The soon to arrive UIA features will allow whitelisting and recall of UIAs which will allow companies to legally IPO on BitShares saving them huge costs associated with traditional IPOs. This feature could be more useful than BitAssets, which this stage are limited by low liquidity and lack of gateways. IPO in a box is an in demand service and its birth may call for a change of marketing strategy.
Questions (some are quite specific, others open for general discussion):
1. To buy shares in an IPO people need their identity verified. Who will do the identify verification? (itnom from moonstone mentioned on mumble they are looking being an identity verifier, is that for IPO whitelisting purposes and what's the ETA?).
2. In the US do you need to be an 'accredited investor' or can anyone buy in providing they are verified?
2. Is an animated explainer video for the IPO feature (directed at businesses) of more value than an animated explainer for BitAssets?
3. Should IPOs on BitShares be the focus of marketing, moving BitShares into a B2B service, away from targeting the consumer with BitAssets?
4. How do investors buy issued shares directly with fiat? Will this feature also be limited by onramps? (the income from the IPO is from the short-name UIA registration fee, so buying directly with fiat by passing BitAssets is ok, the DAC still makes a profit).
5. As shares will only be able to be purchased by verified buyers, after purchase can the shares only be re-sold to other verified buyers or can the verified buyers sell them to anyone?
6. Is it the share that is whitelisted after selling to a verified buyer (giving freedom to be re-sold to anyone) or the buyers account that is whitelisted? (allowing transfers only to other whitelisted accounts).
7. DACx is functioning as an identity verification service for China, could it expand to allow identity verification from the US + elsewhere?
8. How does this work internationally? If a UK company wanted to IPO in BitShares, who will do their investor identity verification? The more countries the investor pool can be drawn from the better (more IPOs will happen on BitShares if more investors can take part, due to the proposition then being more attractive to businesses).
8. Aren't dividends a required feature for this to be useful at all? When will that be implemented?
10. Who will consult with the business clients?
11. The whole process needs to be streamlined and intuitive for businesses doing an IPO and for investors. Is there a IPO primer document for businesses?
12. What else needs to be ready for IPO's on BitShares be ready to be marketed (B2B)? (e.g. gateways, identity verification services, dividends feature, web-wallet market activation, primer doc?)
13. Which other cryptos can do this?
Edit: Adding another:
14. Should actual IPOs have a separate (and higher) UIA fee? There is an identity verification cost with the service provided to them which is not present in other UIAs, so perhaps the other short letter UIA issuers should be charged less and a new fee introduced for those that do official IPOs with compliance features?
1. We're planning to include ID verification by V2 or 3 of Moonstone, meaning in 5-9 Months. There are some data retention issues we need to work out legally with our lawyers first.
2. Until the JOBS Act happens, you definitely need to be an accredited investor in thee US. Gateways will deal with all the legal stuff in each jurisdiction. After talking with companies in various countries I am pretty sure that the initial target market for stocks and bonds via Bitshares won't be the US, rather the emerging and frontier markets. Furthermore, just as the initial liquidity maker for Bitcoin were the dark markets and mining operations shares, so I think for Bitshares we will see a lot of gateway stock issuance happen at first. I would not be surprised if we see at some point dozens of gateway operations happening all at the same time, once the ID verification and market engine setup is done.
3. I think so, yes. To achieve this we also need to modify the trading engine to include Ripple-like offer auto-bridging and market making.
4. Yes, onramps will be hugely important. Most investment most likely will at first happen via BTC and bitUSD, later with gateway USD/fiat.
5. Only verified and white-listed buyers. This is why gateways in each jurisdiction are so hugely important as in reality you will issue your share on a gateway in a specific jurisdiction.
6. The buyers account for that specific share.
7. [...]
8. This is why we think Moonstone will have such a huge impact. Any potential investor can sign up to any gateway and get verified for trading that gateways assets very fast. The threshold to trading on multiple gateways would be tiny, therefore liquidity huge.
9. True.
10. That is a completely new business opportunity!
11. Another business opportunity!
12. Preferably offer auto bridging just like ripple and pathfinding through market makers (also just like ripple).
13. Ripple could do it, but would require considerable modification. Ethereum probably could do it also, but permanently active contracts might get expensive over time. I think this is the first truly competitive advantage of Bitshares.
14. I think the fees are already either too high or too rigid. We need to charge for activity and blockchain space, rather than arbitrary fees.