Launch of Silverway – the first marketplace for professional investors to facilitate OTC deals with private round tokens

Silverway (www.silverway.io) is the first marketplace aimed at helping professional investors buy and sell SAFTs or locked tokens, as well as providing aggregate OTC market data to support informed investment decisions

With 20+ reputable crypto investment funds on board and 50+ active deals in its pipeline, Silverway transforms a $4bn market which encompasses 1,000+ professional investors and hundreds of projects

Silverway is considering leading blockchain platforms for its token issuance, which is planned for 2Q2019

HONG KONG--Apr. 24, 2019-- Today Silverway announced the launch of the first marketplace for OTC deals with SAFTs and non-listed tokens available at www.silverway.io. The marketplace collects buy and sell offers from investment funds and other professional investors and facilitates direct transactions between sellers and buyers. Paid users also get access to comprehensive market data for monitoring, analyzing and tracking OTC market dynamics to make informed investment decisions. 

The platform has been created by a team of former Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital investment bankers and private equity professionals who have been amongst the pioneer professional investors in the crypto and blockchain sector. Silverway team, led by its Founder and CEO Sergey Gurkin, has embarked on a journey to institutionalize the $4 billion private token sales market segment, making it more transparent and safe to invest. 

Today, the market for token trading is represented by hundreds of exchanges (which trade listed tokens and derivatives), a large number of OTC brokers (which mostly trade liquid cryptos and crypto/fiat pairs), fundraising platforms (for primary token sales), platforms for syndicating pools (participating in a limited number of private sales) – there are no institutional grade platforms dealing with the SAFT secondary market.

“The secondary market for private round tokens operates entirely within a gray area. Its current structure creates a number of issues and risks for all participants involved: it is very fragmented, hard-to-access, opaque, and chaotic. It operates via secret Telegram chats, personal meetings, syndicating pools, redundant and often unreliable intermediaries. The blockchain investments space needs a simple and transparent platform for SAFTs and locked tokens secondary market,,” stated Mr. Gurkin.

Silverway was inspired by Mr. Gurkin’s own experience as a market professional. In 2018 Sergey Gurkin had several mandates from large family offices to get allocations in private token sales of various top-tier projects. They could not get allocations from the project teams, so the only way was to go via intermediaries who offered to buy SAFTs on the secondary market. At best, Sergey and his client knew the name of their counterparty, but mostly received proposals from anonymous people in Telegram groups or via a chain of intermediaries. Sergey’s team did their best to agree on the deal terms and set up a reasonable transaction structure, however, the intermediaries did not deliver on their promises, did not comply with KYC/AML policies and changed their prices at the last moment.

“I knew there must be a more convenient way to facilitate direct transactions between buyers and sellers, as in other more mature financial markets. This inspired me to launch Silverway, and I am excited about the transformative changes we are bringing to this dynamic market. We can generate so much value for both buyers and sellers, while earning a fair share of profits. In fact, we can significantly increase the market by opening it up to other professional investors who are not satisfied with today’s opaque practices and limited compliance,” continued Sergey Gurkin.

According to Silverway, many investors are looking for ways to re-sell their locked tokens in order to realize price premiums, get additional liquidity to diversify their portfolios or just cash-out faster. 
On the other hand, a lot of professional investors have very limited access to private sales rounds and are looking to buy private sale tokens, sometimes with significant premiums. All the counterparties are searching for direct secure deals without redundant intermediaries.

“There is a significant interest in OTC deals with SAFTs and locked tokens,” Mr. Gurkin concluded, “but there is no platform to address all the investors’ requirements. Moreover, investors have to waste much time and take a lot of risks sourcing transactions that can be unsafe and perhaps fraudulent in messengers and via an internal network.”

Silverway unlocks the value of this $4bn private sale tokens secondary market, bringing transparency and pre-listing liquidity for the benefit of all market participants. 

The marketplace provides all professional investors with a well-structured deals pipeline from reliable sellers and buyers for direct transactions and access to comprehensive market data, thus reducing risk and making deals secure.

Silverway welcomes professional market participants to join the platform. Register at www.silverway.io for an entirely new experience of private token sales on the secondary market. Silverway ensures a white glove service by supporting its clients at every step: from creating an account to making a transaction.