When it started, Bitcoin was just an idea but ten years on, the cryptocurrency is leading an industry and is on the verge of taking over the world. A lot of this was down to the BTC take over in 2017 when the biggest cryptocurrency reached its high of $20,000.
Of course, the price has since sunk down now but there has been no change to its underlying value. In fact, I would say that it’s safe to say that Bitcoin isn’t just only the most popular digital currency but is also a legitimate financial asset. This isn’t the case for all cryptocurrencies though.
By the end of 2017, there was countless ICOs and at the start of 2018, there were even more scammers who were trying to jump on the bandwagon in a hope to get rich. Luckily, most of these scams weren’t very good ideas with around 60 percent of all ICOs in the first nine months of 2018 either vanishing into thin air or just failed to raise enough money for their project. Either that or they were forced to give refunds to their participants.
Today though it seems that the majority of projects that managed to suffer through the bear market are led by teams with a lot of experience working to apply blockchain solutions to real-world problems. As the crypto industry continuously grows though, it will bring in more sophisticated retail investors as well as institutional money but there are challenges that lie ahead.
There are still a lot of crypto enthusiasts that are pointing to security token offerings (STO) as a solution to ICO fraud and the continuous problems from regulators that have kept a lot of potential investors at bay over the past year. STOs aren’t that different from traditional securities aside from the fact that they rely on blockchain technology in order to make processes like paying out dividends or repaying loans more efficient.
ICOs don’t give investors any rights to underlying assets and don’t force sellers to go through with anything at all. Security tokens, on the other hand, are tied to something tangible such as business profits or revenue but STOs still isn’t perfect.
In theory, once a token is acquired, then the holder can do whatever they want with it so sellers are still able to violate regulations if the security is resold to another party unless the proper exemption is granted from the regulators. What doesn’t come as a surprise though is
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Author: Mark Nezvisky