Introduction and Background

Since the introduction of GoKey in 2021, we’ve done things a little differently.

Over the last year, GoKey was the first project in the Cardano ecosystem to focus on addressing the challenges associated with purchasing owner-occupied real estate in the United States, and the first to introduce the concept of a project token having a monetary policy aligned with the value of U.S. property markets. More recently, GoKey minted the first real estate NFT proof-of-concept on the Cardano blockchain.

As GoKey has continued to evolve, and as our community has grown, we have heard a growing number of requests for opportunities to utilize the GoKey platform to create unique real estate investment opportunities for the community. Initially, we dismissed the idea because we were focused primarily on single-family, owner-occupied property, and also due to the potential risk of crossing into the territory of regulated securities. But after many long conversations, much research, and discovery of new tooling and partnerships within the Cardano ecosystem, we soon reached the conclusion that a DAO (a Decentralized Autonomous Organization) could be a workable structure to allow our community members to propose innovative property investment models and treasury expenditures that advance GoKey’s mission, and to then collectively vote and execute on the proposals over time.

Around this same time, we were fortunate to learn of Clarity Protocol’s Project Catalyst funded efforts to develop no-code DAO tooling for Cardano, along with well known and highly respected partners at MLabs and Liqwid. The decision to team up with the Clarity team was a no-brainer, and with a quick virtual handshake, we were moving forward.

With that, the idea of GoKey DAO was born, and soon thereafter it took the legal structure of GoKey DAO LLC in Wyoming, USA.

Become an Explorer

With the core legal infrastructure now in place, and with preliminary ideas for how best to move the DAO forward, the time has come to open up participation in GoKey DAO to our community and beyond. This is an exciting time to have a role in creating the first real estate venture DAO on Cardano!

With Clarity Protocol’s on-chain DAO governance and treasury management tooling under continued development until Q4 2022, we have a fantastic opportunity to create what is essentially an off-chain DAO, made up of founding members who will be able to begin working together to establish the structure of the future on-chain DAO. We refer to this early founding group as the “Explorers” because of the exploratory nature of the work this group will be doing to discover the boundaries of what is possible with a real estate venture DAO on Cardano.

We believe GoKey DAO will be able to do things on top of Cardano that are simply not possible on any other blockchain. And we want you to join us on this journey.

So, what should a GoKey DAO Explorer expect to be doing? There is a lot to be done to build the foundation for the future, of course. But the efforts will be shared amongst many DAO members, and will be broken up into working groups to address tasks such as the following:

• Establishing DAO vision and goals
• Community building
• Governance and proposal structures
• Improving DAO decentralization
• Technical and smart contract development
• Legal, financial and tax structures
• Establishing cyber security procedures
• Treasury management, tokenomics and staking strategies
• Real estate acquisition criteria and leverage strategies
• Real estate operations and asset management
• Development of token staking strategies
• Determining future membership requirements
• Bounty system design
• Evaluate and pursue partnership opportunities
• Content creation and distribution
• Grant/launchpad/philanthropic initiative design
• Establishing Roadmap
• General advisory and administration
• And more…

How to Join as an Explorer

Currently, anyone is welcome to join GoKey DAO as an Explorer. Explorers must have a sincere interest in moving this concept forward, and a willingness to contribute time and energy in a meaningful way. Also, because real estate acquisition and management activities are capital intensive, we owe it to each other to know that each of us has at least a minimal amount of “skin in the game.” With that in mind, a small minimum financial commitment is required.

To join in the Explorer phase, you must control a wallet that verifiably meets either of the following requirements:

• holds 100,000+ GOKEY tokens, or
• holds 5,000+ ADA delegated to the GOKEY stake pool

Currently, there are approximately 30–40 wallets that meet this threshold, but we are prepared to welcome many more — up to around 100.

If you are interested in joining as an Explorer and meet the above requirements, here are the next steps:

1. Join GoKey’s Discord server at https://discord.gg/h56mzccBGB.
2. Enter “/verify” in any comment field that will accept the command. This will open a small dialogue box (courtesy of HAZELnet Discord bot for Cardano).
3. Enter your Cardano wallet address or ADAhandle where prompted.
4. You will then be prompted to send a very specific amount of ADA from the wallet to the same wallet. Send the amount as directed.
5. Once the transaction is complete, the wallet will be verified.
6. Be patient. This step can sometimes take up to a couple of hours.
7. Once verified, you will receive the Discord role “DAO Explorers” and will be able to see the “GOKEY DAO” category and the associated private channels in the server navigation on the left side of the screen.
8. Please jump in with a quick introduction and join the discussion.
9. Welcome to the first real estate venture DAO on Cardano!

If you need to purchase $GOKEY tokens to reach the minimum holding requirement, we suggest purchasing on MuesliSwap to minimize slippage and for (usually) the best pricing. If you need to delegate your wallet to GoKey, you can stake directly from our easy to use dashboard at staking.gokey.network!

Conclusion

We really appreciate your interest in joining us on this incredible journey. We couldn’t be more excited to explore all the possibilities of this fascinating space along side you. Please feel free to reach out any time with any questions you may have. We are going to do some truly innovative things together. Much more to come in days ahead!

