Democratizing Access to Wealth Creation: Tokenized Securities on Polymesh

About this Episode

What are the benefits of tokenizing regulated assets, and how might it revolutionize the world of finance?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research, Parity) is joined by Adam Dossa, Head of Blockchain at Polymath, a security token platform currently building a custom blockchain on Substrate called Polymesh. They discuss the world of tokenized securities and the promise this area of decentralized finance holds for democratizing global wealth creation. Dossa also explains Polymath’s reasoning for moving from Ethereum to Substrate, including the unique benefits of the blockchain building framework.

Highlights:
01:35 - Benefits of tokenizing securities
07:51 - How to verify the underlying asset
12:52 - ERC-20 vs Polymath’s ERC-1400 token standard
16:44 - Limitations of Ethereum
18:14 - Polymath’s white label solutions
19:57 - Operating in multiple jurisdictions/Polymath modules
23:39 - Moving from Ethereum to a custom Substrate blockchain
26:48 - Benefits of Substrate’s GRANDPA consensus mechanism
28:55 - Benefits of Substrate’s forkless upgrades
31:00 - Users and use cases Polymesh
42:51 - Interaction between modules and smart contracts
47:00 - Progress status of Polymesh

Links:
Polymath website
Learn more about Polymesh
Polymath on Github
Polymath on Twitter

Key Quotes:

“Financial infrastructure should be transparent and accessible. It should be more like a public good than siloed, private infrastructure.”

“Whilst Ethereum is great, there’s a saying: ‘You can please some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time.’ Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain, it’s not optimized for any specific use case. In our particular domain of regulated securities, there are some choices which are not optimal.”

“You have this huge, trillion-dollar regulated securities market globally. If you can bring those assets into DeFi, that’s like DeFi times a hundred. You have all these interesting, varied asset classes and you can start to use those as collateral. Instead of using Ether as collateral, you can take your Apple shares, your Tesla shares, or some basket of shares and use those as collateral.”