Today, a private individual would be daring or foolhardy to put money in unlisted equity rather than a home, a bank accounts or a listed share. Maybe, in a not too distant future, he or she will be able to fund a local theatre, a tech startup or a wide range of small and medium sized enterprises. In that future, shareholding is democratized and a vastly larger section of our citizens will be able to benefit from their insights or their willingness to take risk.
Although the risk of business failure remains, we may remove the great body of uncertainty tied to governance, transaction costs, liquidity and third party risks. We may make the rules of the game transparent and equal for everyone, and we may turn ordinary shares into liquid assets that can easily be transferred or used as collateral.
We may offer these advantages, not only for companies on a stock exchange, but for the small and medium sized companies that will share the economies of tomorrow.
MIR acts as a trust architecture where companies may list their shares and where a number of parties can collaborate to create the required user-interfaces and services. In effect, we build a capitalization table (“cap table”) that doubles as the actual equity. Strictly speaking, transparency may also be achieved through one central database that lists every issue related to shareholding. The real beauty of MIR is the merger of a public registry with the services of financial services firms.