Team and scope is impressive. Very excited for this project!
What kind of value proposition does this offer? Is it a competitor to T0?
Thanks - we are also thrilled for this project, and based on the friction in the current global marketplace we think it has very substantial upside potential. We don't really see Stockchain as a competitor to T0. Though of course I can't speak to exactly what they are thinking, they seem to be taking a top-down approach to everything, registering a United States stock market and focusing really hard on the US public equities (i.e., stock) market and associated derivatives in fiat - i.e., as far as I can tell, they are keeping the current system and just putting it on blockchain. Although that is great, and it is one application of the Stockchain platform, we are excited about the many other potential uses for Stockchain, particularly those associated with privately-traded debt and privately-owned equity, plus public debt, commercial paper, and countries/jurisdictions that don't currently have much opportunity to be involved in the capital markets due to the expense of the current system. These areas are larger than the public stock markets (hundreds of trillions USD, vs. about 70 trillion USD for publicly traded stocks) and they tend to have far fewer regulatory obstacles and securities law issues to address. Our team members have been directly involved in all of these markets, and we are initially focused on those that have the biggest need and the highest friction in the current system. We believe those are likely the best entry point.
We also think that our platform will do best with a phased rollout, both in terms of market verticals (private debt, privately-held and privately-traded equity, commercial paper, public debt/bonds, publicly traded stock, etc.) and in terms of jurisdictions, since regulatory compliance is critical for anyone in the financial space. Our initial thinking is that private debt and privately-held/traded equity are the easiest points of entry: they obtain a massive number of benefits based on blockchain tech, and some types of rollout in these spaces can easily be global in scope. For Stockchain, we want to be as big as possible, as quickly as possible, so want to go global right away. As different uses of the platform are phased in, we will continue to focus on
what - in terms of which market verticals we and our partners can attack most quickly - and
where - in terms of which jurisdictions we think are most ready. As you are no doubt aware, some countries are very positive toward blockchain and crypto, so those will likely be the first we will focus on for highly-regulated verticals.
As far as our value proposition, the current system has required dozens of intermediary industries that are trillion-dollar industries in their own right - the brokerage industry, custodian industry, escrow industry, investment banking industry, factoring industry, legal services industry, etc. These have historically been necessary for financial transactions to be performed, to ensure the deal works how everyone thinks it will. Stockchain disintermediates these industries, in part or whole, for all of the reasons that blockchain is exciting (permanent records, immutable information about all transactions, trustless deals, direct connection between parties), and it can happen either in fiat or crypto currencies. We think the platform needs to be flexible, because much of what this offers is a new approach to an industry that is currently functioning on a 400 year old model, but it clearly is an extremely disruptive approach. With a far less costly approach to trades, it's likely that new capital pools will be created for the billions of people worldwide who can't participate in the current system due to cost. Also, in the current system, transactions generally take multiple days to settle (i.e., when title is actually exchanged), whereas on Stockchain the settlement time will be reduced by over 99% (near instant). There are a number of other benefits as well, but I don't want to write an entire book here. Our whitepaper discusses all of these and more, with lots of examples; feel free to take a look at
https://stockchainglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/stockchain-global-white-paper.pdf
