Summary:
Saum Noursalehi, the CEO of tZERO, explained that the security token sector missed some kind of regulated place for secondary trading. Noursalehi then wished to open the door for retail traders in order to create liquidity, democratize access, bring transparency and efficiency to global markets and accelerate the adoption of security tokens.
News:
Overstock.com plans opening trading on its security token market, tZERO, to all retail traders. Hence, this will give retail investors the much desired opportunity to trade on the platform starting from Aug. 12, 2019. It is good to note that at this point, the one year lock-up period for tZERO’s 2018 security token offering (STO) will pass. tZERO CEO Saum Noursalehi CoinDesk
Let's recall that Overstock.com's platform went live in January but it only allowed accredited investors, that's, wealthy individuals and institutions to trade on it until now.
Per the news, data from Overstock’s quarterly filing claimed that tZERO saw a net loss of $10 million, more than double the 2018 Q2 loss of $4.6 million.
Hence, to boost trading activity on tZERO, its parent company Overstock previously announced a plan to issue more of these digital shares to all its shareholders as a form of dividend over the next two months. At the moment, only two tokens are available on this alternative trading system (ATS): tZERO’s own private equity token, TZEROP, which was issued in the STO; and Overstock’s digital voting series A-1 preferred stock, which was listed in June.
“It’s a nice bonus to our shareholders and it serves the purpose of getting a lot of adoption on the platform. There is a lot of focus on liquidity.”
tZERO is presently working to acquire one of the New York Department of Financial Services’ virtual currency licenses.
“The New York BitLicense is challenging to get, we are working on it, we’re hoping to get it in the next six months,” Noursalehi said. He also stated that tZERO is anticipating about 50,000 investors who previously bought Overstock’s shares to get on board with digital securities trading.
Though no sharp uptick in sign-ups has registered so far, the broker-dealer community got interested, he claimed.
“We had a lot of broker-dealers, about 30 or 40, reach out to us that want to get involved in this ecosystem. We’re working on these requests. Investors have been sending questions as well. They are excited and they are trying to understand it.”
However, daily volume on tZERO has been fluctuating from several thousand dollars to $245,547 at the peak on July 23, according to the website SecurityTokenCap.
