Blockchain Lets You Bet on Stocks

If you really love blockchains, one thing you might want is to buy Tesla Inc. stock on the blockchain. (People who love blockchains also tend to love Tesla stock.) How could you do that? You might imagine the following naive approach:

This seems okay. Basically the Tesla Blockchain Trust is like an exchange-traded fund or American Depositary Receipt, but on the blockchain. Obviously it has regulatory problems; if you did this in the U.S. and sold the thing to U.S. citizens without registering it with the Securities and Exchange Commission you would get in bad trouble. But that's true of almost everything in crypto so never mind. It also has trust problems: If you love blockchains because you like trustless permissionless innovation and don’t want to rely on some central counterparty, you will look skeptically at Tesla Bitcoin Trust. (Also if you are skeptical of crypto because crypto projects are constantly stealing their investors’ money — particularly crypto projects that are set up outside of more regulated jurisdictions like the U.S. — this doesn’t look great.)