The last few days have been intense as far as the EOS blockchain is concerned, culminating in further news from Helios, Brock Pierce’s platform that has received over 45 million EOS to support and enhance the entire EOS.IO ecosystem. Helios announced the launch of the first ETP on EOS, as outlined by Pierce himself.
📰To support the overall EOS ecosystem, we are launching #EOS onto euEU Stock Exchanges via the first #ETP, attracting new capital & startups to our fund. This is a massive step towards EOS being ‘priced in’ as a #SEC approved, non-security token. ⬇️
— Brock Pierce (@brockpierce) December 8, 2021
Summary
What is an ETP?
An ETP, which stands for Exchange Traded Product, is a financial investment instrument that replicates the performance of another asset, such as currencies, indices, commodities and so on.
Thanks to these instruments, it is possible to invest indirectly in the relevant asset. The advantage of using these instruments, rather than investing in the asset directly, is the simplicity and the existing regulation.
In fact, a company or an institutional investor will be more inclined to buy an ETP than the asset itself, for both bureaucratic and technical reasons. Think for instance of an ETP on a commodity: it is easier to buy and trade an ETP than to physically move the commodity.
The same applies to crypto which requires a number of measures to avoid losing private keys, to record them on the balance sheet, as well as other bureaucratic and fiscal issues.
Why an ETP on EOS?
As the statement itself points out, there are no other ETPs of individual cryptocurrencies like EOS.
This is because most crypto assets have regulatory issues and in some countries can be regulated as security tokens, as we have seen in the past (see the Ripple case with the SEC).
So far there are only 3 cryptocurrencies confirmed by the SEC that are not security tokens, and these are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and EOS.
With this added value, it is easier to use these assets to create traditional financial instruments, as they have already been battle-tested by the SEC, i.e. they have passed the scrutiny of the body that regulates financial products.
And this is where the ETP on EOS comes in. This service will start in Europe. We are talking about an ETP collateralized 100% by EOS, so buying this ETP is the same as buying EOS directly, as they are not just representative securities but are issued according to the EOS that Helios itself will provide.
The VC “Helios Rising”
In addition to the ETP, the Helios VC (Venture Capital) was announced. It is called “Helios Rising” and will aim to accelerate projects on EOS and EOS.IO.
In addition, Helios will also create a Pre-VC that will support some projects that are already underway, such as Pomelo.
Pomelo will receive as much as $100,000 to expand the platform and extend it to “non-public goods” projects, which will use the EOS and EOS.IO blockchain in different fields.
This new section will have a starting pool of $500,000, again distributed through quadratic funding.
Finally, Helios will give another $500,000 to several projects that we saw in the first season of Pomelo and among these are:
- ZEOS, the token on EOS that uses the ZK-SNARK protocol to perform private transactions, including swaps and DeFi anonymously. A project that will be launched this Christmas, barring unforeseen events;
- EOS Support, a solid support service for those who have problems with EOS, which also has an algorithm to reward those who actively help with troubleshooting;
- Violet Garden, a social network similar to Instagram, where you log in with your EOS account (verified by the EdenOS project) and where a function to mint your posts as NFTs and sell them has recently been added;
- EOS NFT Standard, the first smart contract standard in which all NFT information is 100% on-chain, including the media file linked to it (which is now done on systems such as IPFS).
News makes the price of EOS fly
To this multitude of news, one must add the first dApps on EOS approved by the Venezuelan government, the launch of Bullish, already operational for institutional users, and another 32 million EOS returned to the EOS community.
All this positive news is also reflected in the price of EOS. After the collapse of the entire crypto market, which brought EOS down to $2.4, at the time of writing EOS has already surpassed $3.7 with a 55% increase in just 2 days.
