Alibaba is looking to fill out white space in the Securities Tokenization Radian® by entering the field of antique tokenization, and may be looking for opportunities for acquisition in the space. What is antique tokenization, you ask? If you have ever seen a Ferrari or an expensive Rolex and felt that you just wanted a piece of them, even if you couldn’t buy the whole thing, then Advanced New Technologies (A.N.T.) may just have the platform for you. A.N.T. is a company based in the Cayman Islands that appears to act as an intellectual property shell corporation for Alibaba. In a patent issued in March 2021 (and assigned from Alibaba to A.N.T. just a month before Alibaba founder Jack Ma disappeared for months), A.N.T. claims a method for creating a digital asset corresponding to a tangible asset and then trading the digital asset using a blockchain-based platform. The patent mentions that it is meant to allow people other than the ultra-wealthy to invest in valuable personal property, such as antiques, artwork, or collectibles. Because the value of the personal property can be split into multiple digital assets, people are able to invest in it without being able to afford the entire item.
Interestingly, the issuance of A.N.T.’s patent comes just weeks after a similar application published for Liquid Rarity Exchange, a small company headquartered in Missouri. Liquid Rarity Exchange is developing a trading platform for “rarities” where users can buy and sell “raritybits.” The company’s website mentions a variety of classes of rarities, including rare vehicles, antiques, musical instruments, armor, and more, and raritybits allow individual users to buy and sell fractional ownership of each of these rarities. These applications reflect a trend of recent months of using high-value personal items to diversify a portfolio and create liquid assets from illiquid collectibles. Securities Tokenization patent investment shows much more activity in platforms for trading financial assets. But will the balance shift toward physical assets as companies tokenize antiques and collectibles? Highly concentrated assets like real estate and metals are already actively represented by tokenized investment platforms. A.N.T., and by association Alibaba, will likely be looking for acquisition opportunities as they begin to define what now appears to be white space on the Securities Tokenization Radian®.
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