NEM and Wave announce launch of Kentucky whiskey fund

NEM and Wave Financial Group have announced that they will launch the Kentucky Whiskey Digital Fund token on the Symbol platform when it goes live later this year.

This latest development comes after digital asset manager Wave Financial Group revealed that it is working with Kentucky-based Wilderness Trail Distillery to launch a fund with up to 25,000 barrels of 2020-vintage bourbon, equating to a year’s worth of production.

This fund will allow investors to purchase asset-backed tokens linked to an estimated inventory of four million bottles of bourbon bottled each year.

Commenting on the news, Wave Financial President and Manager of Fund, Benjamin Tsai: “Kentucky Bourbon represents a huge opportunity for investors – as many assets lose value over time, whiskey accrues value due to its unique barrel aging process. Investors globally can gain exposure to the ever-growing U.S. whiskey market, introducing liquidity and accessibility into a fine goods market that has typically provided neither.”

Investments in the fund are open to non-US and accredited US investors and will be a two token issuance to ensure compliance with SEC regulations.

As a registered investment advisor in California, Wave Financial has previously tokenised on Ethereum, but are leveraging Symbol’s unique capabilities for this fund.

David Siemer, CEO of Wave Financial, added: “After launching the fund, we were on the lookout for a protocol that would facilitate this unique offering. Symbol from NEM was a natural fit, due to its technical capabilities, purpose-built with the issuance of security tokens at the forefront of its network architecture.”

NEM is one of the founding signatories to the Blockchain Token Association’s Verified Token Framework, which is building a regulatory compliant framework for the issuance of tokens.

NEM launched its own token in 2015, with it consistently holding a place in the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap with a current capitalisation of $431 million.

Dave Hodgson, Chief Investment Officer of NEM Group and Managing Director of NEM Ventures, concluded: “I am delighted to see the first committed security issuance on Symbol from NEM, even before its launch. We have been working with Wave Financial since early 2020 to tokenize this unique asset class and it is exciting to see this progress. The Wave team have prior experience of digital asset tokenisation are consummate professionals – the perfect partner for our first security token.”

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