About

Harbor bridges the offline and crypto security economies. Traditional private securities are relatively easy to issue and are far more cost-effective than going public. Yet secondary trading is inefficient and inherently illiquid, resulting in the value of private securities discounted. Tokenizing private securities (i.e. crypto-securities) makes it easier to trade them on secondary markets, while maintaining the cost-effectiveness of traditional private securities. Increased liquidity, in turn, attracts more investors and lower cost capital. Harbor facilitates the whole process by providing a platform for onboarding issuers and investors, as well as enforcing the rules at the token level throughout the lifecycle of that security.

To enforce the secondary trading requirements, Harbor developed technology called the Regulated Token (“R-Token”), that makes it possible for issuers and investors to abide by existing regulations and custom rules. It’s built on ERC-20, which is widely supported by the existing Ethereum ecosystem. Taking away the burden of compliance by putting an electronic wrapper around a security interest - makes capital formation faster, cheaper and easier by orders of magnitude - while unlocking liquidity for investors. This can become the new standard for trillions of dollars in private market assets, in old-guard industries such as real estate, private equity, investment fund, fine arts and others.

The Security Token Stack and blockchain technology have the potential to reengineer financial markets, bringing massive efficiencies to private securities and making it possible to connect buyers and sellers around the world to trade tokenized securities 24/7/365 with near-instantaneous settlement and no counterparty risk — something only possible with blockchain. Harbor’s mission is to power the future of crypto-securities by building a decentralized compliance protocol that standardizes the way securities are issued and traded on blockchains.

The idea for Harbor came to David Sacks, a PayPal co-founder with background in compliance in highly regulated industries, when he wanted to tokenize the LP interest in his fund, Craft VC, but couldn’t find a compliant way to do it. He became Harbor’s chairman and recruited Arisa Amano and Bob Remeika, who worked with him in his previous companies, as chief product officer and chief technology officer respectively. Josh Stein, a legal and compliance veteran, who has also worked with Sacks before, joined as CEO and general counsel in March 2018.

Harbor has officially launched its platform to tokenize private securities in November 2018. Their first offering is a sale of a tokenized real estate investment trust representing a stake in a $20 million off-campus housing complex for students at the University of South Carolina. The property will be divided into 955 tokens valued at $21,000 apiece.