The Internet has come to take your land
I love my job sometimes. It’s like being the newsreader in a scifi satire, when the TV in the background just casually mentions the President is a professional wrestler or the Bay Area has been conquered by Sasquatch or something.
No, but really, the Internet is taking your land.
MEET PROPY
Propy is a cryptocurrency exchange – it’s what it sounds like, a place where you can exchange cash for the magic robot money of your choice – with some big dreams and bigger possibilities.
Many exchanges are also “merchant services,” platforms for spending your cryptocurrency on actual things.
Propy certainly qualifies.
They would like for you to spend your cryptobucks on international real estate. As a matter of fact, “Propy aims to solve the problems facing international real estate transactions by creating a novel unified property store and asset transfer platform for the global real estate industry.”
That’s… big. They go bigger, though. “Initially the Propy Registry will mirror official land registry records in which transfers of real estate are recorded.
Ultimately, however, Propy’s vision is that jurisdictions will adopt the Propy Registry as their official ledger of record such that the transfer of a property on the Propy Registry constitutes the legal transfer of the property and the legal registration of that transfer.”
SAME THING WE DO EVERY NIGHT, PINKY
But seriously, folks. The Propy paradigm has the potential to be a big deal. The offer of increased convenience should never be underestimated. Ask Uber. The offer of peer-to-peer value exchange, with service limited to facilitation and an absolute minimum of middleman involvement, ditto. Ask eBay, or Craig of List.
The plain reality is that the real estate business can be complex and confusing, and it only gets worse internationally.
Any way to streamline the process should be seen as potential Disruption with a capital D. To state the obvious, peer-to-peer exchange – you take my tokens, I take your land – qualifies.
It’s tempting to write it off as pie-in-the-sky. Maybe it is. Even Propy doesn’t expect to get actual peer-to-peer value transfer going until 2020.
FUTURE, NOW
But 2020 is 2 years and change from now. Yeah, it freaks me out too.
More importantly, with 7 days still to go, Propy’s already made 15 million dollars in their token sale, which is Currency Geek for “IPO.” If all goes as planned, they’ll be in beta next month, with production on their transaction tool starting in December.
That’s real, pressing and genuinely new. Sometimes my job isn’t as scifi as it seems.
#Propy
