Overstock Hires CounterParty Build Decentralized Stock Exchange

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Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said previously he had some interesting announcements to share when it comes to bitcoin and his company, and today, Byrne certainly did make an announcement at a bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

The news? Overstock.com has hired two CounterParty developers to code up put together an decentralized stock exchange of sorts that will allow companies — including Overstock — to issue financial securities securely over the web, atop the CounterParty platform (which works over the bitcoin block chain). In essence, bypassing today’s centralized stock exchanges.

The project is code-named “Medici,” and Overstock plans to spin the project off into its own company in effort to continue the software’s development.

He tells Wired:

[blockquote style=”2″]There is an opportunity to recreate the financial world as we know it in the parallel universe that is the blockchain.[/blockquote]

After Medici is built (which may take several months), Patrick Byrne plans to bring the platform to regulators for approval. And that won’t be easy, so Overstock.com has enlisted the legal minds at the Perkins Coie law firm to assist in the endeavor.

Medici will, in theory, allow start-ups and established businesses alike to more easily make their their companies public. In addition, the platform will charge approximately twenty percent less than what today’s services charge.

Byrne has committed about five-to-ten percent of company cash flow (which is said to be in the single-digit million) to put Medici together. Byrne envisions something that could be worth more than Overstock itself — a multi-billion dollar company.

Not surprisingly, the price of the CounterParty altcoin (XCP), which is the currency used natively on the CounterParty platform, has soared over fifty percent today.