This is admirable in concept, but there’s a reason why there’s been slow uptake. Absolutely zero shade on BW for trying this, but it is unlikely to deliver on its goal of providing reliable, standardized information.
My constructive feedback on problems and their solutions below:
1) There is no clear upside to providing these public declarations.
2) If you believe there IS an upside - making your token more investable - then congratulations, you are providing statements with the express purpose of other relying on them for making investing decisions. Here be dragons.
3) Much of the liability surface in this industry revolves around not what you *do* so much as *doing what you say*. Litigious government agencies (like Biden SEC) and law firms (like Berwick) will take anything you say and use it against you.
4) …which means it takes a lot of time from your most valuable legal, technical, and financial staff to fill out these filings honestly and accurately to avoid making a misrepresentation. That’s not a small expense. You’d also need to update with new filings if you believed this was valuable. The more dynamic your organization and business, the bigger the burden becomes and the higher the legal risk of stale information being used by an investor.
5) I can’t tell that any of this info is actually verified, so I don’t think investors will at the margins make any investment decisions based on it. You’d still need to call the teams and counterparties to verify information, so it doesn’t save you a lot of effort unless you don’t diligence at all - in which case you don’t care about this anyway.
6) It doesn’t include ongoing financial metrics. Knowing how much token supply was sold and is vesting isn’t enough to make an investment, only a speculation, limiting the value of the filings.
So there’s several challenges, some of which BW can address and some they can’t.
* ALL LIABILITY: Legal attack surface is potentially unlimited. Nothing BW can do here.
* NO VERIFICATION: The info appears to be only self-representations, and that’s just the whole ballgame. No one can rely on the filings, making them pure legal liability. BW can verify filings via sampling or direct diligence - but then they may have legal exposure.
* NO INSIDER DISCLOSURES: Widen the focus from the project itself. Someone can truthfully say tokenholders control the project, but in practice that may be a single person, never mind other forms of concentration and self dealing.
* CONFLICT OF INTEREST: BW itself is the wrong entity to push standardized disclosures because it sells services to these filers, making any verification lower quality to potential investors. Spin it out, with different ownership.
* NO ONGOING OBLIGATION: This is the attestation problem again: it’s a specific date. Someone could one thing, file this, then go do the opposite. BW could flag which projects have committed to regular, ongoing filings.
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