The blockchain is being put to new and creative uses — like, you know, starting a company?
It turns out that Singapore-based Otonomos, one of 10 startups just announced as participants Startupbootcamp’s newly announced Singapore accelerator, will help “form, fund and govern your company on the blockchain.” It’s as simple as filling out a short online form to have company shares traded like bitcoins:
You’ll now be asked to complete a short online form which will allow Otonomos to incorporate your company for FREE as a new legal entity in Singapore and register its shares on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Proof of ownership of your shares is identical to holding bitcoins: by accessing a wallet using your cryptographic key pair.
Trading company shares in bitcoins might raise eyebrows at the Securities and Exchange Commission, but blockchain-based companies registered with Otonomos are incorporated in Singapore. Otonomos, which says it has ex-Goldman Sachs & Co. wealth advisers on its team, is base in Palo Alto, Calif. Its ideas are not modest. It claims that the old model of funding a company is, you guessed it, broken:
The joint stock company as we know it, dating back to the 17th Century, cannot longer channel society’s full entrepreneurial energies and mobilize its dispersed talents and resources.
Otonomos is engineering blockchain incorporation as the digital successor to the Limited Company: A new corporate vehicle that codes the human freedom to contract onto “smart shares” in an entity that IPOs from day one, crowdfunds itself with digital contributions from the largest possible number of investors, and governs itself through decentralized protocols.
Be one of the first to own a distributed company: click here to start issuing your genesis shares on the blockchain.
Singapore FinTech is hot these days — MasterCard held an event there March 28 focusing on women in tech. That event saw the international introduction of a MasterCard API called Places, which provides location-based transaction data from MasterCard merchants. No word on whether any of companies arising out of MasterCard’s efforts are trading shares via Otonomos.