Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 520

One of the ways that you can turn a traditional real estate company into more of a web3 company is talk about how you're going to tokenize the ownership of real assets. But what does that even mean and how would it work?

Here is one example that I recently discovered (but of course there are countless others and I'm not suggesting that you should use their product). Bricknest is a startup that is focused on buying vacation apartments in popular tourist destinations. They then split the ownership into 365 non-fungible tokens that live on the Solana blockchain.

Each token is intended to correspond to a day. And so if you own 1 token, you own 1/365 of the asset and you get 1 day. You can choose to either use it yourself on this day, or rent it out and get the rental income sent directly to your crypto wallet. If you own all 365 tokens, then it would be similar to you just owning 100% of the asset.

The obvious question is how is this different from, say, fractional ownership, which can be similarly found in high-demand vacation spots? And the dumb answer is that, well, tokens exist on a blockchain and fractional ownership shares do not. So I guess the real question is whether or not tokens will make this ownership model any different.

There is a long history of trying to democratize the ownership of real estate. In fact, this was the general idea behind REITs when they were created in the 1960s. So again, we are back to the question of whether tokenization will be any different from what we already have.

But I think that most people are asking this same question of crypto/web3 in general -- why does all of this matter? And a big part of the problem is that crypto is generally hard to explain. One of the best explanations that I have come across is this one here by Albert Wenger .

Simply put, most internet companies today can be thought of as large privately controlled databases. Instagram, for example, is a database of all of our photos (among other things). But because it's Instagram's database, they get to decide what can be done with it. And naturally they are going to do what it takes to maintain their economic moat.

Blockchains are similarly databases. And right now they're not particularly good databases. However, the key differences are that (1) they are public, (2) they are not controlled by a single entity, and (3) anyone can read and/or write to them. And so they directly attack the thing that gives many companies today their economic advantage.

Does this mean that tokenized real estate is the future? Does it make a difference that rental contracts can be programmed into the blockchain so that distributions are automatic? It still feels too early to tell. But I do think that most people are underestimating how disruptive a seemingly small change like this might be.

Electric scooters are an unsanctioned form of mobility here in Toronto , mostly because people think they're dangerous, but also because I think people are worried about them cluttering up our sidewalks.

The problem with this position is that electric scooters are also a lot of fun to ride and people seem to find them useful. The last time I rode one was in Paris and it seemed perfectly safe to me, though it may have been because there were two of us on it and we were kind of overloading the thing.

In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here's what they learned :

• From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders

• Electric scooter ridership greatly exceeded that of public bicycles, with 300,000 scooter trips taken in September alone, compared to about 35,000 bike trips

• 54% of surveyed scooter riders said that they would have taken a taxi or driven their personal vehicle had a scooter not been available

• 21% of riders said that they used it to connect to public transit (helping to solve that pesky last-mile problem)

• 17 collisions involving a scooter and a car were reported during the pilot year (though, for what it's worth, some/many of the incidents involved a scooter that was privately owned and not part of the actual pilot program)

As much as I love riding a bike, it's a bit more of a commitment compared to riding an e-scooter, which is why I think the numbers look the way that they do here. Not everybody wants to bring a change of clothes and shower at the office.

So I think it's really too bad that Toronto just shut these down before exploring ways to make them both safe and useful.

This isn't new. And it's maybe a bit random. But we're probably overdue for a break from housing debate. So here is an interesting art project by Hans Hemmert (who is part of the German collective Inges Idee).

Called Personal Absurdities (1997) , the project consisted of parties in Berlin in which everyone was equalized to the same height -- 2 meters to be exact. The was done through blue stryofoam platform shoes ranging from 5 to 43cm in height.

Of course, if you already happened to be 2m tall, then no platforms were needed. If you were over 2m tall, I'm not sure how that was handled, but presumably the bouncer stopped you at the front door.

All of this seems interesting to me because most of us probably don't fully appreciate the extent in which height impacts social dynamics. There are countless studies suggesting that we tend to have a more positive reaction to people who are tall -- and this is in everything from business to who we vote for.

In fact, this connection between height and leadership is so strong that studies have found that, when faced with a strong likeable leader, we often overstate their height in our minds. We think they're taller than they actually are because of how strongly we associate height with the ability to lead.

So what happens when you strip away this dynamic and you equalize everyone's height -- even if just for one night of revelry? I would be curious to find out. So if any of you are planning a "same height party", please feel free to invite me. Thanks.

Photo: Inges Idee