2018-12-18 01:57 |
tZERO, a subsidiary of Overstock, has recently been hired by GSR Capital, a private equity company, in order to develop a new crypto token which will be used specifically for trading cobalt.
According to the official report made from Overstock, the new token could lead $200 million USD worth in minerals to be fully tokenized. Most of the cobalt is used to make batteries for electric cars.
While this is great news for the crypto industry and even good for the companies involved, the bad result of this is that another deal between the companies, which would see GSR Capital investing $400 million USD in Overstock and tZERO, was delayed for the moment.
The partnership was initially set to be solved until December 15 but the company asked for more time as the proposition to create the token appeared. The CEO of Overstock, Patrick M. Byrne, has reunited with the shareholders of the company recently to explain what happened to the deal and why it has been delayed for now.
He told investors that the partnership will be invaluable for the ecosystem and that the delay was frustrating as it appeared “at the eleventh hour” but that tokenizing cobalt was a great idea and that this could turn into a very exciting blockchain initiative.
The Tokenization of CobalttZERO and GSR have jointly affirmed that the token will be fully compliant with all the regulatory requirements of the industry and that the main goal is to create something that can be used for purchase and track the supply of cobalt by the companies. Overstock has affirmed that its subsidiary tZERO will be focused on providing its expertise tto create a tokenized commodity market.
According to Byrne, smart contract automation will help to greatly reduce the costs of the companies during the transactions and to improve the transparency of the whole transaction of metals around the world.
The companies have affirmed that this is an important collaboration and that it could lead to a new security token as they are way more than just tokenizing cobalt, according to Sonny Wu, the chairman and founder of GSR Capital.
One of the most positive aspects for the creation of the token, specially when you consider the humanitarian view, is that more than half of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the country is infamous for its use of child labor in cobalt mines.
There is a lot of concern over how this affects the lives of the children and the makret, so a blockchain solution could be used as a sort of a cure for this: RCS Global, a British consultancy firm, has affirmed that the technology could be used to look for illegal activity on the mines and register it on the blockchain.
However, it is obvious that these practices are illegal in the first place, so there is the issue that they may simply not change as much as people want them to if people could just lie to the blockchain. Remember that the blockchain might be immutable, but it is not corruption-proof.
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