Credit risk: Investors take a credit risk on the obligations of the issuer. Thus issuer’s insolvency may result in the partial or total loss of the invested amount. The market value of the product can decrease significantly below its nominal value as a result of issuer’s creditworthiness.
Prior to investing in the product, investors should seek independent financial, tax, accounting and legal advice.
Risk relating to unfavourable market conditions: The fluctuations in the marked-to-market value of certain products may require the investor to make provisions or resell the products in whole or in part before maturity, in order to enable the investor to comply with its contractual or regulatory obligations. As a consequence, the investor may have to liquidate these products under unfavourable market conditions, which may result in the partial or total loss of the invested amount. This risk will be even higher if these products include leverage.
Liquidity risk: This product entails a materially relevant liquidity risk. Certain exceptional market circumstances may have a negative effect on the liquidity of the product. The investor may not be able to sell the product easily or may have to sell it at a price that significantly impacts how much he gets back. This may entail a partial or total loss of the invested amount.
General selling restrictions: It is each investor’s responsibility to ascertain that it is authorized to subscribe for, or invest into, or to on-sell this product.
RISKS RELATING TO THE USE OF A DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TECHNOLOGY TO ISSUE, REGISTER AND TRANSFER THE FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT
Transfers of financial instruments will occur exclusively through the distributed ledger technology, except if an extraordinary event occurs and exclusively at the discretion of the issuer of the financial instruments without investors approval.
Distributed ledger technology is a nascent and rapidly changing technology and as a result the new capabilities are not fully proven in use and remain largely untested in financial markets. The development and continuity of distributed ledger networks is therefore subject to a high degree of uncertainty.
Insufficient testing of the distributed ledger technology may cause the integrated software to malfunction or function incorrectly. Any error or unexpected functionality may cause a loss of confidence in the distributed ledger technology and result in a decline in value of the financial instruments and substantial losses to investors.
A disruption of the settlement transaction repository could temporarily disrupt the reconciliation by the registrar between the public address and the identity of the holders of the financial instruments, which could impact the liquidity or the value of the product and expose the investor to a total loss risk.
The open-source nature of the distributed ledger technology and the smart contracts software implies that they may be subject to specific malicious cyber-attacks or may contain exploitable flaws, which may result in security breaches, which may result in a loss of trust in the security and operation of the distributed ledger technology, in a decline in user activity and a consequent reduction of liquidity which could have a negative impact on the financial instruments.
The malfunction, unintended function, coding or human error or unexpected functioning of the smart contracts to register the financial instruments on the distributed ledger technology may have adverse consequences on the settlement, the registration and the transfer of the financial instruments.
The distributed ledger technology network may present software vulnerabilities, be overtaken by advances in cryptography or in computing power or experience a fork, which may have adverse consequences on the registration of the financial instruments on the distributed ledger technology.
The rewards and transaction fees may be insufficiently high to incentivize transaction validators, causing a reduction of the overall security level of the distributed ledger technology, which could have a materially adverse effect on the registration, the transfers, the liquidity or the value of the products.