MERJ EXCHANGE in Seychelles first to list tokenized securities |12 August 2019

In a world’s first, MERJ EXCHANGE Limited – the Seychelles Securities Exchange – listed on its own Exchange and recorded the share ownership on a blockchain on Wednesday this week.

The listing comes just six weeks after the Exchange announced its plans at the Bloomberg Emerging Markets conference in London to combine traditional financial markets with distributed ledger technology (DLT).

The shares of MERJ EXCHANGE that are listed represent its existing ordinary shares that have been tokenized – that is shares (or securities) that are registered and can be transferred on a blockchain. In the case of MERJ EXCHANGE, its tokenized shares are being held on the Ethereum blockchain which keeps the record of ownership of the shares. MERJ’s tokenized securities have been listed with the MERJ-S ticker symbol signalling that it is a tokenized security and has a market cap of $21,015,780.

MERJ EXCHANGE is the first exchange in the world to list tokenized securities beating other exchanges such as the SIX Digital Exchange and the Gibraltar Stock Exchange that had also announced their plans to list tokenized securities.

“The listing of the tokenized securities of MERJ EXCHANGE Limited signals combining the best of the old world and the new to provide a key piece of missing infrastructure,” says the chief executive of MERJ EXCHANGE, Edmond Tuohy. “This is largely the motivation for the change of name which saw the rebranding of the name of the Exchange late last year.”

MERJ believes that the listing is not only to demonstrate that it is possible, as no exchanges have done so before, to list tokenized securities on a fully regulated securities exchange with share ownership recorded on a blockchain, but to also give the public and the participants of MERJ EXCHANGE a unique opportunity to own real equity in the Exchange to help build and grow the EXCHANGE.

The Exchange has been working closely with the Financial Services Authority in Seychelles to build a robust and compliant framework for companies wanting to leverage the benefits of blockchain within a publicly listed environment. Following the listing of its ordinary shares, the Exchange plans to conduct a public offering later during the year and is currently in discussion with several companies over potentially listing their tokenized securities.

MERJ EXCHANGE Limited, formerly Trop-X (Seychelles) Limited, was incorporated in the Republic of Seychelles in 2011. The exchange went live in 2013 with the listing of the shares of Sacos Group Limited and today has 33 securities listed representing one third of the Seychelles’ GDP. The Exchange is a full member of the African Securities Exchange Association, an affiliate member of the World Federation of Exchanges and is also the national numbering agency for Seychelles enabling the Exchange to create ISINs (International Securities Identification Number) to uniquely identify specific securities.

Contributed