Swiss Company Gets Green Light to Incorporate for a Blockchain IPO

Swiss company Overfuture has received regulatory approval to publicly trade its stock in tokenized form on Ethereum, with the smart contracts provided by EURO DAXX, a digital assets exchange. According to the prospectus, the firm is primarily engaged in "consulting services, IoT and IIot devices assembly and integration, and cloud-based computing platform providing Big Data processing and analytics as well as AI-grounded functionalities." and will be looking to raise €10.5 million in its initial public offering. Overfuture brought in 75 CHF million (1 CHF = $1.03 USD) million in consulting revenues last year through Oct. 31, however, faced an annual loss of 191 CHF million.

Why it matters

• Security tokens have been slow to gain adoption, however, the Overture offering represents a meaningful step forward as the companies articles of incorporation specifically mention the digital nature of the equity shares and use of Ethereum to track the shareholder registry and transfer ownership. By tokenizing their shares, the firm hopes to remove a lot of the traditional overhead involved in a public offering from financial intermediaries.
• While Overfuture is the first company to IPO natively on a blockchain, they are not the first company to tokenize a cash-flow generating asset. RealT recently completed the sale of a residential building in Detroit that was tokenized on Ethereum and trades on Uniswap. If these experiments prove to be successful, then you can expect more issuers look to tokenize real-world assets.