The New York based firm Roche Freedman LLP is creating Initial Litigation Offerings. These are crypto tokens that represent a share of the outcome of a lawsuit. The tokens are being issued on the Avalanche blockchain.
Now the concept of litigation financing isn’t new. Years ago, Yieldstreet, the alternative investments service featured cases that you could finance in return for a chance to share in the outcome, should it be favourable. Take this offering on their site, for example:
LexShares runs litigation financing as traditional closed-ended funds. They are on their second fund, a USD 100mn dollar one.
In fact, in its press release, Ava Labs, the company that runs the Avalanche blockchain on which the tokens will be issued (and also a Roche Freedman client), highlighted LexShares, “which has generated a median annualised return after fees and expenses of 52% since it began investing in 2014”
According to the article,
While there are other litigation investment platforms this will be the first to turn the asset into a digital asset (as far as we know)… The ILOs will be digital assets and apparently, the tokens will be tradable on Ryval.market” which describes itself as the “stock market of litigation financing.”
The first case that is to be tokenized is
Apothio LLC v. Kern County, State of California for the allegedly unlawful destruction of 500 acres of hemp crops worth approximately $1 billion… expected to take place in Q1 of 2021.