Does Uber’s Vanishing IPO Signal a Securities Token Launch?

Until recently America’s publicly traded stock markets were seemingly out of fashion. The number of publicly listed companies peaked in 1997, but by 2017 this figure had nearly halved.

However, tech companies have been going public more actively over the past year. Imminent IPOs are reportedly planned for Dropbox and Uber’s great rival Lyft. These names follow Spotify, which listed but offered no new shares and raised no money, instead simply beginning to trade its current shares.

Why have tech companies, which were previously scared off by all the bureaucracy and public reporting requirements of IPOs, started to consider listing? The obvious reason is juicy valuations. Stock markets have been hitting record highs and that builds enthusiasm for more listings.

One name is conspicuously absent from the trend of raising funds at great valuations by going public - Uber. Could the company be planning to leapfrog over the old-fashioned IPO to a cutting-edge securities token ICO in the coming months?

Telegram set the standard with the introduction of the “TON” blockchain, a decentralized infrastructure with the intended goal of disrupting global communication. After the masterminds behind Telegram collected over $1.7 billion from private individuals alone, it cancelled the public portion of its ICO. It is important to note here that the median deal size of an IPO in the United States reached only $100M as reported in 2014.

Telegram did not opt for the IPO route, as it found a better use case in the form of a token. It found that by building its own blockchain and issuing a token, it could create more opportunities than simply bringing its company to public shareholders. Now consider Uber. Built on the idea that you should be able to utilize ridesharing no matter where you are in the world, a decentralized token seems to fit the company’s philosophy perfectly.

An ICO would in theory allow Uber to run its own ecosystem of tokens, which it could then enable in any way it chooses (from discounted ride payments, equity in the form of a security token, and so on). Uber is one of the only companies with both the capital and the global user-base to make a security token efficient through billions of daily transactions, and in short, not be a total flop.

“It makes perfect sense,” ICOBox Head of International PR Dima Zaitsev commented on the subject of Uber issuing its own token. “The speculation around Uber’s IPO has remained a mystery for years now. They keep pushing it back, and being such a highly prized company, they would be losing money by not doing it by now, unless of course they were pursuing a better option. So the question now is what’s taking so long? I’d bet anything that they’re integrating crypto behind the scenes.”

For those in disbelief that a company would choose a crypto over the Goldman Sachs immortalized IPO method, keep in mind that Uber’s co-founder Garrett Camp has even created his own cryptocurrency called “Eco”. Interestingly enough, the token’s real use-case is still being kept a secret. Additionally, just this past week another Uber co-founder and its first chief technology officer, Oscar Salazar, announced his board placement for a zero-fee cryptocurrency trading platform “Voyager”. We for one are prepared for Uber to make waves as part of the new generation of blockchain.