Introduction

GoKey is happy to announce the details of our recently launched ISPO. Although our ISPO has been live for only a few weeks, we have already welcomed delegation of over 1 million ADA from over 100 delegators! We hope you will join us for this unique opportunity to begin your accumulation of GoKey’s governance and utility tokens without selling or locking up your ADA!

To make staking with GoKey as simple as possible, we have a fresh new dashboard interface to allow our delegators to easily connect Cardano wallets, delegate, calculate rewards, and claim staking rewards — all from the GoKey website.

Before we get into the details, we would like to share why we are using the ISPO model, and our planned efforts to proactively offer transparency measures to our delegators and the broader community.

Why ISPO?

Cardano’s unique Proof of Stake consensus mechanism offers an incredibly unique fundraising option for projects building on the advanced blockchain protocol. The Initial Stake Pool Offering, or ISPO, was first pioneered in 2021, and has since been utilized by a growing number of up-and-coming projects.

The ISPO model is made possible by stake pool delegators electing to forgo all or part of the ADA staking rewards they would normally receive, and instead, delegators receive a predetermined quantity of project tokens per ADA staked each epoch. This allows the project to collect the ADA that would have otherwise been distributed to the delegators, providing critical funding for project development and growth. It also allows delegators to accumulate tokens associated with early-stage projects they like and want to support, without having to sell, lock-up, or even relinquish custody of their ADA. This is a low-risk opportunity for delegators, although there could be potential opportunity costs if the price performance of project token lags behind the price performance of ADA.

It has always been important to us to distribute GoKey governance and utility tokens to our users and the community in the fairest, most publicly accessible methods possible. Having considered several alternatives, including angel and venture capital, public and private sales, and IDOs (Initial DEX Offerings), we believe that the ISPO model, along with sales through decentralized exchanges, fits best with our values and efforts to promote decentralization.

Transparency and Accountability

The open and accessible nature of the crypto space creates a relatively low barrier to entry — for better and for worse. This allows almost anyone to share their ideas with the world and to partner with like minded people across the globe to develop them, offering entirely new classes of products and services to new users. One downside is that there are also occasional bad actors who are able to hide behind anonymity and the absence of enforceable rules and regulations to extract value from the community — often with zero accountability.

In GoKey’s brief history, we have made clear our core values, including our belief in transparency and accountability for our team, partners and platform participants. These aren’t just words published in marketing materials. These are values that we strive to live everyday. Unlike some crypto projects out there, we don’t view the funds that we are working to raise as a blank check. We are taking voluntary, proactive measures to offer a transparent view into the funds raised, how they are securely held, and how they are invested to grow the project. We will also be sharing project goals, milestones and performance metrics as GoKey grows. Watch for more details on this soon!

In general, the proceeds raised in this ISPO will be used to fund typical startup operating expenses, including technical development, team growth, marketing, and professional services such as extensive legal work and accounting. As the stake pool and ISPO proceeds grow, we will offer our delegators a transparent view of how the funds are invested to fuel GoKey’s development.

ISPO Staking Rewards & Bonus Details

1. The GoKey ISPO began at Epoch 342.

2. ISPO is a 99% margin pool, meaning delegators will forgo all typical ADA rewards and receive GOKEY governance and utility token rewards instead.

3. Base token rewards are 0.15 GOKEY tokens per ADA staked per epoch. At today’s exchange rates, this works out to between approximately 7% and 10% APR, not including Pre-ISPO or ISPO loyalty bonus multipliers.

4. Pre-ISPO delegates earned a 0.1x multiplier per epoch, for a total of 2x maximum multiplier if delegated to all 10 Pre-ISPO epochs.

5. Base ISPO delegates earn a 0.01x multiplier per each epoch staked to GOKEY Stake Pool.

6. 1 Billion GOKEY tokens are allocated for this ISPO, approximately 22% of total maximum supply.

7. ISPO will end upon all allocated ISPO token rewards being rewarded.

8. ISPO rewards will be released according to a vesting schedule at the conclusion of the ISPO to reduce the possibility of large quantities of tokens coming onto the open market at the same time, as this could potentially have an affect on market prices and the value of our users’ holdings.

9. GOKEY token rewards distribution will be accomplished via a 3rd party distribution platform or via faucet on our website.

10. Delegates may stake to GOKEY pool directly from our website at https://staking.gokey.network, or from most leading Cardano wallets.

11. Thank you for your support of GoKey in these early days!

About GoKey

GoKey believes that property ownership is important for individuals, families and communities, and should be accessible to anyone who wants it.

GoKey uses NFTs to tokenize real property rights, is forming a DAO for our community to collaboratively own and manage real estate, and is developing a novel approach for peer-to-peer property financing and transactions.

GoKey is also designing a unique, deflationary governance, payment and utility token to track, exchange and store real estate value, that will serve the growing GoKey ecosystem.

Learn more at https://gokey.network

At the moment, when we’re sitting with ADA comfortably below US$0.50, it might seem like an absurd notion to even consider Cardano potentially reaching $100, let alone $200 per coin. Not even the most insane moonboy predictions are considering this as a remote possibility.

But today we’ll be looking at crypto from a different angle. Instead of wondering what value the industry can create, we’ll instead look at what worth it can integrate.

