TZero, which runs a trading system for digital securities, said Thursday it has agreed to digitize $25 million of equity interest in an oil-and-gas fund managed by Houston-based EnergyFunders.
The deal will rely on tZero’s smart-contracts technology, and the digital securities will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, according to a tZero press release.
It is expected that investors will be able to buy and sell digitized equity in EnergyFunders’ Yield Fund I on tZero’s trading system, tZero said, giving them access to returns from oil and gas projects.
EnergyFunders CEO Laura Pommer said in the press release that she was “pleased about this potential opportunity to provide a secondary market for trading our new EnergyFunders Yield Fund I in the same way that you might trade stocks, bonds or ETFs (exchange-traded funds) in a regular brokerage account.”
Founded in 2015, tZero is a unit of Medici Ventures, which is owned by online retailer Overstock. The company has worked with Vertalo, a transfer agent and manager of blockchain-based capitalization tables that recently raised $5 million in Series A funding.