Private Equity Moris Beracha Wuani

Standard Token Protocol (STP), a firm hoping to bring transparency to the tokenization process, announced Wednesday it has raised a total of $7 million through the sales of its STP tokens. The fund was raised through two rounds from investors including Neo Global Capital, BlockVC, AlphaBit. STP develops an open-source standard for projects looking to tokenize their assets. The company highlights compliance, claiming that the protocol will ensure tokens fully comply with region-specific regulations and KYC requirements. Meanwhile, the firm’s STP tokens could be used to pay for issuance fees and compliance investigation or to be used for staking and governance on STP’s platform,  per the company’s white paper. STP’s offering of compliance-proof tokenization protocol seems timely as initial coin offerings (ICOs) regain momentum, with 109 offerings raising a total of over $236 million in April alone,  according to ICObench’s data .  However, the ICO sector is also no...

Political uncertainty has made investors pause By Joice Alves Fundraising for European buyouts has hit its worst quarter since 2010 as the divorce between the UK and European Union has fuelled a sharp decline in investors’ appetite for UK-dedicated funds. Fund managers have struggled to keep pace with the record volumes of cash raised for the asset class last year, writes FN ’s sister publication  Private Equity News.  Both capital-raising and the number of fund closings fell in the third quarter, according to LP Source, a data provider owned by FN and  PEN ’s publisher Dow Jones. Buyout fundraising dropped 68% to $7.9bn across 33 funds in the third quarter, down from $24.6bn raised by 46 funds during the same period last year. Fundraising also declined one-fifth during the first half of this year to $46.6bn, down from $67.8bn in the corresponding part of 2017. The figures represents the worst third quarter for European buyout fundraising sinc...

  By Georgeta Gheorghe The strong momentum underway in Central Europe’s private equity markets is set to continue,  the latest Deloitte Central Europe Private Equity Confidence Survey shows. The high level of deal activity in Central Europe’s private equity markets is set to continue, with two-thirds of respondents expecting market activity to remain the same, the highest level in three years. Nearly a third (31 percent) expect activity to increase further from its currently high level, and just 2 percent expect activity to slow down – the lowest level in five years. It then comes as no surprise that two-thirds of respondents (69 percent) expect to focus mostly on deal-doing in the coming months, in line with the survey over the last two years. Expectations will be buoyed by liquid leverage markets, with three quarters of respondents (74 percent) expecting the availability of debt finance to remain the same over coming months. This is up from two thirds (67 percent) in the ...