BlockInvest is aiming to be the bridge between traditional finance and blockchain, making illiquid markets finally liquid and transparent. It is a Proprietary platform, made for banks and financial institutions, that allows to digitilize and tokenize real-world assets on blockchain in order to make them liquid and accessible to qualified investors.
We met Lorenzo Rigatti, Founder of BlockInvest.
When did you join the blockchain industry?
We could divide this into two macro phases. The first one was in 2016, when I was working in a
large corporate and managing a client with headquarters in Miami. I was strongly
encouraged by a colleague to buy bitcoin at the time. The price was much lower, clearly, and I
was starting to understand it. I started buying a few cryptos, the ones that in 2016 were the most promising. At least according to us. A speculator approach at first.
But perhaps the most important moment was at the end of the year. When I resigned from my corporate job, the cryptos were doing quite well and I started to study the technology behind the speculative aspect. This allowed me to start a new career in this world and led to BlockInvest.
What is BlockInvest?
BlockInvest is a blockchain-based management platform, thought for financial institutions
(Banks and Asset management companies), designed to improve the selling process of
alternative assets. Thanks to this solution, it is possible to digitalize the sale process of illiquid
assets by improving data quality and creating the financial instrument of the underlying asset
(security token), taking advantage of the blockchain technology to broaden the investor base at
a global level, in a compliant environment with an unparalleled security level.
Basically, our platform connect institutional asset owners with accredited investors, regardless
of their investment capacity or physical location, so as to make an illiquid market liquid, more
transparent and efficient.
We realized that a totally different approach was necessary to respond to present and future
market needs. Our goal was to Provide a new zero-code enterprise solution, that allows the
Client to manage and tokenize different asset classes in compliant way.
And we do that enhancing the power of public and decentralized Blockchain (Ethereum;
Polygon). Since 2019, we have been active in the security tokens and Real-World assets (Real
Estate, Equity, Bonds, and more) tokenization industry.
What are the opportunities in the real estate market nowadays?
Real Estate is the largest market in the world, by value. By far and above all. The big opportunity is that compared to other markets there are fewer differences with respect to geography, both from an underlying and regulation point of view.
I just got back from the Los Angeles Blockchain Summit and having received some very interesting feedback from both investors and potential customers. But paradoxically the most interesting thing was the super positive feedback from other American start-up companies that like us are trying to enter this market.
What we realised is that we can collaborate at this stage of the market. There are almost no
competitors for those who really use blockchain. and so the opportunity of the market abroad
and being able to collaborate by bringing on blockchain-based solutions. But the big opportunity is the possibility of creating a single global market for real estate. It will take time, a long time, but being able to use a single transactional network that applies worldwide is definitely the best chance to make it liquid and transparent.
It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s just a matter of “when” the real asset classes will land and be
transferred through the public blockchains.
What is the biggest challenge faced so far?
Education. Education, education. Even in classical finance it is a very important parameter, in
many IPOs they talk about investor education. Education is crucial when you do a business that interests many but there is not yet this expertise and knowledge so here at Blockinvest on that front we are working a lot on this field. We do fundraise, we need to educated. We also have to do client Education to explain to the client what the potential of technology is.
The miss conception here is that are many companies in the industry that don’t really use the technology or they’re basing most of their activities on private blockchains. Sometimes they
themselves barely know what really means to use blockchain. But there is also regulator Education. So how to make the regulators understand what the potential of the technology actually is, never neglecting the technical part because most of the papers, studies that there are in the market always address the business part the potential of the market but we always forget what the underlying technology is. That will become a commodity in a few years, so it is important to get Education from a technological point of view as there is really little of that now.
