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Steve Maarbani’s digital investment platform VentureCrowd has teamed up with product developer MakerX to build a world-first blockchain-based wealth technology platform known as Vest, which the partners say will ‘shock the alternative asset investing system’.
Vest’s key goal is to lower the barrier to entry for all investors and allow syndicate communities to view ‘hyper niche’ deal flow, invest in deals and be rewarded for their contributions to the community.
The initiative, which is set to launch in mid-2023, is seen as a pioneer in the transition to Web3 by bringing together ‘deep technical capabilities, blockchain, UX and design to deliver the next-generation of wealth-tech to the market’.
Vest’s tokenisation of funds management will enable security, liquidity and authenticity in trading with the distributed ledger technology on the Algorand blockchain.
Venture Crowd says that by using Vest, the founders of startups will gain access to capital faster through digitised deal origination.
Tokenised securities and digital registries will allow seamless registry management for companies and fund managers including access to an ‘always-on’ capital raising capability, as well as the use of smart contracts to reward contributions to project value-creation.
Digitised secondary trading will enable tokenised shares and interests in managed funds to be bought and sold outside of the usual merger, acquisition or IPO liquidity events.
Maarbani, the VentureCrowd CEO, says Vest is a revolutionary new platform that will be ‘an investment town square where all inputs are valued, be it from investors with a purpose or startups looking to fundraise’.
“The opportunities are endless for investment with Web3, and we believe Vest will accelerate investments’ progress and contribute to continuous deal flows,” he says.
Web3 is an emerging alternative for the worldwide web that incorporates concepts such as decentralisation, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics.
“Web3 has the potential to fundamentally reshape how the private capital markets work and make investing more accessible, more secure and more flexible,” says Maarbani.
The VentureCrowd platform, which has more than 69,000 users, has raised more than $250 million for alternative assets since inception with capital raisings more than doubling every year for the past three years. The platform posted a 45 per cent surge in gross revenue over the past year.
MakerX employs a product development team that specialises in digital product development for start-ups and venture builders.
Among its recent projects is onRamp, a software-as-a-service platform that empowers developers to build Web3 asset management solutions in days rather than months.
MakerX CEO Matt Davies says his company was chuffed to be collaborating with VentureCrowd to create Vest and democratise engagement in the capital markets.
“This gives everyday people access to opportunities for investment which historically have been unavailable to them,” says Davies.
“Vest leverages new technology which enables open transparency of information on the platform, secure exchange of assets, and tradability of assets which would otherwise be locked up for long periods of time.”
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