TOKO by DLA Piper: Democratizing Finance on Hedera

My name is Scott Thiel. I'm the founder of Tokyo. I'm also the DLA Piper representative on the Hedera governing council and a member of the Hedera board. Tokyo is a global business, but it's obviously critical that we have presence in some of the virtual assets and crypto hubs around the world, including obviously in Miami. So toko is a wholly owned subsidiary of DLA Piper. What I was looking for was the opportunity to create a complementary technology that could be delivered in combination with legal services to provide something that clients want but isn't necessarily available either from a traditional technology business or indeed a traditional legal business. So that was the origin and the sort of rationale for creating a very complex sort of next generation, blockchain based Web3 company within a law firm, because it isn't necessarily an obvious connection at first blush. It was a business that was incubated as part of the firm's radical change initiative, where we were looking to develop non legal services businesses within, within the structure of the law firm. But in a way that allowed us to do something that was more than law but also complementary to the delivery of legal services. One of the ambitions around Tokyo is actually to democratize finance. Toko, in combination with the legal services, actually provides clients with a solution or an answer to the question, how do I fractionalized or do fund raisings or issue virtual assets in a way that is compliant and also technologically sound? When we started envisaging what does a complex security token ecosystem in a global decentralized marketplace? What what does that maybe look like? And the presumption that those global financial centers that exist today and the traditional world are going to be the same ones in that new world, I think is a presumption that needs to be challenged. And then we thought to ourselves, so if that's where we want to get to, what is the technology platforms we need to bring to bear on that problem? I had the privilege of meeting with Mance and Lehman in Singapore. I can remember the breakfast at a hotel around the Marina. I was just intently listening. And it was fascinating to hear that they had built a technology platform that seemed to have all of those attributes that were going to be essential for delivering the vision that we were hoping to start building towards. And to put some points around what that meant at the time. And what that looked like. It was things like the scalability. You need a protocol that's going to be capable of scaling to deal with that transaction volume. There were other features like the level of security. The consensus layer is important. I think there were other things like the stability of the network, the fair ordering and time stamping. These were the attributes we're going to need when this global, decentralized marketplace for security tokens takes off. That was really the foundational layer of our interest in Hadera. We joined the Hedera governing council. We learnt about their technology and they've been very supportive in helping us sort bridge the gap. We were, after all, only a law firm, the opportunity to participate in a council of enterprises that are looking to build the future on Hedera. Being able to then collaborate with them because we bring different skills and things than they do, is going to be more powerful than just doing it on your own. I think we're going to see very broad adoption of the technology over the next few years. And we are really on the cusp of the decentralization and democratization of financial services is and I'm really excited about the opportunity around participation by more people in this ecosystem. We're barely at the foothills of what I think is going to be a very exciting and large mountain that we're all about to climb in this space. Being able to be a law firm, changing the world, sitting next to a bank, change in the world and a large it company changing the world. Maybe we could change the world together.