working to integrate tokenized securities into defi for public, retail, and worldwide use in a regulated (e.g. SEC-registered) way
working to integrate tokenized securities into defi for public, retail, and worldwide use in a regulated (e.g. SEC-registered) way
The goal of the Digital Securities Initiative is to help companies, regulators and lawmakers answer the tough questions standing in the way of tokenizing securities in a safe and sound way.
If it were just up to the industry, publicly traded stocks and bonds would be substantially tokenized by now. But there are legitimate questions about the new problems it would likely create.
For instance: private keys can be lost. Should the law require that security token issuers re-issue tokens to users who lose their keys? What if the tokens are co-mingled in a DeFi smart contract and a user loses their keys for a position within that contract? What if that user was a fraudster who was lying about losing their keys in order to get out of an obligation defined within that smart contract?
There are several tough questions like this having to do with KYC, finality, cross-jurisdictional use, sanctions, and so on.
As for what purpose it would serve to tokenize securities, some see it as obviously a good thing, while others see it as fixing what isn’t broken. We see “why do this at all?” as an important question as well.
We’re here to put in the thousands of hours it will take to sort through these questions, do relevant background research, and formulate concrete proposals for how a new blockchain-based securities ecosystem ought to work.
If we reach proposals we feel good about, we’ll advocate for them, but for now this is a research effort, not a lobbying group. When we talk to regulators and congressional staff, it’s mostly to ask questions, not propose solutions. We just don’t have them yet.
DSI aims to operate publicly as much as possible, posting regular updates and work in progress on this website. That said, some of these questions are political and not everything can be posted on the internet.
We have no incorporated entity or member dues required to participate. Contributing organizations sponsor their own team members or pay consultants to spend time on the initiative when it is in their interest.
There is no application to join; you can just start talking to us and if you’re helping us along with our goals we’ll include you in more meetings and communication channels.
If you are interested in working on this full-time, you can apply for a job or a grant from one of the participating organizations to work part-time or full-time. Please do let us know if you are interested in this route, we are seeking more full-time staff right now.
As we are just launching this website, we are pinging those who’ve been involved in conversations so far to ask if they’d like to be publicly listed. We’ll add a list once we hear back from folks.
The initiative was started by Nevin Freeman. Check out this 15-minute intro talk he gave on the subject at unStable Summit in Denver:
Who we are
The Digital Securities Initiative is an industry-wide collaborative effort with no incorporated entity or member dues required to participate. Contributing organizations sponsor their own team members to spend time on the initiative when it is in their interest.
It was started and is led by Nevin Freeman, who is part of the Reserve project, which has a vision that depends on securities being available within DeFi, but is not itself involved in security tokenization and has no financial interest in any security tokenization company.
To learn more about the initiative and who is involved, read our introduction.
Who we are
The Digital Securities Initiative is an industry-wide collaborative effort with no incorporated entity or member dues required to participate. Contributing organizations sponsor their own team members to spend time on the initiative when it is in their interest.
It was started and is led by Nevin Freeman, who is part of the Reserve project, which has a vision that depends on securities being available within DeFi, but is not itself involved in security tokenization and has no financial interest in any security tokenization company.
To learn more about the initiative and who is involved, read our introduction.