BRØK, the Norwegian government project to track unlisted stock ownership, moved into the sandbox phase earlier this month. What’s a little different compared to other solutions is it plans to use a public blockchain. Specifically, it is using Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum with lower transaction costs.
Many countries around the world have corporate registries where you can look up information on companies of any size, including unlisted ones. These often have some stockholder data, but it’s usually up to a year old. For up-to-date details, one needs to contact the company. Norway’s corporate registry, which keeps records on 380,000 companies, is no different.
Hence the concept of creating a blockchain system to track the change of ownership of any private stock and get a current view of the ‘cap table’ – who owns stock, how much they own and when they bought it.
Another benefit of using a blockchain is immutability. Because companies only share snapshots of stock ownership irregularly, there’s scope to manipulate the cap table,…
