Brazilian Fintech BEE4 to Launch First Local Tokenized Stock Marketplace

This article is adapted from CoinDesk Brasil, a partnership between CoinDesk and InfoMoney, one of Brazil's leading financial news publications. Follow CoinDesk Brasil on Twitter.

BEE4, a Brazil-based fintech company, plans to launch the first local marketplace of tokenized stocks in the next few weeks, BEE4 CEO Patricia Stille told CoinDesk on Tuesday.

The company plans to replicate the structure of a stock exchange and will allow Brazilian companies with annual revenue between $1.8 million and $55 million to make public offerings of up to $19 million.

Last September, BEE4 was chosen by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) to participate in a regulatory sandbox, along with SMU, a secondary crowdfunding market, and QR Vórtx, a tokenizer issuing bonds and credit rights investment funds.

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According to Stille, investments in early stage companies have been reserved for large funds or investors with large amounts of capital and access to private rounds. “BEE4 comes to give general investors access to this,” she said.

The BEE4 platform will offer buy and sell orders, an open bid book, a trading floor and auctions. It will run on the Quorum network, based on the Ethereum blockchain, on which companies will tokenize their public offerings, Stille said.

Asset tokenization is a hot area in Brazil. In December, Brazil’s only stock exchange, B3, said it was exploring opportunities in the asset tokenization, digital asset custody and crypto-as-a-service (CaaS) segments. And last week, Itaú Unibanco, Brazil's largest private bank, announced its plans to launch an asset tokenization platform that transforms traditional finance products into tokens.

This article was translated by Andrés Engler and edited by CoinDesk. The original Portuguese can be found here.