Crypto is far more than abstract tokens trading based on Adam Smith knows what logic. It’s a nascent ecosystem that can absorb everything. When you think about layer 1 crypto, don’t think tech startup, think value transfer network, like the internet of money.

Today we will be exploring realistic and sustainable ways where Cardano could feasibly become a $10 trillion asset by itself.

The Scope of Crypto

When you live and breathe crypto, it’s easy to think that it’s only a matter of time before there’s mass adoption. After all, the industry is HUGE, isn’t it?

Not exactly!

Crypto as a whole is now under $1 trillion. This sounds like a respectable number until you start comparing it to other industries.

For instance, research by American online real-estate marketplace Zillow suggests that the aggregate residential real estate market value in the US is $43.4 trillion. Meaning that crypto has to grow 40x before it’s even in the same league as the value of private homeownership in the US.

As respectable as the returns have been in the cryptocurrency sector, it has a long way to go before it can play in the big leagues. Furthermore, if it is to retain these valuations, it needs to focus on creating and locking in real value, instead of speculative mania.

This is why Cardano is so unique in the grand scheme of things. This blockchain puts Real Finance (RealFi) at the forefront. It intends to be a bridge between RealFi and Decentralized Finance (DeFi), which are on-chain financial services reliant on smart contracts instead of appointed intermediaries and it allows participants to operate peer to peer.

Because of this, Cardano has its fingers in many pies and seeks partnerships with both governments and corporations to create data management infrastructure. So its scope will be everything from identity management, to real-world asset tokenization, along with DeFi.

Real-world asset tokenization is the most interesting for rapid appreciation though, as it merely incorporates already existing assets and allows them to benefit from the network effects of the Cardano ecosystem.

This will be particularly interesting for real estate tokenization.

The Ten Trillion Dollar Problem

Living in the developed world gives people a false sense of how easy things are.

The vast majority of people live in environments where their property rights are not guaranteed. Economist Hernando de Soto estimates that up to 5.3 billion people (67% of the world population) don’t have the ability to prove they legally own the property that they own.

This situation effectively locks the vast majority of people from being able to use the full rights that their property should enable them. For example, they can’t legally rent it out to someone, sell it, inherit it, or use it as collateral in a financial transaction.

Put simply, for financial purposes, this capital does not exist, it’s dead (or at most utilized in the grey economy). De Soto continues to estimate that merely acknowledging people’s existing ownership over the assets already under their control, would effectively create $9.3 trillion.

For reference, the world GDP for 2020 was $84.71 trillion; meaning that simply acknowledging these assets would improve world GDP by 11%.

It bears saying though that this is also not increasingly a purely “third world” problem either. In Ukraine, for instance, amidst the fighting property registries might be hit as collateral damage.

After all, they’re government-owned property that can very easily be targeted.

So, when Ukrainians flee for their lives and then possibly come back years later to pick up their life, they might have no means of proving that they own certain property. As such, if someone were to move in while they’re away, the squatter would have as much of a legal claim over their property, if not more so.

Cardano’s Opportunity

With its emphasis on real finance, and the blockchain’s immutability, unbiasedness and decentralization, Cardano can easily become a data management solution via government partnerships.

In other words, Cardano can aid in the formalization and protection of property rights that people have. Even in a war, people could at least have the comfort that after the fighting is done, they’ll be able to retain what they had.

However, if we are to do this in a reasonable timeframe, it must be done as a partnership between the governments and the private sector. Otherwise, the process might take decades.

Already existing platforms like GoKey can help tokenize these property rights and onboard real estate on the Cardano ecosystem as digital tokens which can be used as DeFi collateral. With adequate support and the proper legal guidelines, this could be done within a few years.

Far more ambitious projects are already underway, such as World Mobile’s goal of establishing internet infrastructure in the whole of the African continent by 2030. As such, this project is within the realm of possibility and it will essentially resurrect $9.3 trillion in dead capital.

Once formalized and tokenized, these assets would live on the Cardano blockchain. They would then move from dead capital to becoming a portion of the ecosystem’s total value locked (TVL).

It bears mentioning that while TVL is correlated with price appreciation, the relationship is not necessarily linear. For instance, if I introduce $1 in value into Cardano, the users might be able to derive far more than $1’s worth.

But let’s ignore this fact and let’s assume it’s a straightforward correlation to make our lives easier. Our quick and dirty napkin math is as follows: we’ve managed to onboard $9.3 trillion in assets into the Cardano ecosystem and there are 45 billion supply of ADA in the blockchain.

Meaning, that if we disperse these $9.3tn over the number of ADA coins, we get a value of $206.60!

Conclusion

If we are to fully understand the potential of projects like Cardano, we must be willing to reframe how we think about the project as a whole. It’s not just a means to create speculatory assets that appreciate in value at random, it’s a means of capturing and utilizing real-world assets to their fullest potential.

The most straightforward and likely easiest means by which this can happen is via real estate. Not only is it an asset class that lends itself to disruption by reducing the cost of intermediaries, but it also benefits from having an unbiased third party keeping track of the different transactions taking place.

GoKey is a platform on the frontlines of the upcoming real estate tokenization revolution, and with its growing expertise, it will prove to be an invaluable player!

