We’re focused on making housing more accessible.

Over the past few decades, the cost of housing has steadily increased to the point where the majority of Americans can no longer afford to have a home of their own. Many are trapped in renting cycles that persist for decades that leave them with no assets to show for it.

This is a signal that the market dynamics in this industry need to change.

Change is hard. Housing infrastructure runs on a surprising number of completely analog processes. For example:

• Deeds are held in documents stored in city hall.

• Mortgage applications are 90 days of paperwork.

• Leases are often physical documents requiring signatures.

With an inflexible infrastructure, housing is brittle and maladaptive to the modern world. Attempts in Web2 to digitize housing ended up painting a well-designed veneer over the same fundamentally outdated technological backend. As a result, the impact of these companies has been limited.

By being able to represent assets and cashflows digitally, Web3 offers an opportunity to reconstruct the housing industry from the core by digitizing ownership representations and constructing new economic relationships between the different market participants.

We can turn interactions that are antagonistic today, like the ones between owners and tenants, and redesign them to be more positive-sum for both.

How

Rental leases are a compelling entry point into updating housing infrastructure because:

• They are the most atomic unit describing how housing is used.

• They are the most digitized aspect of housing with Facebook groups, Docusigns, and Venmo.

• They are a relatively easy-to-model economic agreement.

• The standard 12-month lease structure is serving fewer and fewer people.

These factors together make leases the perfect place to begin experimenting with how Web3 building blocks can reshape foundational housing experiences. Additionally, because leases describe how homes are used, redefining their structure is an incredibly high leverage and impactful point by which we can move towards other parts of the infrastructure stack.

We started this project off as an experiment where we turned 3 months of Punia’s home into NFTs and listed them on Opensea to see what the reception would be and if anyone would even buy it. People loved it and someone even bought a month! Turning a month of your home into an NFT is a cool 1-liner, but the technology isn’t adding a whole lot of value.

Instead, our platform uses a 2-NFT model, with one for the host and the guest, with the respective NFTs representing the commitments of each party:

• The host’s commitment to providing the home as described.

• The guest’s commitment to following the rules of stay.

At the most basic high level, each NFT is used to unlock the funds committed at the start: rent for the host and security deposit for the guest. As such we replicate the economic relationship inherent within a lease, but digitize it to allow for a much faster interaction, a total guarantee of payment, and a secondary market that is the first of its kind.

In the event of disputes, we use an arbitration system that we will be decentralizing. The mechanisms of which we will go through in further posts.

What

Our MVP replicates a similar experience to Airbnb. Hosts are able to create listings for their property. Guests can browse through different properties and purchase a stay.

We’re deployed on Polygon, are integrated with Metamask, and are an entirely Web-3 native experience. Because our initial product is targeted towards Web3 digital nomads, we track which DAOs hosts are a part of so that DAOs can create an off-chain housing network and facilitate their contributors living and working together. Big shout-out to Index Coop for being our first test partner!

You can check out our platform here at www.holon.casa.

We have a few guides that may be useful as well:

• Account Set-Up

• How to Rent a Property

• How to List and Host a Property

If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas on how we can make this experience better, or build other experiences, please email us at whattup@holon.casa or reach out on Twitter to @holoncasa.

Future

Our north star is to increase the volume of stays going through our platform.

With a high enough volume and success rate, the more validity we can drive to our NFT representations of ownership and the more feasible a deep secondary market becomes. With more trust in the NFT and a deeper secondary market, we can:

• Built out new lease experiences like exotic leases that are 12-month leases composed of different homes, or leases that expire only when the renter wants to or is financially insolvent.

• Enable home developers to access future cashflows from renters to finance the acquisition of homes or invest in home improvements today.

• Enable homeowners to give out extra stay NFTs to incentivize better behavior or attract tenants.

• Create an exchange or clearinghouse for apartment rentals.

Something interesting about leases is that their value appreciation can mimic that of the underlying property. For example, if you had a lease for a year that you bought today that is valid 10 years from now, the value change of that lease over those 10 years should be similar to that of the underlying home equity. As a result, we can mimic home equity with the right to stay at that home!

This insight lets us opens up the design space for us to innovate massively, we’re excited for what the future holds!

Step 1: Provide Hosting Deposit

To avoid foul-play, Holon requires that prospective hosts put down a deposit. To do so, make sure you have connected your MetaMask wallet and registered your account details. For assistance, check out our articles on Account Setup and Getting Started with Web3 and Polygon.

Once those steps are complete, click on “My Profile” in the sidebar. 

The hosting deposit is outlined on this page. Please note that hosting deposits cannot be withdrawn while stays are in progress. Click on “Stake Hosting Deposit” to get the transaction started. Make sure you have also provided a contact email. Once MetaMask has confirmed the transaction, you can host properties!

Step 2: Create Property 

Head over to the “My Properties” tab in the sidebar. Click on “List Property”:

Above is a sample of a completed property listings page. Fill out the details for your property and upload pictures as accurately as possible.

At this point, your property has been registered, but is not available for stays.

Step 3: List Property

At this point, your property has been registered, but is not available for stays. Putting the property up as a listing initiates the creation of the NFT that represents ownership for the duration of the stay. To put the property up as a listing and available for rent, you must provide:

• Dates of availability

• Rental Rate

• Deposit Rate

These details are available in the “My Properties” tab in the sidebar. Once all details have been filled out, click on “List Property” to finalize the listing. Congrats, you have listed a property on Holon! ** **

Step 1: Find a Property

Once your wallet is connected and your account is set up, click on Property Finder in the sidebar on the homepage:

Browse through the offerings and find a property that fits your preferences. Click on the property card to see details on available dates and rental rates.

