Dear Community,

I’m reaching out to let you know that ConsenSys is launching “The Brooklyn Project,” a company and industry-wide initiative to help fulfill the promise of tokenization by addressing head-on and — we hope — solving the issues that some regulators and others have raised over the last year regarding token launches. This project will be our top priority, and we will accordingly shift resources to this project for at least the next month or two before resuming execution of token launches.

We are taking this action now, because we, as a company and an industry, have a unique opportunity to restore trust between people and institutions. By acting responsibly today, we can help make sure we are collectively able to reap the benefits of this powerful technology tomorrow.

Tokens are built on a next-generation globally-shared database infrastructure — the Ethereum blockchain — that facilitates trustworthy, fair, and frictionless operations. All actors on this system can be certain that the rules are being fairly applied and followed by all. No minority set of actors or special interests can improperly manipulate the data or business processes, because everyone can directly inspect both data and business logic.

This shared global computing infrastructure enables “tokenization” of nearly anything — e.g., from common stock in a company, to a person’s identity, to a software license, to a particular pair (not just model or brand) of shoes. At bottom, tokenization is the creation of a natively digital asset that is represented on the Ethereum blockchain and has both the scarcity and veracity that otherwise would be achieved only relying on so-called “trusted third parties,” such as Equifax or Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

Tokens, as natively digital assets on the Ethereum blockchain, allow trustworthy, fair, and frictionless creation, verification, and exchange of assets. This has profound implications.

In their current form, many foundational elements of our societies — e.g., identity, reputation, trust, legal agreements, access rights such as software licenses, property title, and money — possess weaknesses and frictions such as fraud, paperwork, lost documentation, reliance on an untrustworthy “trusted third party,” or simply transactional costs of back-and-forth approval processes. Tokenization of these elements could eliminate or minimize all of these weaknesses and frictions.

Tokenizing these foundational elements could shrink clearing and settlement related to these elements into the instant of a transaction.