Since the first initial coin offering (ICO) was held in July 2013, ICOs have raised an astounding $10 billion. But the days of the ICO are over... Too many people think of them as scams. Yet companies still need to raise money. Enter the STO—a way to raise money that has the potential to be far more secure, and, for the first time, legally open to the big players: institutional investors.

With interest for ICOs cooling down, a new type of blockchain-powered funding mechanism is gaining a lot of buzz—the STO. STOs are still a very new model, and the infrastructure for conducting STOs and potentially trading the tokens on a secondary market is being developed by multiple companies.