Startup Raises $3.9 Million in Tokenized Equity in London Stock Exchange Test Issuance

Blockchain startup 20|30 has raised £3 million ($3.93 million) in a sale of tokenized shares in a test environment on a London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)-operated platform.

While a trial effort looking at using tokenized equity to modernize the financial markets, the share offering involved real cash and was issued on the LSEG's Turquoise equity trading platform.

20|30 sets out to tokenize equity and other securities using distributed ledger technology. The firm was notably part of the fourth cohort of the UK Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) regulatory sandbox, announced last July.

As CoinDesk reported, LSEG and the FCA previously said they were working with 20|30 and distributed ledger technology startup Nivaura toward demonstrating for the first time that equity in a U.K. company can be tokenized and issued within a fully compliant custody, clearing and settlement system. With today's news, the first stage of that plan looks to have been successfully carried out.

The project set out to explore "tools to help companies raise capital in a more efficient and streamlined way,” said the LSEG.

After the primary issuance of an equity token based on ethereum, “the next step will be to offer secondary transfers. Then we can work our way up the ‘capital stack’ to reinvent private equity and, public markets,” Tomer Sofinzon, co-founder of 20|30, told the Financial Times at the time.

Speaking to CoinDesk about the project in July, Dr. Avtar Sehra, CEO and chief product architect at Nivaura, said: “Someone can use our technology to do all the legal documentation, tokenize these assets and execute them. LSEG has then been forward-thinking enough to help get these orders out to the existing market.”

Edit (09:45 UTC, April 17, 2019): Updated to clarify that the London Stock Exchange participation was a collaboration using a test environment.

LSE image via Shutterstock