Overstock is looking to change things on Wall Street

In an article on Wired.com it seems that Overstock is straying from their core business and working on a side project that hopes to democratize Wall Street. Building on top of the existing Bitcoin protocol. If the project is successful there is a plan to spin the business off as a separate company.

Overstock has certainly been one of the ecommerce companies that has been at the forefront of exploring opportunities with Bitcoin. It will be interesting to see how this project moves going forward, Wall Street may be resistant to this kind of change.

From the article:

Overstock.com is building software, based on the bitcoin digital currency, that could allow the big-name etailer to issue corporate stock over the internet, sidestepping traditional stock exchanges such as the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.

The Salt Lake City-based company recently hired two of the developers behind CounterParty—an online project that helps individuals and businesses build all sorts of financial services atop the worldwide network of machines that drive bitcoin—and according to Overstock founder and CEO Patrick Byrne, these coders will help build “cryptosecurity” software that any company could potentially use to issue financial securities over the net. Mirroring bitcoin—known as a “crytocurrency”—these securities would be controlled by cryptographic algorithms running across computers spread across the globe, not by a central stock exchange.

Read the full story on Wired