Another week, another four more additions to RealWeb3db.com. They are:
EstateX is an EU-focused retail investing platform
Lilo aims to build a portfolio of luxury properties worldwide that member-owners can visit
Crown Ribbon provides fractionalized ownership of racehorses đ
Manor DAO aims to purchase a mansion in Spain for owner-members of Poolsuite
Top Story: RWA.xyz Launches
RWA.xyz flashed on my radar about a month ago. On Tuesday I spoke with co-founder Adam Lawrence. They originally started the 2022 with the idea of building a Solana-based savings platform for DAOs, similar to Yearn. After several months of prototyping and customer development they concluded that the market wasnât mature enough to address, so they started looking at credit protocols like Goldfinch and Centrifuge. To quote Adam:
In tackling and entering the space, we saw that there was a massive data gap for investors for protocols themselves. For every single stakeholder there's a big lack of information regarding the standardization of protocol terms, or the deal terms across the protocols. All the terminology is different. The UI is often wrong with such features, numbers, the API's are not correct, and there's lots of issues like that. And so I think, just like how you would use real estate software that does all that heavy data lifting for you, or Bloomberg to use the most common sort of analogy â we think that there's going to be a need for the same kind of product or service for these new kind of real world like assets.
Bloomberg is an apt analogy. Over the last several decades, public credit and equity markets have developed standards for how data is formatted and transmitted. In turn, traders, economists, reporters and others have created dashboards to help them understand that data and use it to inform investing strategies and create economic forecasts.
As large as those data sets are, they are tiny compared to the overall economy. There are roughly 6,000 companies listed on the New York and NASDAQ exchanges. In the real estate sector there are mortgage backed securities and REITs only represent a very small fraction of all real estate assets. Getting data on an individual property is only possible if you convince the owner to share it with you (usually while negotiating a sale) and even then the provided data is not always accurate.
Moving assets on chain changes the game in terms of analysis and the buy-sell process. Of course, most property owners view that data as none of your business. Nonetheless, there is a very powerful incentive to âopen the books,â so to speak, and itâs that public assets trade at a premium. Why? Because there are many, many, many more potential buyers who can evaluate an and make offers on an asset at arms length. That is, they donât have to track down the owner and convince them to share their financials.
Real estate ownership skews much older than todayâs tech whiz kids, so they are not as comfortable with concepts like the blockchain and especially sharing financial information publicly. Nevertheless, practically everyone under 40 is comfortable with sharing what some might say is TMI online, so itâs not hard to imagine real estate ownership making its way there too.
Right now the tools for doing that are extremely clunky, and uncertainty around securities regulations, DAOs and crypto in general mean itâs slow going at the moment.
Despite all that, Iâm a believer in the technology fundamentals, and the democratization of investing that has been going on since 1975 (when commission fees were deregulated) shows now signs of stopping. So I remain long term bullish on the idea of there eventually being millions of real world assets on chain, and companies like RWA.xyz are headed in the right direction.
đ More News in Brief
HiFi partners with Crown Ribbon to tokenize ownership of race horses
CougarDAO Purchases Farmland
đšâđŸ We've gone and done it! CougarDAO LLC has purchased a farm
8 members of the member managed LLC have come together to purchase an income generating property managed by web3 tools.
The LLC/DAO is will be managed by COUG tokens. The tokens, which are non-transferrable, represent the ownership interest in the LLC. The LLC owns the property.
(Disclosure: I am a member of CougarDAO.)
Read the whole post on LinkedIn
Lofty Issues NFTs to Early Members
I am one, and you can see my NFT here. Below is the email they sent to owners (I am one). The last line in bold seems to indicate that the NFT is revoked if you sell your tokens, so this is both a marker of status and a loyalty incentive.
Lofty NFTs are live!
Hello there,
Today we are excited to give Lofty VIPs and early adopters the limited edition NFTs earned from our VIP program earlier this year. If you missed out, donât worry, stay tuned đ
These NFTs are issued to your Lofty Wallet, and viewable by following the instructions below. In the future we will make it easy to view your NFTs directly in Loftyâs platform.
If you are a Lofty early adopter NFT holder, your NFT is yours forever. The early adopter NFTs reflect Loftyâs mission of democratizing real estate investing for all, regardless of where you live, how much money you have, or what your profession is.
If you are Lofty VIP, you can remain a Lofty VIP and keep your badge by continuously holding at least 10 property tokens.
đ Good Reads
Defining Digital Securities: A How-To Guide
Milkroad Special Edition: Real Estate on the Blockchain
Thatâs it for this week. Thanks for reading! I love hearing from readers, so please reply if you have questions, comments or kudos.