Brazil to Get First Local Marketplace for Tokenised Stocks, To Be Launched by Fintech Firm BEE4

Brazilian fintech firm BEE4 has planned to launch the first local marketplace for tokenised stocks in the Latin American country. Essentially, BEE4 will replicate the structure of a traditional stock exchange while allowing traders to tokenise their public offerings. The marketplace will run on the Ethereum blockchain-based Quorum network. Tokenised stocks are digital representations of shares in publicly traded firms like Tesla, Apple, and Meta. They enable anyone with a crypto wallet to gain investment exposure to publicly traded companies.

With its upcoming marketplace, BEE4 is looking to allow firms with yearly revenues between $1.8 million (roughly Rs. 14 crore) and $55 million (roughly Rs. 440 crore) to make public offerings of up to $19 million (roughly Rs. 151 crore), CoinDesk reported on Thursday.

The platform will offer an open bid book, a trading floor and auctions service, as well as buy and sell orders service on the Quorum network.

Tokenised stocks are often backed 1:1 to traditional stocks, allowing holders to get the same benefits as owning the underlying stock. These can be purchased via cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies on supported trading platforms.

Unlike classic financial instruments, tokenised shares are traded 24/7.

As per The Coin Republic, trading tokenised assets allows investors to garner the same profit as trading classic instruments while also availing different types of securities in terms of – debt, revenue sharing, income sharing, and convertible preferred stock.

A few crypto firms like FTX exchange, Bittrex exchange, and Mirror Protocol for DeFi currently offer stock tokens. Meanwhile, some of the tokenized shares of popular companies include TSLA by Tesla, NFLX by Netflix, and GOOGL by Google.

Asset tokenisation became a topic of discussion in Brazil after its only stock exchange, the B3 said last December that it was also looking into opportunities in the segments of asset tokenisation, digital asset custody, and crypto-as-a-service (CaaS).

Earlier in July, the largest Brazilian private bank, Itaú Unibanco, announced its plans to launch an asset tokenisation platform to help companies transform traditional finance products into tokens.

The bank will also be exploring crypto custody services for its customers with its newly formed corporate division called the ‘Itaú Digital Assets'.