Cardano is a Proof of Stake blockchain (PoS), which means that if you own even a single ADA you have power within the network. You are not only a participant in the system, you’re also a co-owner thereof.

This is both a great privilege and a responsibility, as you can have a real and meaningful effect to enact the type of system that you want to see. Not only do you have the chance to vote on specific policies, but you are also able to give power to certain entities, such as via Project Catalyst funding, and your staking decisions.

Stake pools are the backbone of Cardano, as they process transactions which ensures the correct functioning of the network and its security. In exchange, Stakepool Operators (SPO) receive rewards which they share with delegators, as their stake makes getting transactions to process into blocks a more frequent occurrence.

It’s a symbiotic relationship that helps develop the Cardano ecosystem by empowering voices that the community finds valuable, so it’s not a decision that should be taken lightly.

In this thread, we will look at how stake pools, rather than just being faceless servers, are becoming community hubs which can help shape the development of the network.

Stake pools as community tools

Stake pools are the most direct form of democracy out there. If you don’t like how someone is behaving, or you find someone who’s doing a better job, you can up and leave instantly at virtually zero cost. This deprives the original stake pool operator (SPO) of income and power to affect the network.

As such, stake pools have had to evolve from just offering the protocol guaranteed rate of return, which at the moment sits at about 4.6% but is scheduled to go down over the coming years.

Beyond the Centralized Exchanges, which mainly attract delegation as they’re the default and easiest option, for a stake pool to attract delegation, it must gain the attention of people through the following means:

• Personality/Marketing: YouTuber pools tend to have higher than average margins. This isn’t done because they’re providing a better service than others, some may argue that it’s quite the contrary.

Be that as it may though, the reason that people are happy to support these pools, even if it doesn’t majorly make financial sense, is because they want to support the personalities behind them. Some of the largest Cardano-focused YouTubers are the first to explain how staking works, and are the first to ask their viewers to stake with them. Delegators also recognize that some content creators are meaningfully contributing to the ecosystem, and want to get involved.

• Rewards: Initial Stakepool Offerings (ISPO), providing pool-specific tokens either with utility or purely for meme value, offering additional services or discounts, etc.

Put bluntly, the main reason people are delegating to pools like this is that they know they are going to get something that they consider valuable in return. It’s a mercenary transaction, rather than one borne out of conviction.

• Ideological Alignment: Whether it’s supporting a charity, or supporting a mission you believe in, people who stake with SPOs because of this reason, think the SPO are the best suited to champion a cause that they feel strongly about.

The main way that this has expressed itself is via mission-driven pools which earmark a portion of their earnings to donate to a certain cause. But the concept is evolving and now projects often have a permanent pool that they operate, and people delegate to them as they quite enjoy what the team is doing.

This state of affairs is a far cry from the original inception of stake pools, where faceless entities mainly attracted delegation by being the most immediately available option on an alphanumeric list. The Cardano public at large is becoming savvier and realizing the power of having skin in the game.

Be the change you want to be

Stakepool delegation is not something that ought to be taken lightly. You should give it to people or entities who are genuinely advocating for the world and financial system that you want to see.

SPOs should be given the same attention and consideration as if you were voting in an election. After all, delegating to someone arms them not only with more ADA, which gives them a direct governance stake in the network, but they can also process transactions maliciously if there is enough incentive to do so.

We should start treating SPO delegation as seriously as voting in elections. If you don’t trust someone to look out for your future and the wellbeing of communities that you value, then don’t give them that power.

Treat it as voting with your wallet for the world that you want to see, as you have an immediate stake in the wellbeing of that system.

Do not give away your power to people just because they’ve made a funny video, really think about whether or not you trust them prioritizing your best interests instead of theirs. If you can’t satisfactorily answer this, then consider finding someone else that you think embodies your values more.

What GoKey offers

All this to ask: Why give your support to GoKey’s stake pool?

Here at GoKey, we hold the radical belief that everyone should have access to real estate ownership, and have the opportunity to own the roof over their heads. This is not only said out of a moral belief that it is the right thing to do as a society, but it is also the profitable choice to make.

Property ownership helps people establish roots in the communities that they inhabit and engage in more socially beneficial behaviors by making people care about their surroundings with the long term view in mind. This not only creates a greater sense of belonging, but it strengthens the sense of trust and willingness to engage in business with people.

So, ultimately, homeownership allows us to engage in prosocial behavior which helps develop the environment to become better for people’s lives, and by extension, for the economy.

This is our dream: we want every person out there to have a stake in the long term well-being of society. We want to bring the principles which make Cardano great to the real world. And this starts with your support.

We are not funded by venture capitalists, we’re normal people with an idea of what an ideal world might be and enough real-world experience to pull it off with the support of the community.

If you delegate to us, you will be rewarded with GoKey tokens, which are intended as payment, governance, and utility tokens. Through this token, you will be able to decide how to use our treasury funds (what properties to buy, how to manage them, etc) as well as be able to interact with the GoKey Network ecosystem, where we are creating a marketplace of tokenized property rights.

Put simply, by delegating to the GoKey ISPO, not only do you keep your ADA, but you will get a token that does three times more than the average coin:

- Deflationary algorithmic stablecoin;

- Yield bearing governance token; and

- Utility token for the growing GoKey ecosystem.

