Stock tokens, no longer will you need multiple trading accounts

Published in El Pais, 17 April 2021.

As Bitcoin’s popularity surges, we have seen more prominent business people get behind it. Tesla has included Bitcoin in its portfolio with Elon Musk joining Mark Cuban in praising alt coin DogeCoin. While Uber has no plans to purchase cryptocurrency it has been open to potentially accepting it as payment and major consulting firm Price Water Cooper has signed an exclusivity deal with blockchain company VeChain. So, what is next in cryptocurrency’s path to acceptance? Stock coins.

Recently Binance, the worlds largest crypto exchange has partnered with Tesla to create a cryptocurrency based on its shares. Meaning one Tesla coin will always be equivalent to one share. This is exciting on multiple levels which I will share below.

Partial Purchase

Traditionally if you want to invest in a stock, you at least have to have enough funds to buy a whole share as partial purchases are not possible, not so with cryptocurrency. Majority of people who buy bitcoin for instance buy small percentages of bitcoin as they do not have $60,000 lying around for a whole one. Tesla stock is trading at around $750 dollars so it might be difficult for many to invest with traditional stocks, now they can.

Blending Traditional and Crypto investing

The two have always been at odds. Traditional business elites have baulked at Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole. Justin Sun, founder of cryptocurrency Tron, paid millions at a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffet to try and convince him to change his mind on cryptocurrency and so far, was unsuccessful. With potentially more stock tokens moving to Binance, we may finally see these two parties work together.

Further tokenization of assets

Why stop at just stocks? There has already been talks of creating partial ownership tokens for property, tokenizing metals like gold and silver and many more.

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain is finally becoming main stream and with Tesla’s image, it may be easier for more projects to be taken more seriously.