Founded in April 2007, BrewDog is currently soliciting crypto investments. The Bitcoin-friendly microbrewery is one of the fastest developing outfits in its industry in the UK.
Invest Your Bitcoin in Beer
Celebrating the occasion, they’ve created a new beer called Cryptonite, according to a video published on their website.
According to the same video, the brewery has over 110,000 shareholders at present. You can legally buy shares in the company using cryptocurrency.
Dubbed “Equity for Punks,” the current fundraising round will last until April next year.
Each share costs 25 GBP. At current prices, that means 1 BTC will buy you over 375 shares.
The company posts a warning on a page with information about the investment opportunity:
“Investments can go down as well as up and invested capital is at risk. Investors should only invest on the basis of information contained in the prospectus (including the full risk factors set out therein) issued by BrewDog plc which is available here. Financial promotion approved by SPNV Limited (FCA No. 610217).”
According to the same page, the company now has over 1,500 employees, having grown over the last decade from just two men.
Issuing shares with the support of Bitcoin is likely to become a common theme in the years to come. Shares can even be issued using blockchain technology, which makes it easier to swap and ultimately keep track of assets.
In their “culture deck,” BrewDog characterizes their arrangement as such:
“We are owned by thousands of people who love craft beer. They are our shareholders, our friends, our community and the heart and soul of our business.”
It’s hard to imagine a future stock exchange that won’t use the blockchain in some way, shape, or form.
Blockchain is particularly well-suited for the types of transactions that exchanges process, making the era of centralized exchanges undoubtedly temporary.
The Future of Asset Management
The primary function of a blockchain is to process and settle transactions. When decentralized applications are built, they are using transactions to establish connections, store data, and the rest. Therefore, exchanges, which process thousands of transactions per minute or more, can benefit from a reliable, semi-decentralized ledger that can accurately store data.
In the event of an exchange failure, the data is immediately backed up. Here is the fundamental benefit. It’s not hard to imagine a traditional mercantile exchange utilizing the blockchain, and incentivizing nodes to host back-up data and even provide bandwidth with tokens that carry some value or another.
Picture a Binance Coin-like token whose sole purpose is to get people to decentralize an exchange’s data; the coin can then be used in the same way as Binance Coin, or it can be sold, also similar to BNB.
On such exchanges, people will be able to transact shares in real businesses. Eventually, a “master blockchain” superhighway, something on the order of Wanchain, will emerge.
Through something like this, all blockchains will be able to talk to each other, and all assets will become interchangeable.
Then you might realize a situation where people in rural Africa can improve their lives by micro-investing in companies in Los Angeles and vice versa.
The model used at BrewDog is more traditional than all of that. Bitcoin is added as one way to invest.
For those with significant Bitcoin holdings, investing some of the proceeds from recent price rises might be a way to sustain earnings in the event of a crash.
As the warning goes, though, and as with any securities, it might be a good way to lose all your funds as well.