- New stocks include Blackrock, Coinbase and Microsoft
- Announcement follows sell out demand for assets and an 11% increase in Swarm’s user base
25th April, 2023: Swarm, the compliant blockchain platform, today announces it is adding seven more public stocks for both retail and institutional investors to trade on its compliant decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
In February 2023, Swarm became the first organization in the world to offer digitized US treasury bills and Apple stock via a compliant and decentralized platform. In the first month of listing the securities, Swarm saw an 11% rise in platform users and sold out of products on three separate occasions, with iShares US treasury bond 1-3 year ETF selling out on the first day of trading February 24th, Tesla stocks selling out on February 28th and Apple stocks selling out on March 13th.
Swarm conducted a community vote for holders of its payment token, SMT, to decide which securities should be listed next on its platform.The shortlisted companies came from public nominations made on Twitter, using the #ShareTheShares campaign. The community campaign is the first of its kind to allow users to help drive product innovation.
The new companies that will be listed are:
- Blackrock (BLK)
- Coinbase (COIN)
- Coupang (CPNG)
- Intel (INTC)
- Microsoft (MSFT)
- Microstrategy (MSTR)
- NVIDIA (NVDA)
Philipp Pieper, co-founder of Swarm, said, “Swarm is a hybrid between the wild west of crypto and traditional exchanges. Because of that, we have to do things differently. Our approach needs to satisfy both the regulatory compliance expected from a traditional financial institution, and the community engagement expected from a DeFi project. Launching the community vote for the next set of stocks we list is testament to people wanting these products.”
The fully asset-backed tokens are available on the Polygon blockchain for both retail and institutional investors, with no minimum investment. Trading is available from Thursday 24/7 and compliant on Swarm’s permissioned DeFi platform. Tokens are self custodied and held in the owner’s crypto asset wallets.
Timo Lehes, co-founder of Swarm, said, “It is interesting to see where the demand of our customer base lies. Many of the companies we are adding are involved in tech innovation, much like crypto itself. It also seems like a no-brainer to add Coinbase.
“We believe that 2023 is the year of tokenization. When prominent figures in the traditional financial space are talking about this phenomenon, like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, you know we are approaching an inflection point. Blockchain technology will change the way we trade, consume and interact with financial products. Making public stocks available to trade on chain in a regulatory compliant way is just the beginning.”
The tokens are 100% backed by real stocks and bond ETFs bought in traditional financial markets. Underlying assets are held by institutional custodians. Tokens can be redeemed for the value of the underlying asset at any time and monthly disclosures of assets in reserve will be made publicly available. Swarm is working towards a real-time asset verification model.
Ends
Notes to editors
- Assets will be available for trading, once the regulatory notification process has been completed.
- The community vote was conducted on Snapshot. Anyone with one SMT in their crypto wallet was eligible to vote. Voting was done on an approval system, where users could vote to approve as many or as few companies as they wanted to.
- SwarmX GmbH, the issue of the stocks and bonds tokens, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Swam Markets GmbH. All published prospectus and notifications for the certificate tokens can be found here (search SwarmX).
About Swarm
Swarm is a blockchain platform that brings novel digitization and trading solutions to the world of traditional finance. It is the first organization in the world to offer digitized treasury bills and Apple stock via a compliant and decentralized platform. Day to day, we work with real-world-asset owners to tokenize collateral and build trading infrastructure in a compliant way.
Swarm is a hybrid, embracing the advantages of blockchain-trading – flexibility, speed and efficiency – and pairing it with the trust and asset-range typically enjoyed by traditional exchanges. Swarm aims to integrate TradFi with DeFi so that everything becomes “Fi”. For more information, visit the website.
