For the second time in a year, Radoslav Albrecht is first with his startup. Last May, Bitbond became the first German bank to use Bitcoin for international payments. Now the Blockchain startup is the first in Germany to receive Bafin’s permission to trade in digitized shares. The confirmed founder Albrecht the Handelsblatt.
So-called security tokens represent virtual company shares
In the case of Bitbond, it is debt. The tokens are supposed to work much like a bond. The token edition aims to digitize classic startup financing rounds and thereby simplify them. The Bafin classifies the tokens as securities and regular bonds – so Bitbond needed to create a prospectus. It covers 74 pages. As a result, the company could raise up to 100 million euros by issuing the tokenized bonds. For investors, this is a term of ten years. The information in the brochure has now bowed off the Bafin.
From March 11, the tokens should be able to be drawn. The deposits are in the cryptocurrency of Stellar Lumen. But without banks, it seems that it will not work. At the same time negotiations are underway to explore conventional financing methods in parallel, founder Albrecht is quoted in the report.
Bitbond is lending to small businesses on an international level – and has done so for a long time with the blessing of financial supervision. Fiat money is converted into bitcoins and then sent to the recipient country, where the bitcoins are converted back to the local currency. Transactions should be possible within minutes.
Other startups are also planning STOs
The initial coin offerings, which were carried out in bulk between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, trade so-called utility tokens. Users expect their acquisition to be able to pay for special features or services, for example in an app, at a later date. Here, however, there were frequent cases of fraud.
There are other companies that have announced plans to implement so-called Security Token Offerings (STOs). Including the Cashlink makers with their Blockchain platform Stokera, also plans the blockchain startup Bitwala an STO.