Pricing Illiquid Assets is Difficult and Expensive
Currently data oracles do not provide regular updated pricing for private companies. In fact, the only way to price an illiquid asset is through an expensive and slow valuation process. This limits the pricing to only very highly valued assets.
Today ⟶
An intransparent market dominated by brokers and investors.
For example, even an existing investor in SpaceX won’t know the latest valuation and transaction price.
Current price discovery is impossible – brokers and investors have no incentive to disclose latest price of private companies.
Lithium is the FIRST protocol to regularly price illiquid assets
Lithium can do this quickly and inexpensively, enabling price discovery for illiquid assets, just like stocks
Lithium’s proprietary consensus mechanism sets the foundation for real assets x DeFi
Lithium Protocol
Case Studies
Case Study 1: Pricing a pre-IPO company
Say a Wisdom Seeker wants to know what a pre-IPO company might price on IPO. They pose this question to Lithium Finance and post a bounty, say $100 in Lithium Tokens.
Wisdom Nodes (Analysts, investors, others) provide answers and stake their answer to provide a confidence rating in their results.
Answers are aggregated and a subset of answers are selected randomly by the protocol to create the final answer. Once the final answer is revealed, the source is also visible to enable verification of valid answers. Final scores are calculated using the DMI-Mechanism algorithms.
Final answer is available on a regular basis, enabling frequent pricing of an illiquid asset.
(OPTIONAL IN THE CASE OF IPO)
Once the ground truth is revealed (pricing of IPO, for example) the rewards are paid out to those who were closest, and the reputations of the Wisdom Nodes (experts/ oracles) are updated.
Case Study 2: Finding Daily pricing of a private company
A Wisdom Seeker wants to know what the price per share of a private company is today, they pose this question to Lithium Finance along with a bounty, say $100 in Lithium Tokens along with a daily time limit.
Wisdom Nodes (Analysts, investors, others) provide answers and stake their answer to provide a confidence rating in their results.
Aggregated answers are pulled together and a subset of answers are selected blindly and randomly by the protocol. Scores and reputations are updated and final prices are shown daily.
Our Founders
David Lighton
Co-founder
David Lighton is an entrepreneur passionate about inclusive financial innovation, known most recently for his work as Founder and CEO of SendFriend, a fintech startup using the blockchain to create faster, less expensive, and more inclusive cross-border payments, and it’s backed by leading venture capital investors such as Techstars, Ripple, and Barclays.
David also is a Fellow at Yale University’s Global Justice Program. Previously, he served as World Bank Staff on the Haiti desk, following the devastating 2010 earthquake.
David holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Sloan School of Management, where he was a Mastercard Foundation Fellow. He also holds M.A. and B.A. degrees with honors from the Johns Hopkins University in International Economics and International Relations. He is a member of Johns Hopkins’ Junior Board.
Steve Derezinski
Co-founder
Steve Derezinski is a Senior Executive and MIT Blockchain Engineer & MBA (SB in mechanical engineering and MBA from MIT), who has launched 80+ startups that have cumulatively raised over $250M to date. Steve also founded and served as an MD at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he helped to incubate early-stage startups with strong commercial potential.
He is also a senior instructor at MIT and Babson and responsible for developing the Blockchain Ventures course and the MIT Future Commerce curriculum.
Before starting Lithium, Steve served as a consultant in multiple major corporations on blockchain strategy. He is also an expert reviewer for a Federal Agency’s Blockchain Funding and a subject matter expert for large philanthropic foundations in the US and the EU.
Our Team
Steven Ciraolo
Head of Blockchain
Steven Ciraolo has been working as a software developer for over a decade. In the past four years of experience as a full-stack blockchain developer, Ciraolo played a crucial role in many DeFi projects and took projects from the ideation phase to implementation, focusing on overcoming the unique usability challenges.
He’s also the primary developer and owner of the Ministry of Decentralization Project focusing on decentralized education systems. He also served as the Full Stack Developer at TokenSoft and worked with Lithium through the RaidGuild — a group of highly talented Blockchain developers with significant project experience.
Abhishek Ray
Senior Blockchain Developer
Abhishek Ray
Is an experienced blockchain and smart contract developer. He takes pride in providing the best securable and decentralized product by product-driven solutions.
As a Senior Blockchain Developer at Lithium, his goals include making the protocol securable and decentralized. In addition to his primary duties, Abhishek had been indulging in Layer-2 (rollup) work.
Investors
