Indiegogo Delves Into Real Estate-Backed Security Token Offering for Luxury Resort

Indiegogo is a pioneer in the crowdfunding industry, having been one of the first sites to offer the service a decade ago. The company is now turning to the increasingly popular ICO model to raise funds for an upscale resort located in Colorado. The ICO will, however, differ from many of the offerings in the market by offering security tokens which will entitle investors to an ownership stake in the resort. Investors who purchase the tokens will own shares of common stock in the St. Regis Aspen Resort, with payment being accepted in US dollars, bitcoin and ether.

A World of New Opportunities

Indiegogo will offer its users the unique opportunity to own shares of common stock in the St. Regis Aspen Resort, a prestigious and upscale resort located at the base of Aspen Mountain in Colorado. The opportunity will only be available to accredited investors, and while Indiegogo is taking the lead in the project, it will not directly offer the tokens for sale. Instead, the sale will be conducted through Templum Markets LLC, a broker-dealer that’s registered with the SEC and a member of the Financial Regulatory Authority (FINRA). It will be available to the over 15 million active users of the Indiegogo website, both in the U.S. and the other 235 countries in which its services are available.

In a statement, Indiegogo’s co-founder Slava Rubin expressed his excitement at the world of opportunities that security tokens will open up.

We have always strived to foster innovation and provide our users with access to some of the most novel and interesting products and ideas from around the world. With the blockchain revolution fully underway, we at Indiegogo are excited about the world-changing impact and potential of security tokens. Our goal is to provide an access point to our growing network of millions of customers.

Investors will participate in the token sale by purchasing Aspen Coins, with each token representing indirect ownership through one share of common stock in the resort. Whether the investment will produce a good ROI is anyone’s guess, but this is a landmark event in the journey towards the tokenization of real-world assets.

The resort has 179 luxurious rooms with four onsite food and beverage outlets. It’s located on 29,000 square feet of prime land at the foot of the majestic Aspen Mountain. It’s currently owned by Elevated Returns, which purchased it in 2010.

The president of Elevated Returns, Stephane De Baets, also expressed his optimism toward the part that security tokens will play in the future of crowdfunding.

Security token offerings are the investment tool of the future, a mechanism designed to store wealth by utilizing income-producing digital assets. By opening access to investing in traditional assets like real estate, we are creating a new opportunity for investors to explore an ownership stake in something previously only accessible to private investors and high net worth individuals.

While ICOs have become quite popular as a fundraising method, they have been limited to utility tokens whose values are largely speculative and depend on the performance of a project. Utility tokens don’t entitle the owner to an ownership stake in a company and merely act as a form of payment that keeps the network running.

Security tokens could tap into a largely unexplored market and provide investment opportunities to small-scale investors that were previously only available to high-net worth individuals. With no limit to the number and type of assets that can be tokenized, investors will be spoiled for choice.