Stake with GoKey and be the change you want to see in the world!

Conclusion

If we are looking at aspects beyond raw financial return, there isn’t a correct choice of what the best pool is. After all, they all represent very different ways of looking at the world and engaging with it.

As much as we would like to have the largest stake pool out there, we’re aware our vision of the world is not for everyone.

But if you believe that we can build a better world, where powerful corporations don’t lord over us for all our basic needs, and where people can develop deep ties with their community, then consider delegating with [GOKEY].

You will receive front-row seats in this new venture, and the ability to decide and to profit from our growing operations.

Cardano encourages people who have something at stake to take action. Delegate for the world that you want to see!

If you look back at the pages of history and mythology, one theme that keeps popping up over and over is that the home is sacred. Whether it’s vampires not being able to cross the threshold of one’s property, or the police needing a warrant to enter your home, we instinctively know there is something important to be found in having a place that is truly ours.

Yet, as home prices rise and wages stagnate in much of the Western world, homeownership is becoming an unattainable dream for a growing proportion of the population. People feel increasingly disconnected from the communities they live in and this causes a sense of isolation.

Here at GoKey, we believe that property ownership should be an attainable dream for everyone. We don’t just think it’s the moral thing to do, but we also think it is the economically beneficial course of action.

Today we will be exploring why everyone should be a homeowner, and how GoKey can help people achieve this dream.

Home is where the heart is

The status quo measures wellbeing in dollars and cents. From a purely financial standpoint, the economists would prefer that a country’s population have a chronic but not debilitating health condition, which forces them to seek medical assistance. This would promote spending on medicine, while not harming productivity, a win-win from a financial point of view.

But the wellbeing of a society is not reducible to just a GDP number. For a society to function correctly, we must look at the members holistically, we must take into account their health and mental wellbeing. So how exactly does widespread homeownership affect people?

One of the more widely held theories on what makes people happy is the self-determination theory, which identifies three main psychological factors that affect emotional wellbeing:

• Autonomy — the freedom to determine one’s path;
• Competence — the desire to master one’s environment; and
• Belonging — the will to interact with and connect with others.

With that in mind, it becomes obvious how renting might not exactly lead people to be satisfied with their lives.

The most obvious obstacles to a renter’s happiness are autonomy and competence, as renting precludes either from happening. Renters aren’t allowed to change their environment much. In fact, if you make any major alterations, you might even be punished for it and lose your deposit.

So renting creates learned helplessness where people don’t feel like they can do much to improve their surroundings. They’re essentially guests in their own homes.

This more broadly applies to their surroundings out of the home as well. After all, if you are likely to be forced to move sooner, rather than later, it doesn’t make sense to try to plant long term roots, or become too involved with the wellbeing of your area.

It should be apparent how this affects people’s sense of belonging, and their ability to feel connected to the broader community. If people’s arrangements are designed to be temporary, they’ll treat their surroundings as disposable and replaceable, as opposed to something worth preserving.

More broadly though, people want to feel like they’re involved in creating something. In psychology, there’s a well-studied phenomenon known as the IKEA Effect, where people value objects that they’ve assembled more than if they had bought them, even if the premade ones are of objectively superior quality.

Humans value projects that they have a stake in, and thus they are likelier to put in a greater effort into making things work, than if they’re simply forced by circumstances to be involved in it.

Real Estate Ownership & Society

In business management, there is a concept known as “the principal agent problem,” in plain English it’s how you overcome the problem of someone managing some asset for you, in a way that you’d be happy with. If the incentives are not aligned appropriately, people will obviously turn inwards and try to benefit themselves, rather than fulfil the duties they were assigned. So it becomes a tricky balancing act, more so if we’re thinking on a broader social level.

The easiest, and usually most prescribed solution, for the principal-agent problem, is to make the “agent” managing the principal become a co-owner. In this way, the incentives of the original owner and the agent are aligned, as they are both concerned over the present and future wellbeing of the asset.

It bears saying that this not only applies to stock markets and companies therein, but to whole societies.

For instance, Economic Historian Niall Ferguson in his book “Civilization: The West and the Rest” posited an interesting explanation for why Latin America didn’t develop quite as well as North America: property rights!

In Latin America, conquistadors came with the mindset of subjugation and ruling like feudal lords. Actual property owners were few and far between. The haciendas, the gigantic estates where they lived, served as their petty fiefdoms for hundreds of years.

Much like in the feudal era, societal advancement was difficult with a stagnant upper class that exploits the lower classes. Untold amounts of geniuses labored the fields and never contributed to the betterment of their societies.

Why should they? After all, they wouldn’t reap the fruits of their labors, someone else would.

Now, compare that with the North American colonies, and what became the US in particular. In many of the early colonies, settlers were often given a hundred acres of land just for living there for a set amount of time.

In other words, the citizens of this new territory genuinely felt they benefited from the system if they contributed. So, they were far likelier to invest the time and effort to improve their surroundings.

