Report: Overstock CEO claims company looking into being listed on "a block chain kind of a stock exchange."

Giving the keynote speech today at the Bitcoin2014 conference in the Netherlands, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne announced that his company was looking into the possibility of dual-listing its stock on “a block chain kind of a stock exchange” in addition to the NASDAQ. Should Overstock follow up on this plan, the company would become the highest profile listing in the notoriously unstable world of bitcoin-backed stocks.

Byrne was asked about the idea during the question and answer session following his presentation. According to CoinDesk, Byrne was careful in his phrasing of the idea, adding: “I would already be interested in issuing a bond or something, so we could be the first to list this sort of security.”

According to CoinDesk, Byrne’s company is already in the early stages of creating a legal structure for a dual listing. Currently, Overstock (OSTK) is listed on NASDAQ with a market cap of roughly $380 million. An additional listing, even on a virtual exchange, could quickly become a legal nightmare, particularly given bitcoin’s murky legal status and the general reluctance by the Securities and Exchange Commission to make any concrete rulings on virtual currencies.

Even with those issues, Byrne claimed that the company had several viable options for moving into the bitcoin-backed securities realm.

We could either issue securities in bitcoin and translate those and collect funds in dollars. I am less interested in that than just taking it and listing it and maybe even creating a new security and issuing it through such an exchange. Or we could take our security, which is already publicly registered and publicly traded and just get it dual listed on somebody’s technology.”

The CoinDesk report claims that a definitive plan for the Overstock listing could become public in a matter of months.