Ravencoin — A Securities Token Roadmap
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Tags and Restricted Assets were adopted on the Ravencoin network on February 7th, 2020 at 6:15 EST. It was up to the Ravencoin network participants to adopt the changes. This was the culmination of two years of hard work and pulls together the final pieces of a very elaborate and significant puzzle for Securities Token Offerings (STOs).
As many of you know, an STO is a legal issuance of securities on the blockchain. STOs are like the ICOs of 2017, but they are issued under the legal framework of — and compliant with — the securities laws. In the U.S., specifically the Securities Act of 1933.
Technologists have already shown that the purchasing, issuing, transferring, tracking, and trading of tokens to raise capital is possible. This began with the Mastercoin offering in 2013 and reached its apex in 2017, with billions of dollars raised through ICOs. A few of these ICOs failed because they were scams, and others failed because of enforcement, by the SEC, of rules that weren’t followed. Still others like EOS and SIA have had SEC enforcement, cooperated and are still pushing their projects along. Some ICOs outside the U.S. have been successful and have resulted in interesting new projects.
Some of the subsequent ICO issuers have moved out of the U.S. to friendlier jurisdictions and left the U.S. investors behind. Others have abandoned their plans because of the complexity of navigating the existing U.S. legal framework.
In the meantime, the Ravencoin developers and community have been writing code and building technology to solve the problems faced by those interested in issuing legally compliant token offerings. There were nine major technological problems that needed to be solved:
- Restricted Assets — These are tokenized assets on the Ravencoin platform that follow rules set by the token issuer. This is just open-source technology and tools, where the rules to follow are set by the issuer, and enforced by the distributed code.
- Tags — Tags are needed so that the movement of Restricted Assets can be restricted to only those addresses that are properly tagged. Tagging can be used for things like KYC, Accreditation, Affiliation, and limits on the number of addresses that can hold tokens.
- KYC Platform — A trusted…
