Blockchain—the underlying distributed ledger technology that powers bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies—is becoming more popular and promising for a wide range of use cases because of its massive potential to drive the next wave of tech innovation.
Real estate leaders have reason to be especially optimistic about the opportunity of the blockchain ecosystem. It has vast potential to improve transparency, accountability, and liquidity across many areas of real estate, from trades to recordkeeping. Critical information that has traditionally been inaccessible or stored in piecemeal documents could be free-flowing with the implementation of blockchain technology—think contracts, deeds, proof of ownership, identity verification, and inspection history for real estate of all kinds.
At Roofstock, we focus on making real estate—a traditionally illiquid asset class—radically accessible, cost-effective, and simple. That’s why, with new funding from our Series E financing round, we plan to invest heavily in this technology to benefit our investors and the entire real estate community. Using the distributed ledger system, people could create digital tokens representing homes to make buying and selling real estate more transparent and straightforward than ever. By one report, tokenized real estate could become a $1.4 trillion market even if just .05% of properties were tokenized in the next 5 years.
We’re hard at work exploring how building out Roofstock products on the blockchain can benefit Roofstock’s existing SFR investors and Roofstock One’s accredited investors–in addition to crypto-native investors who may be interested in diversifying their digital wealth by purchasing tokens that represent real world assets. With that, I’m pleased to share that we’ve been accepted into the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton’s Cypher Accelerator, which is led by a top tier team of professors and students at UPenn and is sponsored by senior advisors like Tim Draper, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Amico.
Tokenizing homes is just one piece of the tech stack poised to revolutionize the future of real estate into a more democratized, accessible market. Our blockchain initiative, along with our internal incubator and next-generation technology accelerator, Roofstock Labs, is leading the charge for real estate in a powerful way. The Roofstock team is excited to share more in the coming months!
