As you know, the first Security Token Offering on the Smartlands Platform is underway, and we couldn’t be happier that it has attracted so much attention from investors, asset owners and the Smartlands community. But, once the security tokens are issued and purchased, the most beneficial part of the process is to make them available for trading on the secondary market. After all, it is liquidity that makes security tokens such an attractive proposition; the fact that your fractional ownership of any asset is now irrefutably represented by a piece of code on the Stellar blockchain makes digital ownership of that asset highly agile, easily transferable and tradable for profit. And, since making money is the primary reason we’ve all become investors, the importance of understanding the mechanism of creating a difference between the amount spent and the amount gained is impossible to overstate.

On the way to create this mechanism for you, our investor, we’ve made quite a few significant strides. Today, Smartlands Platform is a fully regulated platform for issuing security tokens on the Stellar blockchain. This crucial milestone was reached, among other things, through the agreed purchase of a stake in Shojin Financial Services (SFS), which is regulated and authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and possesses the crowdfunding licence necessary for the Smartlands Platform to issue security tokens.

Armed with our unbending spirit and the crowdfunding license from the FCA, we are ready to proceed to the next step in shaping up the landscape on the Smartlands Platform. Together with the consortium of partners vested in the development of securities trading on blockchain we are entering the active stage of obtaining the Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) license.

The MTF license will allow us to create a multilateral trading system for bringing together multiple third-party buying and selling interests in securities as it occurs on all the major regulated stock exchanges around the world.

The move will give us a range of possibilities. Not only will the regulated, and profitable trading of security tokens create a possible path to wealth for investors on Smartlands, it will transform the global investment climate. It may sound like a bit of an overstatement until you realise, as we did, that to date only a few issuers are applying to obtain licenses for the lifecycle of a security token – from issuance to secondary market to dividend payout and reinvestment.

Parallel to the process of obtaining our own MTF license, we have been conducting negotiations throughout 2018 with a number of trading platforms which already possess MTF licenses and are ready to list security tokens issued by Smartlands. The first partnerships will be announced soon.

Notably, security tokens issued on the Smartlands Platform will not be the only tradable securities on our exchange. On top of the pending partnerships with the other security token issuers, we will be inviting businesses to cooperate with Smartlands directly and to jointly grow the liquidity of their digital shares.

In order to facilitate these developments, Smartlands is getting ready to roll out a thoroughly updated version of its Wallet, which can then be used to trade security tokens, SLT, XLM, and anchored currencies on the Stellar network. Along with several other key features, the ability to trade pairs of compliant security tokens against anchored fiat currencies is expected to be the dominant function of the wallet designed to attract traditional investors and enhance liquidity on the Platform. We can say with confidence that this will be the very first fully regulated solution on Stellar.

As you can see, we are making headway; our plans are clearly outlined for a structured implementation. The cornerstone of our collective ambitions – the Security Token Offering on the Smartlands Platform – is ongoing. The private sale is proving to be hugely successful, and, come May, the public sale promises to be nothing short of triumphant as well. The preparations for the completion of a fully regulated ecosystem for you to successfully trade your security tokens on the secondary market are underway, and the level of excitement in all three of our offices is off the charts.