How STOs Rose From The Ashes Of ICOs (And What They're Doing Differently)

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

A few years ago, it would have been near-impossible to go a few days without the announcement of one Initial Coin Offering or the other in the cryptocurrency industry. Up until around 2018, ICO’s were the most popular way to raise funds for promising new projects in the cryptocurrency industry and involved consumers buying up the native token of that project with the expectation that it would increase in value after the project has gone live.

However, that period, often dubbed the wild west of the crypto industry, was filled with a lot of scandal and fraud. Many of the projects that were promoted during that time did not have merit behind them but instead, were cashing in on a growing trend. Some were outright fraudulent and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States has been prosecuting those involved in illegal and fraudulent ICOs even years after the fact. 

This, along with a number of other factors has seen ICOs fall out of favor with the crypto-loving population and are mostly a relic of the past. However, a new form of investment has sprung up from its ashes and is poised to expand the reach of the industry as a whole. 

The Rise Of STOs

Security token offerings, or STO‘s as they are commonly called, involve the tokenization of the specific asset and the sale of tokens which represent ownership in the project. STO‘s have been applied in a number of industries, notably real estate and even art. STO‘s are not just the latest fad within the blockchain and crypto sector but instead, represents a changing landscape of the financial world and the way people invest. 

The reason why STOs seem to be succeeding where ICOs failed is due to a number of reasons. First, STO‘s are arriving on the scene at a time when the industry is much more mature and there is more regulatory oversight compared to 2017. Many ICO projects were unregistered and had no oversight but popular STO projects boast of registration with regulatory bodies in their country of origin. 

Take Genius Estates, a platform that offers access to STOs in a number of sectors that is about to be registered with the Estonian regulatory body. This means that STO’s will likely spend longer time on top as opposed to dodging the authorities at every turn.

Additionally, there is more emphasis on access to previously inaccessible opportunities. GENiUX offers its users the opportunity to buy into tokenized real estate projects. Usually, a person would need tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to invest in a real estate project but thanks to a platform like Genius Estates, using GENiUX, everyday people can invest in different industries. ICOs, in many ways, we're all about community crowdfunding to make a project succeed but STOs focus more on how the projects can make individuals richer.

Finally, the nature of STOs often means that the projects have to show greater merit before they can get investments. If someone wants to buy into a real estate STO project, public information will be made available about the location of the project and its actual prospects for profit. This is compared to the ICO craze in which projects with poorly written whitepapers and no actual use cases were making wild claims to investors. Investors themselves are also more discerning these days and are unlikely to support such fraudulent activities.

GENiUX And The Power Of Access

Much of GENiUX’s mission statement is about providing access to its various opportunities for its users. GENiUX is not limited to the real estate sector as people will be able to buy into STO‘s and NFT’s for arts, sports, route construction, and even aviation projects once its marketplace is live. GENiUX is not only pushing the very beneficial sector of STOs but is also making sure that access to STOs is made easier for everyone. The platform will offer a dedicated asset marketplace through which people can buy into multiple STO‘s from a single place from next year when it launches.

The projects that are listed on the platform are actually vetted and investments are made through GENiUX’s native token. Dividends will be paid through the same token and this means that earnings from STO investments can be streamlined to a single source for consumers. 

Furthermore, GENiUX offers rewards for those who refer others to their platform, and the supply of its native token, for which the pre-sale is ongoing and heavily monitored. The sale will be launched on August 1, 2021.

Genius-Estates represents not just a growing and more robust STO market but the new values that it espouses which include access to opportunities, proper oversight, and the long-term goal of making investors’ lives better while promoting the magic of blockchain technology.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.