This wasn’t a one-off thing, but a consistent pattern of behavior for that area of the world. For example, there was the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave away nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States for free to 1.6 million citizens. Then there were the efforts in the twentieth century to make homeownership accessible via the pseudo-governmental entities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Naturally, if you can personally benefit from improving an area, your incentives align with the rest of the community. If, on the other hand, you’re concerned about the abuses of those who lord over you, then your focus is inward.

Beyond anything else, it’s this factor that more adequately explains the success of North America as compared to Latin America.

It bears saying though that our brief historical overview is skirting over important moral pitfalls about how the land was divvied up, to whom it was given to over the centuries, and to whom it belonged to prior to this. These are historical scars that are difficult to ignore, and they are certainly worthy of consideration.

This is why we believe that if GoKey is to make property ownership accessible to all, we must do it by genuinely offering a better alternative to everyone, rather than the blunt and callous force of the state.

Crypto & Real Estate Ownership

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology more generally, is about so much more than just creating tokens to gamble on. It marks a different means by which property ownership is established and authenticated.

Now, at least on a practical level, it is easy to mark changes of ownership in assets. Not only that but you can fractionalize them, use them as collateral, etc.

For the time being, the main obstacle ahead is getting tokenized assets representing physical real estate to be acknowledged as equivalent to their real-life deeds. We’ll get there in the coming years, but that’s besides the point.

What we can do now though, is to give renters an opportunity to own a portion of a property when they pay rent. We can leverage the power of crowdfunding that crypto provides to buy out entire buildings, and then manage them via Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

This is achievable today and marks a great first step toward a future where everyone can have the opportunity to be a partial stakeholder in the places they live in.

Conclusion

Property rights and the ability to shape your environment are essential for the well-being of the members of society. If a sizable portion of people doesn’t have the ability to meaningfully and positively impact their surroundings, then there is an underclass whose concerns are not being heard.

We want to build communities of people who help improve society due to their communal sense of ownership.

GoKey wants people to recapture a sense of belonging, a sense that people’s choices matter and that they have the power to build something meaningful alongside the rest of the community.

In our view, the easiest way to do this is by making property ownership more attainable for all!

Crypto is volatile, VERY volatile in fact. As a consequence, it has failed to deliver on a lot of the promises that it initially had.

Instead of an alternate financial sector not beholden to the interest of third parties, it has become a casino where portfolios might go down -99% on any given day of the week. For obvious reasons, this is untenable for anything other than rampant speculation.

If crypto is to become a financial force in the world, it must create a stable means of transacting digitally and across borders. It also needs to be able to maintain its value not only from year to year, but from generation to generation.

In this article, we will be exploring how crypto is likely to evolve by creating new kinds of money, which are pegged to external sources of value, like the aggregate worth of real estate, and what this effect might have on the world going forward.

A New Kind of Money

The reason gold was used as currency for thousands of years was its scarcity and ability to retain value across generations. The problem for everyday usage are many though, such as simultaneously being heavy to transport, while also being difficult to store securely in one place.

In either case, for obvious reasons, gold didn’t quite cut it for everyday use. So we shifted to more abstract notions of money, like issuing paper notes that could be exchanged for gold. The issue with that is that the intermediaries in charge of issuing said notes abused the trust people placed in them to enrich themselves. They printed more claims than they had reserves for and pocketed the difference. This accidentally birthed the first fiat currencies where their value was circularly derived from an authority saying it was valuable because they said so, rather than actually being backed by anything of worth (from Latin: fiat, “let it be done”).

This brings us to today, with the invention of cryptocurrencies, we get rid of the impracticality of being transparent. However, it also introduces the new issue of extreme volatility to the currencies themselves; as the wider market doesn’t know whether crypto is a passing fad or the future, it doesn’t know what to value them at.

Enter stablecoins into the scene. These are tokens that are pegged to the value of some external asset, often fiat currencies. However, depending on the type of stablecoin it might accidentally just reinvent banking via the backdoor.

If it’s the type of stablecoin that requires to be backed by some asset, a reserve-based crypto, then all the same criticism of normal paper currencies apply. As they don’t have an upwards cap, sooner or later their value approximates 0 due to inflation.

Even in these early stages, organizations like Tether, in charge of the USDT, have been accused of creating far more tokens than they should have given their purported reserves, for instance.

So, if we don’t intend to recreate the old financial system on the blockchain, we have to rethink money. If decentralization is our goal, then we need to develop a decentralized and stable currency.

This, among other things, is the goal that GoKey has. The GoKey payment and utility token is a type of asset that will use stablecoin principles to align itself to the value of the US residential real estate market.

In addition, the token will enable the creation of a marketplace for property rights attached to participating real estate. As such, given that it will have a relatively immediate use case, it will ensure that there’s market liquidity for the token, and thus stability.

Why align a digital asset to real estate value?

The main living space for gold, and other precious metals, is in high-security vaults around the world. Nobody really knows how much gold and silver there is, and we just take each other’s word for it.

Some estimates say that there could be as much as 30x more “paper gold” than real gold. Meaning that for every gold bar that exists, there are thirty people out there who think they own it.

Obviously, this is a house of cards waiting to fall, and when it does, it might take decades for it to recover, at which point the same song and dance would occur again. Our financial system demands the extreme securitization of these assets (and their derivatives), especially as they’re difficult to audit, and thus gold (despite its astounding historical track record at maintaining its value against inflation) is not a guarantee for value preservation.

