Securities Token: The New Era of Equity Crowdfunding

99% of the European businesses can be classified as SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprise). Only 1% of these SMEs have access to capital market. The SME funding gap has been estimated more than 1.5 Trillion USD in formal economy. Organizations like OECD has time and again highlighted that policies must be taken by regulators to boost equity-type instruments and other sources of finance complementary to straight debt-based financing options to bridge this gap. Equity crowdfunding concept popularized in late 2010. However, one of the biggest problems with the current equity-based crowdfunding is the lack of secondary market of the issued securities. In late 2016 the concept of initial coin offering became quite popular. In 2018 itself, blockchain projects have raised more than 14 Billion USD through ICOs, globally. Most of these projects have used ICO to finance their Blockchain based business model. However, there is a huge scope of tokenizing equity instruments of both digital and non-digital business models. The rise of securities token offering is just a matter of time. In this talk we will discuss whether securities Token is a natural evolution of European equity crowdfunding market. Will transferability aspect of cryptocurrencies make them quite relevant in the online alternative finance market.