RE: Changing the Capital Raising Landscape
I would be careful citing material from 2017 around how "blockchain will revolutionize all of finance." These materials paint a really rosy picture of how blockchaining finance will lead to a blockchainified decentralized future of blockchainy amazingness. We saw what happened in 2017 and 2018 when "greatly improve[d] flow of capital between investors and entrepreneurs" enabled massive scams and a wealth of "projects" (including enormously valued smart contract platforms like EOS) that have yet to show anything for all of the capital raised. That being said, I mostly agree with what you're saying in the second paragraph. The concept of smart securities has some interesting potential. Check out this presentation for a detailed look at smart securities.
Blockhains do not make transactions faster or more effective (i.e., the classic Visa vs. Bitcoin transactions per second comparison), they simply allow for the removal of intermediaries. For the traditional financial players to allow this doesn't make much sense to me. If I put my conspiratorial hat on, the focus on "blockchain for improved financial processes" seems to be a slight of hand by established financial players to seem like they're adding layers of security and auditability without actually adding any value and distracting from a threat to their business model. It also seems like a way for companies like IBM and Microsoft to extract more value from their clients by selling them "state of the art" technology with the hot blockchain buzzword.
I agree with your comment on citing material from 2017. I think that it still brought up some good points, but something more recent would have been more effective.
I still think that most of the scams played off of the hype of blockchain and "coin offerings." In an equity offering, I think that investors would be much less tempted to blindly throw money at a company. I more envisioned stripping out the issuance of "coins" and simply use a blockchain network as a means to connect a greater number of projects to investors. I think a blockchain platform centred around equity issuance removes the hype that lead to scams and will make it easier to connect private equity firms with entrepreneurs.
I might be misunderstanding, but I I hope to discuss this further.
I see what you're saying now. I think equities could definitely benefit from being blockchain-based.