– an interview with the Co-founder and CEO of Coinstreet Partners, Samson Lee
Thank you for joining, Sam. Could you please start by telling us a bit of the history behind the TADS Awards? Who got the idea, and why did you make it into what it is today?
Sam Lee (SL): Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. So yes, we started what we call the TADS Awards, T-A-D-S, which stands for tokenized assets and digitized securities. And, we purposely try to avoid the word STO awards because STO, too many people, is very focused on fundraising. But, this award is not an award to those who raise the most money. It is an award for new asset classes, tokenized assets, or digitized securities. And, the reason we use two terms is that we think they are pretty different actually. Not all kinds of tokenized assets are securities. However, digital securities are, of course, more straightforward. This is now actually proven by the recent momentum of NFT.
When you think about NFTs, a lot of them can arguably say they are not securities. They are representing some kind of assets being tokenized.
Yes, but probably not all of them…
SL: Not all of them. Yeah. We can talk more about that; it is a whole topic, it’s very interesting. But yeah, so that’s the background. We started in Hong Kong, but we have worked together with many partners around the world. So, this is an international award. If you look at our winners from last year, I think maybe only one company came from Hong Kong, and then all the nine other winners came from different parts of the world.
What do you want to achieve with the TADS Awards?
SL: We have three main goals. First, of course, we want to recognize people who are taking a risk by being first movers. We want to thank them for their contribution.
Secondly, we want to bring together the whole industry from different countries, different solution providers along the…
