The First REIT Gets Tokenized Using Harbor’s Compliance Protocol
November 27, 2017 | Franco Faraudo | Propmodo Daily
The recent proliferation of blockchain technology, and the hype that went with it, created an onslaught of real estate companies looking to “tokenize” their properties. Lured by the dream of any qualified investor being able to buy or sell pieces of their real estate in one (two factor authenticated) click, it seemed for a minute that distributed ledger technology would quickly be the new standard in how real estate investments were sold.
But the Securities and Exchange Commission, as they are known to do, threw a nice big glass of cold water on the red-hot tokenization industry. In May of last year they officially announced that most, if not all, initial coin offerings (or ICOs according to crypto-twitter) are actually securities. This set most tokenization platforms, which were usually focused completely on the technological part of the process, squirming under the scrutiny of potential investors and regulators worldwide.
Of these companies, Harbor was always the one that stood out for their steadfast dedication to securities law compliance. Today they are announcing the formal creation of their platform along with the offering of the first property to be tokenized using their compliance protocol. To understand exactly what Harbor does in the complicated digital asset marketplace I talked to its co-founder and CEO Josh Stein.
