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Comment by a_d | Hacker News Reader

I can also imagine startup equity being tokenized. Where an exchange like Coinbase acts like SecondMarket (now called Nasdaq Private Market). This might be a great way for early employees and founders to get liquidity before the company IPOs. It would change the startup game completely. A lot of things to look forward to here.

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I difinitely hope it's going in this direction, but this space needs to mature a little bit, and perception needs to change. Currently ICOs are viewed as scams and some of them are still insanely overvalued.

The way to overcome this is to write milestones into the smart contract that unlock additional funding after the milestone is hit in a given time period.

The issue with today's ICO is that the market demand is so high it would be silly for groups to leave money on the table. Just like bands leave money on the table because the value of their tickets > the price they sell them at.

Many people on the buy side who get in early to ICOs are essentially scalpers whereas the people who run the project usually have no business raising the funds they do in their first round.

Milestone funding would solve both of these issues.

Isn't this just an IPO under a different name? What's the difference between a "token" and a "share"?

(Aside from the cryptocurrency hype-sauce)

Token is like a bearer share which can be transfered digitally from person to person. Bearer shares are not that common nowadays but I understand that in the past they were quite popular.

I assume that bearer shares fell out of favor for a number of the same reasons as bearer bonds. On the one hand, the average person doesn't really want to hold a lot of money in paper assets that they're responsible for the physical security of. On the other hand, governments don't like untraceable paper assets that can be used to transfer a lot of value because of money laundering etc.

They were popular, and it’s not that they are not that common nowadays...they are now illegal in all US states (and I believe every country too).

This already exists, I forgot the name of the company doing it.

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