On the other hand, existing real estate is far more difficult to hide, and owing to the public registries, properties don’t tend to be promised to multiple people without their knowledge and consent. It’s also worth mentioning that GoKey is tokenizing property so that this can all be verifiable on the blockchain, but that’s a story for another day.

For now, we’ll just say that measuring the aggregate value of the residential real estate market in the US is a far more straightforward affair than measuring what the real value of gold ought to be.

As such, through that, we have a metric that we can easily use to peg the value of GoKey tokens to, and in theory this asset should be stable on an intergenerational basis.

While it’s impossible to know with certainty what the future will bring, the historical record strongly supports the notion that real estate is stable on an inflation-adjusted basis. A good example thereof is a small street in Amsterdam, the Herengracht.

Owing to the artificial nature of Amsterdam, where the Dutch have historically had to battle the seas to build their nation, it lacks some of the variability of other cities. As such, the character of that specific street has not changed in almost 500 years — it has always been the home of affluent businessmen from century to century.

We also have the sales record for all these different properties. Consequently, it’s an interesting natural experiment where the area hasn’t been gentrified or lost its luster, like Detroit, but it has remained steady.

Some economists studied these historical documents and came to an interesting conclusion: yes there were ups and there were downs, and prices went up over 11x over these past five centuries, but on an inflation-adjusted basis, the price change has been negligible.

Real estate was a phenomenal store of value, provided that an area catered to the same type of people for generations. In effect, this is what GoKey is working to accomplish.

By linking the value of GoKey to the broader real estate market, it doesn’t matter whether one area becomes less affluent, and another one rises. In aggregate, the population is likely to grow, the economy is likely to develop, and thus it’s likely that the total value locked would appreciate, even in real terms.

So What?

If GoKey succeeds in establishing the peg to broader property market value indices, then two things will happen:

1. Existing GoKey tokens will benefit tremendously from rapid appreciation, as our token supply readjusts to be in line with the index.
2. The crypto market will have an intergenerational store of value that can seamlessly be used to operate smart contracts.

In other words, GoKey will have solved one of the main objections in the crypto space. Presently, no sane person would ever take any long term contract denominated in cryptocurrencies, as one of the two parties involved is bound to pay too much, or way too little.

This is a means by which the crypto market can evolve and instead of thinking in hourly wicks, it can start thinking and designing with decades in mind. Of course, this won’t happen overnight.

The principal proposition that GoKey has both to current, and future token holders, is offering the ability to the public to be as financially sophisticated as they want or need to be.

Soon, we will be launching the first pilot projects in our market for the trading of property rights of participating US real estate. In other words, property will stop being a somewhat illiquid and inert asset that sits around for decades on end without doing anything, except generating tax liabilities and maintenance costs.

Instead, real estate equity and debt could be used to fund all manner of financial operations. This will liberate potentially trillions of dollars that have hitherto remained dormant in the balance sheet of longer-term property owners, including millions of retirees.

Conclusion

Crypto at the moment is at an awkward developmental stage — it’s in puberty, and as much as it’s brimming with potential it hasn’t quite figured out what it wants to do with its life. In order to mature, it needs to be able to think in longer timeframes.

This can only be done if it learns to tame the volatility raging inside it.

GoKey represents an important missing piece of the crypto puzzle. Once fully operational, we will be able to give users access to tools and abilities that they might have never thought possible. Crypto will be able to sit at the grown-up table and win.

In the near future, we won’t need the centralized intermediaries of necessity, as we will be able to competently and accurately be able to replace them seamlessly!

However, unlike food and water, shelter is not something particularly easy to come by. As such, given that shelter is a scarce resource with high demand, the price is always primed to be high. Unsurprisingly, it is usually among the most expensive needs that we humans seek to meet.

This has been known by those in power since the beginning of history, and thus access to real estate has always been a carrot that they wield in their game of politics.

Our current era is no different. Presently, there are gigantic financial organizations like Blackrock, which are gobbling up much of the available real estate, sight unseen. Just in the first quarter of last year, corporate investors bought 15% of all available housing in the US!

Normal people have no chance to compete against these much deeper corporate pockets, and so fewer individuals and families are able to own a house over time. The end result is that the market is being cornered, and a profitable monopoly is getting established for the corporate class.

At that point, people would have no option but to pay exorbitant prices, and homeownership would be close to impossible.

If this type of concentration of power is left unchecked, we may be at risk of going back to the feudal era where normal people owned nothing and were beholden to powers far greater than themselves. If the Western world is to avoid going into such a nightmare scenario, people need to be able to freely conduct business with each other without financial institutions breathing down their necks, especially in the real estate space.

This is why we created GoKey, a blockchain-based platform that allows users to tokenize their properties, and transform them into liquid assets that they can use in whichever way they see fit.

This is the beginning of a new era, where customers can regain freedoms and ownership opportunities that were slipping away from us due to practical and economic realities.

How GoKey can revolutionize ownership

GoKey is a platform that allows you to take the property rights associated with ownership of real estate, and tokenize them as digital assets which are tradable and usable in smart contracts. This is the next evolution for NFTs — endlessly personalized and with actual utility. Through them, you’ll be able to utilize the full spectrum of rights that you are entitled to as a property owner.

