UPDATED: A TOKEN ON A NOTE ON A SHARE ON A COIN — BITFINEX WILL SELL YOU A SLICE OF STRC ON A BITCOIN SIDECHAIN
Bitfinex Securities listed five notes on Tuesday. They track Strategy, Metaplanet, Sweden’s H100 Group, France’s Capital B, and Strategy’s variable-rate preferred, STRC. The issuer is ORO (II), a securitization fund in Luxembourg run by SICOS Securities. The regulator is El Salvador. The rail is Liquid, a sidechain that settles to Bitcoin. You can pay in dollars, in Tether, or in bitcoin, and Cointelegraph puts the minimum near a dollar. The tickers went up Wednesday: CMSTR, STRCst, CMPTL, CH100 and CALCPB. Bitfinex Securities says it now lists more than $500 million of this kind of paper.
And you cannot buy it. Eligible investors outside the United States only — US persons are excluded from all five. The cheapest, fastest way to own a piece of an American company that holds bitcoin is a token sold to people in Lagos and Lisbon and Manila, and not to people in Ohio. The rules written to keep you safe also decide what you are allowed to want. Read what you get. The notes are backed by real shares held at regulated institutions, and they hand you no ownership of those shares. So the chain is this: a token, which references a note, which is backed by stock, in a company, which owns bitcoin. Paper claims on paper claims. Four promises deep, each one made by somebody with a lawyer. Strategy alone holds 845,050 coins, and a dollar here buys you no claim on a single one of them. This is the same trade as ICE buying into tZERO, BlackRock’s tokenized Treasurys, and Robinhood’s own chain — keep the asset, change the plumbing, collect the fee. What’s new is what’s being wrapped. The treasury company was already the wrapper. Now the wrapper has a wrapper, and it rides Bitcoin’s own sidechain to get there. None of this is a scam and the plumbing is genuinely better. It is worth naming what the product is, though. Somebody looked at a company whose whole pitch is that it holds the asset for you, and decided the problem was that you could not buy a dollar of it fast enough. Paper claims on paper claims, and at the bottom of the pile, the one thing in the arrangement that does not need a lawyer.
And you cannot buy it. Eligible investors outside the United States only — US persons are excluded from all five. The cheapest, fastest way to own a piece of an American company that holds bitcoin is a token sold to people in Lagos and Lisbon and Manila, and not to people in Ohio. The rules written to keep you safe also decide what you are allowed to want. Read what you get. The notes are backed by real shares held at regulated institutions, and they hand you no ownership of those shares. So the chain is this: a token, which references a note, which is backed by stock, in a company, which owns bitcoin. Paper claims on paper claims. Four promises deep, each one made by somebody with a lawyer. Strategy alone holds 845,050 coins, and a dollar here buys you no claim on a single one of them. This is the same trade as ICE buying into tZERO, BlackRock’s tokenized Treasurys, and Robinhood’s own chain — keep the asset, change the plumbing, collect the fee. What’s new is what’s being wrapped. The treasury company was already the wrapper. Now the wrapper has a wrapper, and it rides Bitcoin’s own sidechain to get there. None of this is a scam and the plumbing is genuinely better. It is worth naming what the product is, though. Somebody looked at a company whose whole pitch is that it holds the asset for you, and decided the problem was that you could not buy a dollar of it fast enough. Paper claims on paper claims, and at the bottom of the pile, the one thing in the arrangement that does not need a lawyer.
Cointelegraph · Tue Sep 1 · + CRYPTO BRIEFING (El Salvador regulator, Liquid Network) · Tue Sep 1 · + BITCOIN.COM Wed Sep 2, 5:30 AM ET for tickers, the $500M total and the US exclusion