Mt Pelerin, first company globally to tokenize its shares

Mt Pelerin, a project to build tomorrow’s bank on blockchain, is excited to announce the tokenization of its equity. Its token owners are now shareholders in accordance with Swiss law; the Mt Pelerin Shares (MPS) have been issued on blockchain in the form of Ethereum tokens (ERC20).

The advantages of issuing shares on the blockchain for investors are significant. It enables them to benefit from faster deal execution and lower fees — no middlemen needed, and to sell their shares at anytime — even though they are not traded on a major exchange. All of this while being recognized as a shareholder and protected as such by Swiss law. Potential applications of tokenized shares are numerous, from private equity investors who won’t have to wait for the startups’ exit to get their investment back to a new kind of efficient, innovative crowdfunding.

Token owners of Mt Pelerin, as any shareholder, have voting rights as wellas dividend rights. Each MPS token is equal to a share of the company, which is valued at 5 CHF (4.37 EUR). The company is valued at CHF 50 million (EUR 43.78 million). The ownership of thecompany is divided as follows: 95% ofthe equity is privately owned by themanagement of the company and 5% of the ownership is available for sale.

Arnaud Salomon, CEO at Mt Pelerin, commented: “This is a major technological breakthrough for the blockchain space as well as the financial industry. Mt Pelerin is pioneering asset tokenization with this issue of the first ever compliant by-law tokens, our own shares. Starting today, it is possible for investors in tokens to be protected by law rather than by a private contractual agreement determined solely by the goodwill of the issuer.”

Mt Pelerin was launched in late 2016 by professionals from the Financial and Technology industries willing to leverage blockchain technology to disrupt the banking sector. The team at Mt Pelerin has been providing blockchain consulting services to leading players in the financial industry for the past two years, while they developed the fundamental building blocks to achieve their vision of a new era of banking.

ICOs (Initial Coins Offering) have been increasingly used over the past couple of years by blockchain startups to raise funds, up to 752 ICOs representing EUR 15.7 billion since the beginning of the year, according to Coinspeaker. One of the main issues so far with tokens issued during ICOs or the latest STOs (Security Token Offering) was that token owners of a company were not recognized as shareholders according to their local regulation and had no legal rights on the company. Mt Pelerin has found a solution to this issue, allowing its token owners to have legal ownership of the company, without resorting to derivatives and in full compliance with regulation.

The technology behind this achievement is the MtPelerin Bridge Protocol, an innovative solution which allows to put any financial asset on chain in a compliant way. This framework was designed to be easily replicable; the Bridge Protocol and template documents related to the shares tokenization are open source, to allow companies to build up their own tokenization process and write History. You will find below a summary of the process to tokenize some shares.

• The board of directors of Mt Pelerin has issued an off-chain resolution which was scanned and attached to a smart contract, thus issuing the tokens.
• The Geneva Trade Register approved the article 9 of the by-laws of Mt Pelerin which recognize the token owners as shareholders.
• 5% of the tokens are available for sale and will be minted directly to each investor. Investors can buy MPS either on the ethereum blockchain or with fiat or bitcoin.
• The remaining 95% of the tokens are bound by a shareholders’ agreement and have been minted to a vault.