estate tokens, can do so in a very simplified manner through platforms like Vertalo while enjoying low legal costs and low transaction fees, and having liquidity at their disposal. (Another platform with those qualities is the Equisafe platform.)
The Vertalo team expects that certain STO's which were originally launched on Ethereum will want to move over to Tezos eventually. This is why Vertalo wants to be able to swap chains. So that tokens that have already been issued on Ethereum can be moved over to Tezos in an easy manner. Vertalo is able to perform this switch in about two minutes.
This process has been discussed and showcased live on the latest TezTalks.
Vertalo aims to bring in institutions and large bases of assets. One of those institutions is Dealbox: a capital advisor and venture studio. They help support early stage startups raising capital. Not in the wild-west style that happened on Ethereum through ICO's which spawned a lot of illegal security offerings, but in a regulated manner. They have 22 different issuers on their platform, which are coming to the Vertalo platform. One of the first companies that is mentioned to come to Vertalo is a company that is fractionalizing private jet ownership. (Same use-case as tokenizing real-estate: divide the total value of an income generating, real value asset into tokens that are registered on a blockchain. This will enable you to buy fractions of that asset instead of a whole asset (which most can't afford). This way a whole investment market that was previously unavailable for many, now opens up to a broader market.)
Vertalo also goes full into the real estate use-case. Last month, they already announced to tokenize $300M Real Estate on Tezos. But as revealed in the interview, "The numbers are actually bigger than $300 million. That's just one portfolio."
They have created Vertalo Real estate. All STO's will be launched on Tezos. The tokens will be traded on t-Zero and on other exchanges. Vertalo believe this is just the beginning. There is going to be a restructuring of the entire asset market. And through STO's and the ease with which these can be issued, acquired and traded, this development will revolutionize a part of the asset market that has been very hard to access for many. This is an extremely large market that will benefit of this new ownership model. This could very well be the huge use-case that brings adoption to blockchain. The technical hurdle will not be present like in cryptocurrencies. For the STO usecase, users do not need to understand blockchain and create wallets. Institutions like Vertalo, Equisafe, t-Zero and others are using public blockchains like Tezos as underlying tech.
Watch the whole episode of TezTalks #3 here:
