Why I started liminal.market

I started liminal.market because I wanted to put a pension fund on chain, but it wasn´t possible because one fundamental part was missing

In Iceland, we have a pretty good pension system (or at least that is what we are told). For the private sector, it is private pension funds, so at least the government isn’t spending it.

Government employees have their pension with the government, and the government spends it. In 2012 they owed 400 billion ISK($2.8 billion). I have no clue what it is today, but I bet it’s much more. The solution will be to print the money, making everybody pay with inflation.

For the private sector, we have few pension funds to select from, this is a good thing. Not having a single source of failure. But there is a huge cost in this system, it costs 25 billion ISK ($160 million) each year to run it. This is for some 300 thousand people or so.

We are only about 350 thousand here in Iceland. I think we can do this cheaper with blockchain and make it transparent, giving more trust and a much better yield on our pension.

So I started investigating. I quickly realized that this was not possible since pension funds can only invest in specific assets, defined by law and crypto is not on that list and you cannot buy securities on chain.

I thought, I’m a programmer, let me build tokenized securities on chain.

This then enables fully transparent funds on chain, and owning securities, fully legal.

That is why I build a liminal.market, to give the people more safety and, to give the people more safety and better yield on our pension.

12% lower pension

How much different is the yield on the pension? According to Björn Z. Ásgrímsson, a specialist at the Icelandic central bank, if the cost goes from 0.25% to 1%, it lowers your pension by 12% over 40 years of savings. That is huge, for such, a seemingly small change.

By using blockchain, that cost should be even lower than 0.25%.

First, we need tokenized securities on chain. Best to just build it.