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Smart Structures for Digitalized Deals

Blockchain

Smart contracts will transform renewable energy financing

Posted on by Aaron Powers

 

This post is the part of our new series called “Use Cases”, where we explore real, concrete and transformative applications of smart contract technology

In this article, we’ve examined renewable power generation – it’s exciting, growing rapidly, and critical to our planet’s future. But its also a specialized market that only a small number of investors can access directly and, when they do, it takes them decades to monetize the value that’s created in just the first couple of years of the project’s lifecycle. Smart contract technology has the ability to cut straight to the core of these structural challenges and provide this sector with a new set of possibilities.

Read More…

Legal Insights: Billing for legal services when time is no longer the measure of value

Posted on by Jan Berger
Legal billing

 

This article is part of Hunit’s Legal Insights series. We’re sharing some of the key learnings that we’ve gained from in-depth interviews with legal professionals across multiple international markets.

We’ve called our series of in-depth interviews with law firms and financial service providers our “listening tour”.  Using a standardized set of discussion questions, we set out to gather systematic insight on the legal professional’s day-to-day operations, their problems, their concerns and of course their understanding of DLT and smart contracts.

One of the listening tour’s key discussion points concerned billing methods in an environment when a lawyer’s ability to create value for the client is disassociated from the use of their time (billable hours). In an increasingly technology-enabled environment, what does the law firm of the future’s customer invoice look like? Read More…

Legal Insights: < 1 in 4 chance of code-based smart contracts becoming mainstream

Posted on by Aaron Powers

 

This article is part of Hunit’s Legal Insights series. We’re sharing some of the key learnings that we’ve gained from in-depth interviews with legal professionals across multiple international markets.

We recently posted an article entitled “Legal Insights: Will the lawyer of the future know how to code?” where we talked about assessing adoption chain risk. While we made a quick reference to the seminal book on the subject, we didn’t discuss much of how that process works or how we reached the conclusions that we did.

Thanks to some of the feedback we received, we realized that there was general interest in the process that we followed and how we reached our results. As our childhood algebra teachers used to admonish us: “Show your work” – So we did! Read More…

Legal Insights: Will the lawyer of the future know how to code?

Posted on by Editorial Staff

 

This article is the first of Hunit’s Legal Insights series. We’ll be sharing some of the key learnings that we’ve gained from in-depth interviews with legal professionals across multiple international markets.

As it stands today, the legal profession’s basic toolset hasn’t changed since the quill and ink pot. First typewriters, then word processors and later document management tools have all provided increasingly large productivity gains, but they all still output to the same medium: paper and signature. The most recent step? A PDF that imitates paper, into which one inserts a digital representation of their freehand signature. Progress? Absolutely. A phase change? Not yet.

So before we get to the subject of coding lawyers, perhaps an even more basic question needs to be answered: will the practice of law continue to orbit around pieces of paper? Read More…

Surprising outcomes: COVID-19 driving digital reserve currencies?

Posted on by Editorial Staff

 

Experts are opining that the measures taken to control the COVID-19 pandemic have propelled the world 10 years into the technological future. The most obvious impact has been a massive change in work routines – millions of workers are spending an extended period in home-offices using remote collaboration tools for the first time. But while security flaws in the leading video conferencing systems grab headlines, most of us missed how close we came to an upheaval in the global monetary system. Read More…

Hunit contributes to LTC’s latest report: The Future of Property

Posted on by Editorial Staff

”It takes little imagination to envision how the real estate market could remake itself if fractional ownership in individual properties traded with the same fluidity, transparency and costs as equities.”

Aaron Powers, Hunit co-founder and CEO had the chance to contribute to the London Technology Club’s latest report in their “Future of…” series. Read More…

Thinking about issuing a digital private market investment?

Posted on by Editorial Staff

 

What do you want to accomplish?

Digital investment instruments are flexible – they can be used to tokenize traditional asset classes such as equity or debt (bonds) or they can be built up of different features that combine into a novel instrument. So, the first step is to clearly conceive of what your business needs.

Is it a more efficient way to manage your company’s equity and shareholder obligations? Read More…

Digitalisation of the Private Market

Posted on by Editorial Staff

Key Market Enablers

We’re confident that blockchain-based electronic instruments represent a future pillar of the private market financial sector; offering massive operational efficiencies and enabling investment features in ways that are difficult or impossible to achieve in conventional paper-based instruments.

Our analysis found that there are still a number of blockers preventing this new asset class from fulfilling its potential. To achieve our mission of enabling a decentralized economy, we’ve built a platform that addresses these critical obstacles to market acceptance. Read More…

Private Market Structural Challenges

Posted on by Editorial Staff

 

Transactional Friction and Liquidity

Prof. Aswath Damodaran, widely cited valuation expert from NYU’s Stern School of Business, makes the assertion that regardless of business type, private companies suffer from a 20-30% valuation discount due to the illiquidity of the private equities market. While this discount level generally applies to formal valuations (such as those determined when raising capital), owners of illiquid private securities often Read More…

Capital Markets are Evolving

Posted on by Editorial Staff

 

The Private Capital Shift
While the structural opportunities appear largely the same, the underlying dynamics of the global capital market are evolving. We see this manifested in the global decrease in mid to small cap securities offerings and the growth of the $1bill+ megadeals. From peak to trough, the current US market has seen a dramatic reduction (81%) in the number of IPO’s per year when compared to the mid 1990’s. Read More…