ICO, blockchain development and Ethereum tokens: ICO Malta explained

We caught up with CEO of ICO Launch Malta Jan Sammut, to explain the ins and outs of the company and the intricacy of their offered services

Jan Sammut, CEO
Jan Sammut, CEO

First things first. What exactly is ICO Launch Malta?

By way of introduction, ICO Malta is a full stack ICO provider, which combines its inhouse technical and marketing skillset with partner legal and financial service providers to offer a truly turnkey ICO service offering.

You’re a blockchain development agency too, right?

Right! We have a team of 12 in-house B9Lab certified developers and counting, with our lead blockchain developer being a member of the Ethereum core team. This in-depth of knowledge allows us to go way beyond the issuing of regular utility tokens and build custom token protocols to a client’s spec such as in-built dividend payments, non-fungible tokenized certificates of ownership for asset backed projects etc.

Many in the industry are predicting a shift to securitized tokens, do you agree?

Well, as institutional clients pile on more and more pressure on asset managers to offer exposure to this emerging asset class, we will see an obvious increase in securitized offerings. To this end we have developed a bespoke security Ethereum token protocol, which will allow the issuer to maintain absolute control over post-offering transferability via a UI based white-list.

What are the advantages of this system?

The main advantage is that this will in effect behave like a register of shareholders, with the entity having full KYC and AML visibility on every last holder. It also allows our clients complete and total independence. It doesn’t tie them in endless service agreements with us as we provide them with a backend from which to manage their holders. The token can also be augmented with a dividend script, which will allow the issuing entity to ‘push’ dividends to ticket holders, or, alternatively, allow holders to ‘pull’ these when they are available. It’s a subtle difference with very large implications on the fungibility of tokens.

From a client perspective, we can now offer them a cryptographic equivalent to any of Wall Street’s instruments on a fully compliant platform which is terribly exciting.

The industry is evolving at a rapid pace, what is your prediction for the next six months?

I see an acceleration of institutional capital flowing into the markets, along with an emerging class of security token offerings by large, established companies (think Amazon and Facebook). I’m also keeping an eye on a few projects which are proposing ways of eliminating banks from the crypto>fiat equation which would resolve one of the major bottlenecks on innovation in the sector.