Please describe your proposed solution.
- In this day and age, it is not enough for individuals to have a job and be able to become financially secure. The vast number of people who choose that route are having to work longer and longer past retirement age. I believe that commercial real estate is a vehicle to help people secure financial sovereignty. The problem is that the normal person will fiind it very difficult to invest and find trusted intermediataries to facilitate these transactions. Over the next decade, blockchain technology will allow for more and more portions of the process to be taken care of on trustless systems. SToR Token is the low hanging fruit to raise capital to fund projects on a trustless system. Bring thousands of entrepreneurs or would be entrepreneurs into the ecosystem is both good for the SToR and Cardano. This is also good for the onboarding person to educate them on the asset class and help them on their journey to financial stability.
- We have taken the approach of multiple other Web 3.0 platforms that have been successful and used this as a template for the way we will utilize smart contracts to provide security for the tokens locked on the platform. This system has proven to be simple yet affective way to tokenize self storage facilties and provide a path to fractional ownership of these facilities.
- We have three pillars of participates that will benefit from the platform. First, the sponors of the storage facilities that are being funded is the first group. These are the people that need the funding and they can also be investors in other projects. The second group of people are cyptocurrency enthusiasts that have had profits through their investments and are looking to diversify their portfolio into a hard asset backed investment. These are people that are more familiar with the cryptocurrency market and less with the commercial real estate world. The third group are people that are interested in investing in commercial real estate but may not be familiar with the asset class or cryptocurrency investing
- We are implementing the project in phases. The first phase is to develop the Web 3.0 platform for the speculating investor to provide capital for the development of the phase 2 portion of the platform. This portion should be up and running in November of this year. It will be at least a year after phase 1 is launched to the launch of phase 2. The phase 2 portion is where the facilities will be listed and funded. A subsection of phase 2 that will be implemented is the reward system for SToR powered facilities to help create incentives for the patrons of these facilities to stay loyal to the ecosystem.
- The outputs for the system will be the capital needed for the sponors to develop or acquire self storage facilities and the yield provided to the investors through tokens. The other outputs will be the tokens provided to patrons of the SToR powered facilities. The inputs to the system would be the payments from the sponors that pay back the capital with interest.
- The result of this project will be an edge in the market place for the sponsors of these facilities. Now it is not uncommon for a 30 day due diligence and 60 days to close the loan. Our goal is to decrease the time to closing to be 2 weeks of due diligence and 2 weeks to close the loan. This would be on the timeframe of a team purchasing with all cash. This would allow the SToR powered sponsor to be able to offer a lower price due to the ease of closing for both the buyer and seller.
- The unique aspects of this project is that the other commercial real estate projects that I have seen are that they are not using a token that fluctuates with the market demand. These projects are only trying to provide transparency to the investor and hash the documents on the blockchain. This is essentially the same way to do business as the previous century. They do not take advangtage of the appeciation of the token. The other advantage that we have as opposed to cryptocurrencies are that with this transparency, a potential investor can do the valuation of the company just like a company in that is public and on the stock market.
- Bringing hundreds of people to the Cardano through the SToR token ecosystem will benefit Cardano immensely. If we are successful with the platform we hope to bring every asset class to Cardano and bring thousands of people to the platform. If we can make this platform secure then that will bring confidence to many more people to come to Cardano as well. This could include commercial real estate investors, private equity groups, venture capital, ect.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
- DEFI and tokenization is the catagory that we are entering in the F9: Developer Ecosystem catagory
- This application is for funding for the our milestone 2: website development and refinement, Wallet Creation, Interface, and smart contract. This is the stage that we are in now. To complete this portion of the project we are asking for $25,000
- The funds from this application would be used to develop the web 3.0 website and the smart contract to lock the tokens in a staking mechanism to produce a yield for the investor
- Our cryptographer will use his expertise to develop the smart contract for the staking and the ability to link the website with the commercailly available hot wallets
- If we are able to get funding for this portion of the project we would be able to use our bootstrap funds to do more marketing and get more interest in the platform.
- The development of this social token and website are integral to provide a separate, independent economy that supports digital ownership of self-storage facilities
- This ecosystem will provide education to people interested in financial sovereignty in the self-storage asset class. We are actively working on how to incoorperate the education portion into the website
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
There are many risks we will have to address as we go through the steps of this project.
1.) The biggest risk that we will have to be vigilant about is the risk of the platform being hacked. We have made plans from the beginning of the project to address this issue. The first is developing the platform on the Cardano which has the best infrastructure. The next was to hire the best developers to hopefully write code that is secure. The next plan to help with this aspect is to have an audit of the code.
2.) The 2nd biggest risk is to address the risk of regualtion and the compliance with the SEC. There are hundreds if not thousands of real estate blockchain projects being developed right now. We have a group called reBLOCK that is trying to answer the question about how to be compliant and if these assets will be considered a security. Once we move on to phase 2, we will seek out the attorneys in this group to confirm that we are compliant and go through any regulatory hurtles that are necessary including sercurity filing, know your customer, and anti-money laudering rules. We also have compliance issues for foriegn investors. We have a team in the British Virgin Islands that is going to help with this aspect of the project. We will also need to subscribed to the software Investnext so that we will be able to comply with tax laws and generate K1's for the investor to be able to take depreciation of the facilities and protect their returns.
3.) The 3rd biggest risk is that we do not create enough excitement in the self-storage community to bring people into the ecosystem. This would make the DAO unsustainable. We have a mastermind of approximately 100 of the top self-storage sponors in the country. There are enough deals in that room alone to keep the platform running for the foreseeable future. I am going to pitch them at our next meeting to hopefully gain users and interest in the platform. We are actively developing our marketing stategy to get the word out and also gain users.
4.) The 4th biggest risk is that during a bull market the users take out there coins from the platform to buy more speculative coins that may appreciate faster. We will have to figure out how to keep adequate liquidity to take care of functions of the platform. We have a large treasury to combat the liquidity issue. We will need to continuously try to keep the excitement up for the platform to also combat the liquidity issue as well.