How to launch an ICO and avoid regulatory issues

So the fifth thing, this is the last topic today, a step-by-step roadmap for success that I promised you guys earlier. First, I want to tell you real quick about my company 10XTS and specifically what we're doing to help startups use blockchain to raise capital. Now we're a blockchain development lab. We've got a world-class team of financial people, legal experts, software developers, literally bankers, economists, AI experts, mathematicians, and seasoned business leaders, right? Remember back at the beginning when I said my passion in life is helping startup founders realize their goals as innovators and creators of value? Well, that's what we're working on with 10XTX. We've been developing our flagship product called XDEX, which is a blockchain-based fintech ecosystem that makes it easy to launch, trade, and report on regulatory-compliant asset-backed security tokens. Pretty simple. Now we've kind of blazed the trail, so I'm a big believer in eating my own dog food, so to speak, and practice what I preach, right? So before I go into any detail about XDEX, I want to show you what we're doing with our own company, with 10XTS. We're going to expose our roadmap that really does seem to be meeting with legal approval right now, and I've probably got one of the most conservative Midwest securities attorneys you'll ever find on this thing, trying to poke holes. So first we tokenize the equity shares into NextDS. We created a Delaware C-Corp with both non-certificable common and preferred shares. Non-certificable is the key word there. Delaware, like, passed legislation last year that made it legal to issue shares and store corporate information on a blockchain. Well, those 10x TS shares are represented by tokens on our xDEX blockchain, and we really quickly sold out of preferred in our own seed raise. So it seems like people are interested in what we're building. So now we're in the process of launching our next round, which is a Regulation D offering to accredited investors only. We're launching this round using, uh, probably either simple agreement for future tokens or convertible notes, also represented by a separate class of tokens, right? So we're hitting the road this summer to secure partnerships with angel groups and VC funds who would ultimately also be users of this platform on the investment side. So now then, finally, our goal is to launch a Regulation A Tier 2 offering towards the end of 2018, first of 2019. So we still got a lot of work to do, but we've been moving and grooving pretty fast. So when we launch in 2019, end of 2018, first 2019 for the Reg A offering. That creates a token that's tradable by anybody regardless of their accredited status. So the Regulation D token is representing some way that it'll convert into the Reg A Tier 2 offering, and then it's going to be convertible to ultimately will become our own internal currency token within the platform. So we're blazing the trail of how to get money through the securities hurdles into an internal tradable currency. So while we're a blockchain software company, we actually separated our utility token away from the security token, which means really the same process can be used by any other startup that wants to launch a security token on the platform. So now we've also built this on top of a decentralized peer-to-peer framework that allows over time the further decentralization on a global basis of the actual trading platform itself. So we're just getting the system going. But the great thing is, is this, the way that we've approached this is that we can launch the network and go global with it, but still enforce regulatory compliance in the localized level. So like after a year of R&D, unlike any other of the security token exchange platforms that are developed, we chose to avoid Ethereum as well. We built an entirely new blockchain with its own infrastructure that is not reliant upon any existing chain, any inherited legacy liability associated with regulators. There's contingency of the SEC that still thinks Ethereum is an unregistered security and it's a bad thing. They're eyeballing it closely. There's no centralized vector of attack because it's a deep a decentralized platform as well. And our platform has all of those regulatory controls built into the business rule engine that ensures the proper registration of people through a process that meets the legal banking standard of know your customer, anti-money laundering, and it maintains the compliance and reporting for literally all issuers, investors, all of the security tokens and the trades down to that localized level. So our secret sauce is our business rule engine and our API microservices layer that literally only permits transactions and trades based on the answer to a single question: can these two entities engage in this specific transaction? Now, while the parties remain anonymous to each other, the platform knows whether or not individuals may buy or sell a specific security token based on the status of the people involved in the security itself. So we've got like this built-in white label system that also will attach to an entire— call it Edgar— is baked into the blockchain itself. We're developing the system to permanently maintain information continuity about an asset on the blockchain forever into the future, which is important for future investors doing their research into whether or not they want to buy a particular security token sometime in the future. The other thing that we've worked on is, and this is important for regulatory compliance, is to design the platform so that we can electronically file transactions and trades with any auditing system or any regulatory authority using our XML-based reporting layer. So we could file everything directly to EDGAR. In our target market, we've looked at launching in obviously the early-stage funding space. So our secondary focus is traditional capital institutions. Anybody that's got alternative asset classes, we want to make them more tradable and liquid. And our third focus is obviously institutional and banking to enable them with crypto asset custody and management services through the platform itself. So now you have the roadmap, right? And you got insights into what we're doing to advance capital funding for startups with blockchain. Now, since I'm a Founder Institute director in Cincinnati and my hypothesis really started as a result of working with early-stage companies through the program, uh, we've been working to establish a global partnership with Founder Institute to help graduate companies follow a similar path. So that's one of the main points of why I wanted to do this webinar today is to really help educate the Founder Institute ecosystem about what we're doing and give everyone an opportunity to engage with us directly to help. So I've explained to you what you need to do to position your business to take advantage of the changes in the early-stage capital and, you know, access investment with blockchain. I've shown you a way out of all the funding challenges you're struggling with by positioning yourself for the future of funding. This stuff is not going away, whether it's me, whether it's ultimately going to be absorbed into the traditional Main Street financial ecosystem. This stuff is— this is where it's going, guys. This is not going away. So now you got some choices to make, right? You can keep plodding along and, you know, fielding your, uh, you know, traditional equity raises, and good luck to you. You know, we're here to help on that as well. But my team and I have set aside some time to speak with you guys. Anybody that's interested in this topic, we want to talk to you personally because we're in a position where we're now fielding it out with a lot of startups. We've got some regional ones we've been working with, starting to, you know, even talk to some other cities for Founder Institute companies already. But, you know, we want to talk to you about how you can apply these ideas if something I've said today is interesting to you. But since every business is different, we can't really sort of can it yet. So you guys are helping us out by talking to us. About what I've talked to you about. So what we wanna do is we wanna get on a call with you and walk you through some more of these processes. So you basically tell us where you're at with your business, where you wanna go, and we'll tell you exactly how to get there in terms of what we're doing.