Quick Facts

Name of Token:

Liquid Asset Token (LAT)

Leadership:

Valentin Preobrazhensky, CEO

Main Use Case:

Tokenized Asset Marketplace

Outstanding Supply:

400,000,000 LAT

ICO Date:

August 22nd, 2017

Community Hotspots:

Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Medium

History of the Token

Artem Chestnov, Managing Director of Liquid Asset Token (LAToken), offered a detailed history of his company in an interview with MLG. The idea for LAToken first came from CEO, Valentin Preobrazhensky who had gained much experience trading equities ($200 million portfolio) and from building the back office to a global hedge fund. Four years ago Preobrazhensky founded Zalogo, a home equity, mortgage, and credit marketplace. Zalogo had become a very successful business over the last 4 years, obtaining significant investment. In 2016 alone, the firm facilitated over 12,000 mortgage offers and closed over 1,000 deals from 35 banks and investors.

This experience led Preobrazhensky to consider to try and pursue a broader spectrum of offerings. Thus, it was ultimately decided to expand to offer other asset classes. This included real estate, stocks, and art, essentially assets that were not very liquid. In order to facilitate these new orders Chestnov states that blockchain was added to their platform several months ago to optimize these processes of reselling loans, investing, and borrowing money. It was this implementation that became the genesis of LAToken, the first tokenized assets exchange that allows clients and participants to buy and sell equities and real assets using crypto-currency.

Chestnov explained in a statement to MLG that the decision to bring aboard David Drake, Chairman of LDJ Capital, as an advisor to LAToken is instrumental to the company’s new direction. LDJ Capital is a real estate investment fund based in New York. Feedback from Drake helped finalize the decision to focus on asset tokenization.

Since this partnership many important developments have come about including successful tokenization and transfers of test Apple and Amazon shares. Chestnov said in a statement to MLG that LAToken has just recently partnered with MyGold, a gold and silver manufacturing company and mint based in New Zealand, to tokenize and list gold on the LAT Exchange.

Present

LAToken is focused on ensuring the main platform and product meet the highest security standards. While, many assets have already begun to be tokenized, the team at LAToken is diligently working on expanding this list. Tokens backed by commodities, real estate, and works of art will be launched within weeks said Chestnov in a statement to MLG. “There are many new assets to be announced in the near future”, said Chestnov.

To help with product line development on LAT Debt Tokens, Hague van Dillen has just recently been brought on board as an advisor. Hague is a Portfolio Manager at Franklin Templeton Investments with over $730 billion in assets under management. He managed and analysed a floating debt portfolio for 9 years.

LAToken is also presently preoccupied with their first crowdsale of their native token, LAT. There will be four rounds with the proceeds used for tokenization and trading development of the key asset classes. Round 1 will include equities, round 2 will be real estate, round 3 will have debt and commodities, and round 4 will feature illiquid assets (e.g. works of art). Round 1 is limited to 25 000 000 LATs offered at 0.001 Ether. The price for the following rounds will be higher.

Differentiating Factors

Chestnov states that the key differentiating factor for LAToken as compared to competing projects right now is the existence of a marketplace to trade assets once they have been tokenized. One of the highlighted features of this marketplace is the fact that it facilitates secondary trades of assets within the market, as well as primary trades.

Future Goals

LAToken plans to launch tokenized trades in 2018. In 2019 their team will launch an app constructor, that allows users to build applications on the LAT platform tailored to specific asset classes, legal requirements, and investors underwriting procedures. This developer toolkit will create apps that ease operations and transactions within the marketplace. The apps will be sold and purchased at an LAT App store. By 2020 LAT Exchange aims to become the leading platform for trading tokenized assets.

DISCLAIMER

MLG is an advisor to the LAToken team and on the LAT ICO.