Wall Street Left Out in Overstock’s US$500M Stocks Issue

Online retailer Overstock has filed for permission to issue US$500m in stocks using distributed blockchain technology.
Approaching the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States, Overstock has filed aprospectus, a document normally used as a disclosure document for prospective share buyers, detailing the way in which the company plans to issue these crypto-based stocks.
‘[These] shares would be uncertificated and represented exclusively as book-entries on a cryptographically-secured distributed ledger. Digital securities are designed to enable trades to settle immediately or nearly immediately, unlike traditional securities, such as shares of our common stock, trades of which settle on the third day following the day the money is exchanged.’
The SEC will now decide whether it finds this document ‘effective’, and suitable to be used as a sales document by the company in selling these securities to the value of US$500m.
CoinTelegraph first reported on the retail giant’s plans back in October 2014, when initial details were shared at the Las Vegas Inside Bitcoins Conference.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-04-28.