Benzinga - Traditional finance (TradFi) is facing serious challenges, highlighted by recent scandals in the industry. On November 8th, 2022, the mismanagement of centralized finance collided with crypto, as the infamous centralized exchange FTX, owned by Bankman-Fried, unraveled to the tune of 8 billion dollars.
The FTX administration used little to no accounting or accountability policies and were using customer funds to illegally prop up inexperienced crypto investing giants Alameda Research. This scandal and many of the financial issues affecting the world today, such as the banking crisis of 2008, and the one that the US is currently facing, were only possible due to the nature of the closed and centralized world of traditional finance, where big players get to do what they want without proper accountability or trails.
The Paradigm is Shifting
A new way is emerging in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications built on blockchain technology, without the need for intermediaries.It aims to provide transparency, fairness, and accessibility to all, regardless of their socioeconomic status or geographic location. It offers greater control and ownership of assets, as well as the ability to earn passive income through various financial instruments such as staking, yield farming, and liquidity providing.
Orbeon Protocol, dubbed “a challenger model community based VC”, is using these benefits to become the new paradigm for decentralized investment and crowdfunding.
They seek to match promising businesses with retail investors. Previously, investing in early stage companies was the preserve of big conglomerates like Blackrock or ultra high net worth individuals. Retail investors have to wait until companies are publicly listed before they can buy shares, by which time the big VCs have already made their profit. Most of these deals are done behind closed doors, and even when the company goes public, investors outside of the US are often not permitted to participate.
The current banking system poses challenges for new businesses too. In a world where a lot of the SMEs in the UK cannot get funding, Orbeon Protocol offers a chance for small but exciting businesses to evolve and grow, whilst providing returns for their community.
Helping Smaller Investors
Crowdfunding has helped smaller investors in the past, but as the Orbeon team points out, the traditional method generally takes a large slice of the equity or rewards, lacks the transparency of the blockchain, and the security of knowing that a project has been vetted for success by a team of experts.Orbeon Protocol seeks to change all of this by carefully vetting early stage businesses, then converting the opportunity on offer into an NFT, which is then fractionalised and sold to their community. The company's information will be stored in the metadata of the NFT. This means that investors can get involved with new projects for as little as $10.
The decentralization and democratization of investing is an exciting and empowering paradigm shift, and it will be interesting to see how far Orbeon Protocol and other blockchain based companies will push the boundaries of equity and inclusion.
Orbeon Protocol is in presale, with ORBN currently on offer at $0.1125. The presale was due to end in January, but due to the high demand it sold out early.
In response to this and the fact that the team (who recently completed KYC using Coinsult.io) are way ahead of their development milestones, an additional 13% of the supply of tokens have been released for presale.
Previews of the platform are being shown to the community via social media, including the staking dashboard, marketplace and portfolio. ORBN has over 6000 holders and has raised over $7 million to date. Users can find more about the presale on the official website.
This post was authored by an external contributor and does not represent Benzinga's opinions and has not been edited for content. This content contains sponsored advertising content and is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice. Cryptocurrency is a volatile market; do your independent research and only invest what you can afford to lose. New token launches and small market capitalization coins are inherently more risky than large cap cryptocurrencies. These tokens are subject to larger liquidity and market risks.
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