Yesterday the Beijing municipality announced a new blockchain pilot for stock registration and custody. It will be implemented by the Beijing Regional Equity Market, which already has an online stock registration, custody and transfer system.
The solution is not targeted at the national public stock markets, but at regional equity markets that target local small and medium-sized enterprises for non-public issuances. For the Beijing area, the Beijing Regional Equity Market is the only venue authorized to process such transfers.
As of June 30, the Beijing Regional Equity Market had served more than 1,000 unlisted companies with a total share capital of more than 21 billion yuan ($3 billion) and held equity in custody for nine commercial banks.
Apart from Beijing, the China Securities Regulatory Commission also authorized Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shenzhen for blockchain pilots.
Around the world, there are numerous startups focused on tokenizing private shares. The one that sounds the most similar to the Beijing initiative is Swiss-based Daura, which specifically targets Swiss SMEs and digitizes the share registry using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. However, investors can be outside of the country. The startup received funding from both the Deutsche Börse and Swiss stock market SIX.
