NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Overstock.com to open blockchain based equities trading platform before year’s end
Overstock.com Inc. is moving forward with plans to launch a private blockchain-based equities exchange.
The company said at a conference Monday that the exchange would be launching before the end of the year. The T0.com platform, first announced in 2014 and used by Overstock.com in a $25 million bond offering in 2015, will be a launched as a marketplace for trading widgets. It can’t legally call itself a stock exchange, so those “widgets” will be tied to equity in the companies on the exchange.
The impetus for the move is that the company has seen stock market manipulation of its shares. According to VentureBeat, Overstock.com found that the trouble in the case was in part due to the complexity of settling trades, in particular the fact that trades are not fully settled for three days.
“It’s no secret that Overstock’s own financial technology subsidiary, TØ, has been working on a blockchain version of Wall Street,” Overstock.com Chief Executive Officer Patrick Byrne said in September. Overstock.com’s communications director, Judd Bagley, extended those Wall Street comparisons Monday, saying that Overstock wasn’t afraid to take on the financial giants of the world. “We’re from Utah. We don’t care. We’re really taking a ‘burn it down and start over’ approach,” Bagley is reported to have said.
Security and speed
The advantages of the T0.com platform could be twofold, providing both security and speed over existing equity trading platforms. By using the blockchain, the platform utilizes distributed record keeping which means that everyone has a copy of a trade, and with proper security across the blockchain, single players are unable to corrupt those records, something that can occur with existing systems. Speed is intended to be the biggest advantage of T0.com, with trades able to be settled in 10 minutes as opposed to the three-day process currently found on American equities markets.
It’s not clear exactly what will be on offer once T0.com opens for business, but the first widgets, or shares, offered will likely be those of Overstock.com themselves.
Image credit: Overstock Coliseum/Wikimedia Commons/CC 1.0
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