Overstock's tZERO to Trade Tokens During Wall Street Hours Only

Overstock's newly launched security token exchange tZERO is live, but it's still a work in progress.

That platform launched in the late afternoon on Thursday, allowing investors to trade their tZERO tokens.

The first trade saw 10 tokens bought at a price of $8 apiece, according to the users in tZERO's Telegram group.

For example - in what might be a sign of the platform's position between mainstream Wall Street finance and the more open, experimental market embodied by the cryptocurrency space - tZERO will, at first, operate during normal market hours between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. EST. It's during that period that the broker-dealer Dinosaur operates, Noursalehi explained.

On January 11, investors got emails saying that they could gain control of their tokens and set up a brokerage account with tZERO's partner, the broker-dealer Dinosaur Financial Group that would facilitate trading.

TZERO has been designed as an alternative trading system, or ATS - a trading venue subject to less regulation than an exchange, matching customers' trade without policing their practices and usually registered as a broker-dealer.

In addition to that, tZERO deals exclusively with private equity, eschewing publicly traded companies.

"We're working closely with the regulators to get that up and running," Noursalehi said, adding that the new exchange - dubbed the Boston Security Token Exchange, or BSTX - will use the same technology stack as tZERO and will be the first exchange in the U.S. to trade this kind of digital asset.

The goal is that, in August, retail investors can begin trading at tZERO - as it stands, only accredited investors can do so.

The team is actively developing tZERO's technological capacity to help other companies issue their security tokens.