Matt Levine, Columnist

This ICO Looks an Awful Lot Like a Share Offering

Overstock.com is so over the regular stock exchange.

October 27, 2017 at 6:00 AM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Sometimes the new way of doing things isn’t so new.
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

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Ugh, how do you spell the name of Overstock.com Inc.'s blockchain subsidiary? Bloomberg News uses "tZero", while Overstock seems to use mostly "t0," but with a slash through the zero. (Or that is the effect that I assume they're going for, though in normal text fonts, it's really "tO" with a slash through the "O," "tØ.") You can also see "tZERO" out there. I wish Overstock's blockchain project was a little better at building consensus.

Anyway the big news out of Overstock/tZeR0 is that it is planning an initial coin offering to fund its development of a new exchange to trade tokens, one that will be licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as a securities exchange (and so might be an appealing place to trade ICO tokens that are probably securities). What is interesting about tZero's ICO is that it is -- shhh -- pretty much a regular stock offering: