Beverly Hills Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICO - April 16, 2018 - YouTube

JIMMY GORHAM: I don't think there is a standard model for security tokens yet.

I feel like a lot of companies are borrowing from traditional securities, traditional models

of equity and things like that.

But, with Crypto there's a lot of room for innovation and I think there's still going

to be a lot to come that people haven't quite thought of yet.

EDUARDO ARGUETA: I think the rise of the ICO's in 2017 is ... it really shows how much of

an opportunity was being underserved by the current financial structures of funding for

start ups.

That's really one of the main issues that took businesses to consider other type of

investment vehicles and fundraising vehicles, which is an ICO.

It's just a lot of these businesses were not being served correctly by current financial

industry.

So like we learned today, venture capital has been turned on its head forever and ICO

are a great new way, if managed correctly, to raise these funds that companies need badly

to take things global.

JIMMY GORHAM: I think 2018 is going to be a really interesting year to see how security

tokens develop.

Right now from everyone I'm talking to, people know that that's the direction we're moving

in, but there's still a lot of wait and see mentality.

So I think there'll be more clarity by the end of the year into 2019.

SHASHANK SRIPADA: The rise of the security token in 2018 I think is an unfortunate event.

I just believe that there's a bit of a miscommunication with SCC.

I mean, they need to either define what a security token is, or they need to allow utility

tokens to exist, because the rest of the world is not on board with that.

They are going ahead and allowing innovation to happen.

The SCC in the US has really stifled that.

With us we are ranked D in the US, and we have to be a security token, but if you give

us a full security framework, we are more than willing to assign equity and pay out

dividends and voting rights.

But we can neither do that nor can we do a utility token, which we truly are at the heart.

I think there needs to be more analysis and they need to act quicker because other places

in the world are far ahead of the US.

JIMMY GORHAM: I think there's still a role for utility tokens, and it's going to be ... its

kind of incumbent to the designers of these new technologies to incorporate the best of

both worlds, and take the investor protections on the security side and combine it with the

liquidity, and some of the unique capabilities of utility tokens to try to merge that together

in the future.

The security token hype, it will be interesting to see if it lives up to expectations.

On the one hand, some public companies are talking about tokenizing their existing security

offerings that are now stock.

Something like that would just be a huge game changer.

But on top of that, there's still a lot of companies that are trying to raise money for

their crypto currency projects and if they want to be legitimate at least in the United

States, that means security tokens.

So I think we will see a lot of projects this year.

DAN MAPES: Historically, the way we raised money for a venture was to raise money from

friends and family, then NGO's, then eventually capital A round, then a B round, then a C

round.

Now we actually can go to the public, and if we raise enough money in our first round;

whether it's in a pre sale or even a private sale, we may have enough there that we don't

even actually bother to do a public sale.

So really it's just the entrepreneurs looking at the situation and going like, “Okay,

we hit 20 million or 30 million or whatever it is, that's probably enough for right now.

We can build everything we want to build with that."

So I think it's just really the entrepreneur working with their public support.

SHASHANK SRIPADA: I don't think everyone needs to do a presale, I mean we raised a lot of

money in our private sale for BubbleO, but actually we are still going ahead with the

mainsale because we are a consumer app.

Part of the reason we even are doing an ICO is because it's a community building effort.

It gets us users, it gets us a community that's actively engaged.

I think that's what you need to look at before starting to do a mainsale.

Because, are we doing it just for cash or are you doing it for the right reasons?

Is the way we got to look at it.

Is it going to be able to sustain a token economy that's beneficial to everyone invested

and using the token.

DAN MAPES: The cool thing about a token is it's a new asset class.

It's neither a utility, nor a security, nor even a currency, it's all of them.

In the past we had money, we had stock, and we had gold or things like that as commodities.

The token actually can function as any one of those things and probably other things

as well.

Tokens a new animal, so it doesn't really fit in any of the old categories.

Although it can fit in them somewhat.

It can be used like a security, it can be used as a currency, it can be used as a commodity

but it's not any one of those things.

So it's going to take us a while to learn about them and how to govern them.

In the meantime, SCC and everybody is going to have a lot of concerns about them and try

to apply old models to them; they are not going to work very well.

And we're going to take us a while to learn what they really are and we use them.