Crowdfunder Indiegogo allows companies to sell security tokens

Crowdfunding giant Indiegogo has expanded its cryptocurrency operations to make room for security tokens. This comes less than a year after the company started offering tokens on its platform last December.

According to Crowdfund Insider, Indiegogo’s first security token offering (STO) is already available on the platform. The STO is from a luxurious ski resort, St. Regis Aspen Resort in Aspen, Colorado. According to reports, Indiegogo will only allow accredited investors to purchase the resort’s Aspen Coins, which will be offered by a real estate investment trust (REIT) called Aspen Digital.

To offer the Aspen Coins to the investors, the company is working with Templum Market LLC, a crypto brokerage startup. With this being the first offering of its kind on the platform, investors will be able to indirectly own an equity state in the REIT Aspen Digital. Indiegogo is allowing investors to use various currencies like the U.S. dollars, ETH and BTC. The Aspen Coins are created as ERC-20 tokens, meaning that they can be held in any Ethereum wallet. However, due to regulations, the coins can only be traded through an alternative trading system (ATS) registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which will be operated by Templum.

According to the company, their new services are very similar to crowdfunding methods used in the cryptocurrency industry, where blockchain companies raise capital by selling new digital tokens. However, in this case, the sale will fall under regulatory provisions.

Stephane de Baets, a founder and president of Elevated Returns, the asset management firm that owns the resort, said that security token offerings are the investment tools for a better financial future as they will allow investors to store their wealth by utilizing income-producing digital assets, which, in turn, will open more financial doors to the participating parties.

Security tokens have increasingly become popular in the cryptocurrency market space. Unlike utility tokens, security tokens provide investors with an opportunity to utilize the power of blockchain technology and, at the same time own, other assets like real estate, shares and bonds.

Indiegogo is not the first investment platform to offer security tokens. Crypto lending service RAD and virtual exchanges such as LATOKEN joined the space and are currently offering security tokens on their platforms.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.