blockworks.co
Part of the promise of blockchain technology is its supposed ability to improve the issuance and exchange of tokenized securities to make them more secure, efficient and transparent than is possible in traditional finance. The practical application of security tokens, however, has been slow to develop, largely due to regulatory hurdles.
One country that seems to be ahead of the rest is Switzerland, where standards developed by the Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) are now seeing adoption in capital markets.
The Geneva-based Taurus has developed a suite of tools to enable companies to tokenize their shares on Ethereum in a regulatory-compliant manner. Today, Taurus announced that Alaia SA, a startup that develops and manages sport and hospitality infrastructure, has successfully done just that, with the shares deposited at the banking giant Credit Suisse and soon to be available on the secondary market via Taurus Digital Exchange.
Lamine Brahimi, co-founder of Taurus, said in a statement, “we are committed to supporting entrepreneurs and financial institutions to make private assets digital,” referring to the prospect as “corporate finance 2.0.”
Taurus’ product line, called Capital, Protect and Explorer, enables the “end-to-end digital management of Alaia shares and their representation in Credit Suisse booking systems,” according to Taurus’ press release.
The company simplifies the process for banks, exchanges, broker dealers and large NFT platforms, for example, by facilitating gasless transactions on Ethereum for their clients. Taurus’ smart contracts handle the transaction fees to settle share transactions on-chain.
Brahimi told Blockworks the CMTA standard being employed was “an improved version of [earlier standards] with all things related to company shares (investors, whitelisting, corporate actions).” The CMTA “blueprint for the tokenization of shares” was developed in September 2018, and outlines a process for Swiss corporations to follow.
Initially only Ethereum and Tezos are supported blockchains for the security tokens, but the firm plans to support additional chains in the future, he noted.