For instance, when you buy property, you’re not just purchasing the bricks and mortar stacked on top of each other, but you are also typically purchasing the land underneath, along with the right to occupy and utilize the real estate as you see fit.

Each one of these characteristics has value in and of itself, but most people aren’t aware that when you purchase real estate, you’re actually purchasing a whole bundle of rights that have been packaged into one ownership contract.

The right of possession, the ability to mortgage it, to lease it, or even to put restrictions on the use of the land, are all rights that don’t necessarily need to be packaged together. In fact, with higher-end properties, it’s not unusual for each one of these rights to be separately auctioned and assigned different dollar values and owners, as well as for uniquely defined periods of time.

In other words, you could sell the physical structure of a building, but retain the land underneath, and charge rent on it or regain ownership of the whole structure after a few decades. This sounds strange as it’s not the way it’s typically done in countries like the US, but in many parts of the world, like the UK and Asia, it’s often quite commonplace.

Property ownership has the potential to be as unique and varied as the people who own them.

The reason we’ve mostly forgotten about this as a society is because of the associated costs and practicality of enforcing the variability of these ownership contracts. For the vast majority of people, it’s unfeasible to even consider fully utilizing their rights as they would need to hire lawyers, realtors and engage in needless bureaucracy, so it eventually gets forgotten as an option.

It’s like climbing Everest or going to Antarctica, sure, they’re things that you could feasibly do, but realistically the costs and the bother make it not even worth considering. Nevertheless, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies changes the equation by giving normal people the ability to assign characteristics to digital assets and keep track of the state of abstract legal conditions.

Prior to being able to tokenize these elements and track them on the blockchain, it would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical to detach property rights tied to an ownership contract, as independent assets that one can use. But with GoKey, you can easily treat different aspects of ownership as entirely separate assets, that have a tradable value.

GoKey allows residential and commercial property owners and users to create agreements with people across an ever-increasing range of markets (starting with the US and eventually expanding to the rest of the world), while interacting with them on equal terms, as opposed to the current arrangement, where one party tends to have all the leverage.

By creating NFTs of real estate, we can begin to use property in ways that might not have been possible to do before. For instance, fractionalizing ownership of a house into multiple pieces will be much easier via tokens.

Much like a stock represents a proportional share of a company, so could a fractionalized NFT represent a proportional share of a house. As such, elderly people who have most of their net worth tied to a single property, could fractionalize their homes and cover daily expenses with small shares of their home.

Of course, this is far from the only application for real estate NFTs. NFTs representing property and the rights associated with said real estate could be as flexible as any other financial asset — they could be lent out, collateralized, leased, optioned, auctioned, merged with other assets, grouped as an investment fund, etc.

The point is that the average person will soon have the ability to be as financially sophisticated as they wish to be, and they’ll be able to act as financial players in the broader market on equal terms — as opposed to the present where we’re beholden to bureaucrats and brokers extracting large fees from real estate activities.

Bridging the gap

What triggered the change from feudalism to the modern era was the Black Death, where nearly 40% of the European population perished. After the plague was over, the few remaining peasants accidentally ended up with more individual bargaining power due to labor force scarcity. As such, everyday people could be more vocal about their wants and needs and set the terms of their employment.

This is what GoKey wants to accomplish (the balancing the scales part, not the mass death — we’d prefer as few deaths as possible, in fact). We want to empower individuals to be in charge of their financial lives. Our priority, for the time being, is to tackle real estate, as living expenses are by far the biggest chunk of most people’s budgets.

Tokenizing real estate will allow people to arrange agreements with each other in a mutually beneficial way, without the excruciatingly high fees and convoluted contracts. Ultimately, we want homeownership to be accessible to all people who want it; and we want current homeowners to be able to fully take advantage of the rights that they’re entitled to.

The younger generations have largely been priced out of the real estate market, and we want to change that. On the other hand, the older generation might be asset rich, but they’re cash poor.

We believe that we can take the two disparate life circumstances and help create arrangements that benefit both parties. That is the beauty and the promise of blockchain technology — a world where we’re not beholden to the middlemen of necessity, and we can interact with each other as fairly and equitable as is possible.

Real estate owners and users will be able to deploy easy to use smart contracts, which regulate the use terms of their property, while would-be owners will be able to enjoy a more equitable share of the real estate. For example, a renter’s agreement might grant them the right to work towards purchasing the property they live in.

Property ownership is about to become far more democratized than it has ever been!

Conclusion

It is easy to dismiss tokenized real estate on the blockchain as a gimmick, like 3D television or other trends with little practicality which end up dying out. Yet, this would be a mistake of perception.

When you transform a property into NFTs with GoKey, and you untangle the bundle of rights that a deed represents, you’re able to use real estate as any other blockchain asset out there, which opens millions of possible uses. Suddenly, you can even use real estate and associated rights as collateral within all DeFi applications out there.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what this might mean for our society going forward, and we aim to explore this seismic shift in the articles to come.

For thousands of years, there has been a wide gulf between the renters and owners of a property, but now GoKey will allow for a blurring of the lines, where people can benefit and conduct business in never before seen ways.