January 2021 - DigiShares

DigiShares Selected for Leading Accelerator Program

Posted on January 25, 2021March 3, 2024 by kiman

We are proud to announce that we were accepted out of 200 applicants to the F10 Acceleration Program (from Venture to Unicorn), facilitated by SIX, the Swiss stock exchange.

The F10 Acceleration Program, which premiered with its first cohort in 2020, aims to facilitate POCs, pilots and other collaboration between some of the most innovative Startups and Swiss banks, insurance companies and the Swiss stock exchange SIX. It is the door opener for post-seed Startups, helping them succeed in the Swiss ecosystem and boost innovation for F10 Corporate Partners – to build the financial and insurance services of tomorrow. Participating Startups will be supported by high-caliber Mentors and Investors at F10 in Zurich and will also increase chances to gain exposure in the Spanish and Singaporean ecosystem. It is the goal of DigiShares to use the acceleration program to initiate collaboration projects with F10 corporate partners with a focus on real estate tokenization. DigiShares views the F10 program as the top blockchain and fintech related acceleration program world-wide.

The 9 other participants in the program can be seen here along with the official announcement from F10.

«This program is a cornerstone of our collaboration with our Corporate Partners.» says Gerrit Sindermann, General Manager and Country Success Lead Switzerland, «our team and involved Corporate Partners have thus been very demanding in the selection process, and our expectations are accordingly very high.”

About F10
F10 is a global innovation ecosystem with offices in Zurich, Singapore, Madrid, Barcelona. With its incubators and accelerators covering the fields of FinTech, InsurTech, RegTech and DeepTech, F10 supports and guides startups in transforming their ideas into successful companies while stimulating collaboration with international organizations.

Our founding partner has been SIX, a global financial infrastructure provider and operator of the Swiss and Spanish stock exchanges. It has since been joined by a growing number of leading banks, insurances, consulting and tech firms.

About DigiShares

DigiShares is one of the leading providers of white-label tokenization platforms for real assets, combining financing, corporate management, and trading in an end-to-end solution. Our solutions enable asset owners and fund managers to digitize and automate processes, to reduce administrative cost, to reduce the ticket size to fractionalize and democratize and enable retail investors to participate, and finally to provide a huge increase in liquidity through the built-in marketplace that enables shareholders to trade their assets.

Q&A with Polymath & DigiShares CEO

Posted on January 19, 2021March 3, 2024 by kiman

In this interview, DigiShares CEO Claus Skaaning discusses the coming together of traditional finance and blockchain, how security tokens open up assets to a broader pool of investors, and why large physical assets like real estate are a prime target for tokenization.

Tokenization has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in liquidity, in part by bringing thousands of ordinary traders to assets typically reserved for big-money investors. But with such great potential comes the need for the right technologies and regulatory approach to enable greater adoption of security tokens. Tools need to take full advantage of blockchain digitization and automation in ways that are compliant with legislation.

Polymath (P): What are the missing pieces needed to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology?
Claus Skaaning (CS): I actually believe the pieces are falling into place. 2020 has seen massive interest in digital assets from issuers, and I expect that 2021 will see a massive increase in tokenization projects. One of the missing pieces has been regulation. Now we’re seeing more and more jurisdictions clarifying legislation related to tokenization, adopting the stance that a “tokenized security” is just a digital security that exists as a token on the blockchain. They’re also recognizing that tokenization can be handled not by adding new legislation but by slightly modifying and updating existing legislation to support digitized processes and documents. Also, we’re increasingly seeing banks interested in what we’re doing. Swiss banks are now becoming digital asset custodians and the first Swiss bank has announced their own tokenization platform. Some digital asset custodians are extending their services to cover fiat, essentially becoming neobanks. All of this makes it easier for investors to be onboarded into the world of digital assets.

P: What are the business benefits of using blockchain to issue securities and manage cap tables over traditional methods?
CS: Blockchain digitizes and automates processes related to issuance, governance, compliance, and trading to a much higher degree than we see today–which yields major efficiency improvements and cost reductions.These benefits suddenly make it cost-efficient and realistic to accept 10,000 investors into a real estate project instead of just 10 or 100, and to offer these 10,000 investors the ability to trade digital assets peer-to-peer. That just isn’t possible without blockchain technology.Cap table management benefits as well. Because the cap table is read directly off the blockchain, it can be kept up-to-date and doesn’t need to be manually updated or maintained. Even when trades are done peer-to-peer, the built-in smart contracts can automatically update the cap table.

P: What makes large physical assets (real estate, infrastructure, solar, wind, etc.) ideal for tokenization?
CS: They represent one of the largest single asset classes suitable for tokenization. Global real estate is worth $228 trillion and only 7% of that is available for retail investment, whereas more than 80% of investors view real estate as a good investment. Tokenization could help to close that gap.Insurance and the ongoing corporate management of these types of assets are traditionally paper-based, time-consuming and inefficient. There’s a lot of potential for digitization and automation. Also, these assets are very illiquid as there are very few, if any, efficient ways to trade them, whereas tokenization enables peer-to-peer trading in a very cost-efficient manner.

P: Real estate is the largest physical asset category right now. How do you envision tokenization changing the market over the next 10 years?
CS: Real estate will become much more accessible for retail investors than it is today. Today real estate investment is primarily the playground of accredited and experienced investors with at least $100,000 USD to spare. With tokenization, real estate assets will become much more liquid and it will become standard practice for most assets to be immediately tradeable. Whether there will be sufficient demand for real estate assets to create real liquidity remains to be seen.

→ WATCH TOKENIZATION IN REAL ESTATE, A DIGISHARES WEBINAR HOSTED IN COLLABORATION WITH POLYMATH

Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares

Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares, has a PhD in computer science and has been an entrepreneur for many years, with one exit behind him.

He has worked for Hewlett-Packard R&D and been CEO of one of the very few HP spinouts. He is also the author of 7 patents.

DigiShares Joins Polymath Service Provider Ecosystem

Posted on January 13, 2021March 3, 2024 by kiman

DigiShares, the end-to-end white label platform for tokenized securities, has joined the Polymath Service Provider Ecosystem. This collaboration gives Polymath users access to DigiShares’ cap table management tool and token sale platform.

“There is enormous potential in tokenizing assets—particularly large physical assets like real estate—and having the right technology is critical for increasing adoption,” said Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares. “We very much like the open ecosystem Polymath is creating around the ERC 1400 standard and the Polymesh blockchain initiative, and are excited to be working together to make the world of securities faster, more liquid and more transparent.“

ERC 1400 is a flexible, open source security token standard created byPolymath to bring consistency to how assets are created and handled on the Ethereum blockchain. Because ERC 1400 has been so widely adopted, Polymath has been able to gather market feedback and use the foundation established by the standard to create Polymesh, the first blockchain built specifically for security tokens.

The Polymath Service Provider Ecosystem brings together custody agents, broker-dealers, legal firms, token sale platforms, cap table management providers, KYC/AML providers, and others who can help users create and manage their token.

By joining the ecosystem, DigiShares —who has already collaborated with Polymath on a Wyoming-based project with a real estate company—has integrated ERC 1400 and can onboard tokens created using the standard without additional technical due diligence.

“Real estate tokenization has been getting a lot of buzz lately, but prospective issuers need specialized tools to go to market,” said William Vaz-Jones, Director, Partnership Development at Polymath. “DigiShares focuses on bringing efficiency to the token sale and cap table management processes to make tokenizing property easier and more effective.”