SCOTEX – the planned new stock exchange 2.0 company running on a Blockchain-based distributed ledger announces that it is raising capital via Scotland’s first ever ICO.

The Initial Coin Offering is the world’s first ICO-IPO hybrid, with an equity-like structure: token holders enjoy fee reductions, 30% of SCOTEX net revenue and full equity-style participation in upsides including any acquisition of SCOTEX. The ICO will be run according to the XCAP ICO Protocols that transpose many of the protections and standards of IPO’s into ICO’s. The ICO will take place on the Ethereum ERC-20 protocol. Registrations for the ICO are being taken at xcap.com.

At the heart of SCOTEX is a radical new post-trade framework using a Blockchain-based distributed ledger called STARS: Secure Transaction Affirmation and Reporting System and it will mean trades settle immediately without the need for clearing, leading to an enormous reduction in the cost of trading for investors. The blockchain-based system will mean ŸTrades will settle almost immediately with no need for post-trade clearing ŸŸTrading will be much cheaper for everyone as users will be charged a low fee to access a 
ledger rather than being charged per transaction in a captive system ŸŸŸSellers will get their money almost instantly after a trade; buyers need to post no collateral. 


The benefits to listed companies will be enormous. It will mean nimble companies much more in touch with their shareholders and free of the large recurring costs of a legacy market listing: dividends will be disbursed in hours, stock splits carried out in minutes and at no cost, rights issues and made and carried out in hours without paying expensive underwriting and legal fees (Friends Provident would save the £31m that went to banks and lawyers in its recent rights issue). A digital ledger will make SCOTEX fully transparent: with stock/token holdings on a public ledger, crimes such as insider trading far easier to detect.  It will allow companies to bring exciting new innovations like running stock incentive programs where the triggers for stock release are smart contracts.

Companies or ventures can choose to IPO or ICO on SCOTEX; either way the same regulated exchanged-based governance and compliance standards will be enforced. SCOTEX will take the global lead in taking ICO’s away from the wild west and into the institutional mainstream with  SCOTEX’s long term goal being to achieve regulated exchange (“RIE”) status so that pension funds will be able to invest in crypto assets. SCOTEX will be open to the world: companies and ventures from anywhere will be able to tap into the UK’s deep capital markets if they satisfy the listing criteria.

As well as a primary market for global companies and ventures, SCOTEX will run two other exchanges: SCOTEX Crypto (SCX), a secure UK onshore exchange for the trading of crypto-assets including Bitcoin and Ether; and SCOTEX Dark (SDX), a decentralised open-source dark pool multi-party computation protocol facilitating swaps between cryptocurrency pairs as well as equities providing order execution without exposing market sensitive information such as price and volume.

SCOTEX will truly bring th UK into the crypto era and we welcome recent comments by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond at Davos: “[any] new rules mustn't stifle the blockchain technology that underlies Bitcoin, which has a wider application” and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney’s comments last Friday to the Scottish Economics Conference: “crypto-assets… could catalyse private innovation to create a more resilient, effective payments system.”

XCAP starts and accelerates companies developing revolutionary IP and technologies both in emerging industries and industries experiencing radical disruption. XCAP ventures are open and accessible – a model designed to challenge and disrupt the legacy VC model of secrecy and exclusivity. Find out more at www.xcap.com.