The Spanish startup Brickken, which offers a centralized platform that allows businesses or assets to be tokenized, providing investors with the opportunity to generate passive income, also wants to become a provider of decentralized token issuance technology. The company is finalizing a tokenization solution as a service, which it plans to have ready in September, so that startups, companies and investment funds can transform their capital (shares) into tokens to facilitate investment and liquidity in them, as a financing alternative.

Edwin Mata, co-founder of the company, explains that the entities that use this system will be able to make a public issue of tokens (STO, as it is known in crypto jargon) so that any person, whether qualified investor or not, can invest in businesses, projects or any other financial asset. In addition, the investor can always sell his tokens to anyone at any time on the platform.

The Brickken project was chosen a few weeks ago to enter the Spanish sandbox to test a secondary market for tokenized startups. “In order to trade securities in secondary markets, you need to go to licensed platforms. In Spain there is BME Growth, the point is that currently in the EU they cannot use distributed ledger technologies (DLT). It is expected that this year the regulation that allows it will go ahead, but in the meantime, this project will allow us to test what the future will be like, ”adds Mata, who points out that they signed up for the sandbox with the aim of becoming a security stock market tokens (cryptographic assets based on blockchain technology linked to a traditional financial asset).

Mata insists that the objective is to create the first secondary market for security tokens, because in Europe at the moment there is none because the legislation does not allow it; something that can be done in other countries such as Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States

"We want everyone to have access to this technology and that any company from any country can set up its own financing scheme without having to go to a centralized platform," adds Mata. The manager specifies that the proposal is not free, because monetization is already embedded in smart contracts, just as it is embedded in the technical functionality offered by a large part of the regulations that STOs must comply with.

The manager emphasizes that the difference with respect to other solutions that already exist in the market is that Brickken has created a 100% decentralized app, which provides this technical functionality so that individuals or companies can tokenize assets in a very simple way. "Compared to the centralized platform that we already have and where we do 100% of the work, with this decentralized application we seek the autonomy of the companies." According to Mata, they are currently doing concept tests to continue collecting data, especially related to legality issues from other countries.

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The startup was started in 2020 by five expert entrepreneurs in different fields (technology, legal, financial and marketing). To date, they have been financed with the co-founders' own funds and Startupbootcamp, a renowned acceleration program. Last December, Brickken received 325,000 euros from the CDTI Neotec fund and has now launched a seed financing round. It plans to attract some two million in a maximum period of six months.

With its first centralized platform model, the company obtains its income from issuance and from raising capital and other related issues, but Mata defends that its new tokenization as a service proposal will allow them to scale their business worldwide. Mata believes that 2022 can be consolidated as the year of asset tokenization: "In 2021, we have seen the boom of NFTs [non-fungible tokens, whose trading volume exceeded 13,000 million dollars, 4,298% more compared to the investment volumes in NFTs in 2020] and the next thing will be companies, startups or movable assets".

The founders of Brickken argue that the tokenization of art or collectibles (NFTs) is just the tip of the iceberg, stressing that the tokenization of real-world assets using blockchain technology is here to stay. Mata also explains that while in other types of markets within the blockchain such as the NFT marketplace there are many players, in the market they focus on there are not so many.

"Many have died because they came onto the market too soon or because they came out with good technology, but without taking into account the regulation that establishes how you have to issue securities in each case. Here, regulatory compliance is really complex, and in our case we believe we have a future because we comply with both aspects, the technological and the legal. In addition, most platforms are betting on the centralized model, acting more like a bank than using the advantage of the blockchain, which is decentralization. They think that they will not be able to monetize their services because they lose control, but that's not the case. The more people use your technology, the more scalable your product is".

Brickken currently has a team of 12 people, but they hope to have a staff of 20 between now and March.