The JOBS Act, formally called Jumpstart Our Business Startups, changed the business landscape in the USA during the Obama administration. Now, David Weild IV, one of the people who inspired it through his research into the destructive nature of equity markets, is calling for a ‘Jobs Act 2.0’ to have blockchain at its core, according to an interview with Michael de Castillo, published on Coindesk.
Weild, who is head of investment banking firm Weild and Co. Holdings, says that although he is known to many as ‘The Father of the Jobs Act’, there are a number of things about it that he would change if he had actually written it. As a result, he has been searching for solutions since the legislation passed in 2012 that was intended to help small businesses find funding by easing securities regulations.
His research brought him to the blockchain, which he has steadily become more excited by, especially the opportunity to offer an alternative solution to IPOs. In his 2010 research paper that led to the government putting the Jobs Act in place, he “blamed the drop in IPOs largely on a lack of support for aftermarket business services that help make going public profitable for the post-trade world at large.” As he said in his interview with Castillo: “These small-cap offerings require intermediaries that are adequately compensated to find the other side of the trade, and when you deprive that marketplace of the oxygen that’s required to sustain it, you end up with an erosion of the entire ecosystem of support providers.”
Weild’s now believes that tokenised securities on the blockchain will solve that problem and possibly remove the need for any intermediaries, i.e. trusted banks, in the future. He accepts that the process of making ICOs a securities compliant process will take time, but if he is right, and it seems a probable move, then he will finally realise his original goal for the Jobs Act, and we will have Jobs Act 2.0 on the blockchain.