Step 2: Select date ranges and Contact Property Owner // Submit Rental Request:

Once you have selected a property, you can view dates for availability. Select the date ranges that work for you. The total charge includes the rate per rental period and the security deposit, which is fully refundable except in cases of questionable behavior.

Once your date ranges are selected, click on “Send Sublet Request”. Follow the dialogue box prompts to confirm the details of the transaction and send the request to the homeowner. 

Step 3: Approve the USDC transaction and purchase the NFT

Once you have been in contact with the homeowner and they approve your sublet request, you must approve the USDC transaction to finalize the arrangement. 

Congrats! You have rented a property on Holon - communicate with the homeowner for details on access, rules during the stay, and other important details! To view past, present, and future trips, check out the “My Trips” section in the homepage sidebar. 

:

Step 1: Log In with Web3

Holon runs in Web3, requiring a connection to your MetaMask wallet to exchange funds and validate users. Without logging in, the Holon homepage will look like this:

To unlock listing and renting properties, click the purple button in the sidebar that says “Log In with Web3”. Allow your Metamask account permission to interact with Holon. Once you have your wallet connected, you should see a pop-up that says “Signed In”. Your homepage should now look like this:

Step 2: User Details

Now that your MetaMask wallet is connected, your Holon homepage now provides access to Hosting and Renting properties. Click on the “My Profile” section in the sidebar.

Enter your email. While you can host and rent without providing additional details, it would be great if we could get your username for contact and updates. Congrats, you are now officially registered with Holon! 

Step 3: Stake Hosting DepositIs 

If you would like to host on the Holon platform, you must stake a deposit through the “My Profile” section. The hosting deposit is outlined on this page. 

Click on “Approve” in the Required Deposit section to get the transaction started. Please note that hosting deposits cannot be withdrawn while stays are in progress. Make sure you have also provided a contact email. Once MetaMask has confirmed the transaction, you can host properties!

Check out our other getting started articles to learn more about how to rent and host properties.

UPDATE: OUR $HOLON INCENTIVE PROGRAM HAS BEEN PUT ON HOLD.

Why

With everything we do at Holon, we believe we are at our most powerful when we are free.

Freedom to travel the world and soak up all of its beauty and adventure. Freedom from constraints that limit our ability to think big. Freedom through economic security to pursue the life we want for ourselves.

When we look at the world around us, we see many complex systems, economic, social, and political, that all, intentionally or not, hinder our ability to be free.

Those are the ones we wish to change with the products we launch and the organization we build.

How

Housing is such a fundamental building block upon which we build the rest of our lives. Yet the systems around housing are some of the most antiquated and maladapted to the new modern life enabled by the internet.

Most of us are likely stuck in 12-month leases. With vacations that we take, we often end up paying double rent. Nomadic life can be filled with financially exhaustive short-term rentals. Spending more time than a short-term rental is impossible to do without subletting our apartment and finding storage for our personal belongings.

Our housing traps us in a false duality of living vs. working with the inability to deeply marry the two.

Our first product is going to be taking the most lightweight unit of housing, the lease, and bringing that into the web3 digital world to adapt it to the lifestyle that we all want to live. We’re going to decompose the lease for you such that you have total freedom in how you want it to be used.

What

We are onboarding users into our lease tokenization beta program. As a part of this program, you will be able to upload your lease details and receive an NFT for each month remaining in your lease.

Such NFTs have a variety of use cases:

• Swap NFTs to do an apartment trade.

• Immediately list certain months up for sale.

• See how much people are willing to bid on your apartment for that month.

• Allow third parties to compose your NFTs into longer stays they can offer to others.

This is just the initial exploration of this design space. We imagine that as these NFTs become able to interact with other NFTs, DeFi, and other Web3 initiatives, the things we can do with them will be limitless.

Additionally, as a part of our beta launch, we will be giving 1.5% of our token supply to those listing their units and completing stays.

We will be continuing this program for the first 1000 months onboarded on our platform and for the first 100 cumulative stays on our platform. We will strive to make sure all the leases onboarded onto our platform are real and may ask for further proof if we have any evidence for foul play.

Staying true to Web3 principles, we want to make sure our early users hold ownership in the value that they help create on our platform. Our early users are incredibly valuable in helping us bootstrap and improve our platforms and we want that to be clear in the tokens we distribute back to them.

To sign up for our beta, please fill out the Typeform here and join our Discord! Learn more on our website.

Future

This beta program is the first step in our mission to digitize all property. As a follow-up to this beta, we will soon be releasing a full-stack marketplace that helps renters mint their lease NFTs and travelers find destinations.

We are working with a bottoms-up strategy by first providing utility to renters, and slowly working our way up to the homeowner by bringing the value of Web3 through unique tooling for them.

With the digitizing of property, not only do we expect to make it more flexible, and thus adaptable to our modern lifestyle, but also much more accessible. Housing is so fundamental to our quality of life, and yet it is becoming increasingly less affordable.

Housing is operating on 70-year-old infrastructure that significantly limits the number of new economic innovations that can be built, and as a result, suffers from stagnation. By digitizing property, we upgrade the underlying infrastructure and create the opportunity for us to redefine home ownership at an incredibly fundamental level.

Tokenized leases are the first step, but the future is making housing a human right!

Principles

I believe in distributed ownership, freedom, and trust as the fundamental building blocks of any system that serves humans.

Systems that aren’t built upon these principles will be suboptimal in empowering humans in maximizing their talents and coordinating together to bring about a more optimistic future.

~ Hippie Vibes ~

Modernity

The current way by which we view housing ownership is exclusionary with incredibly high barriers of entry through capital and knowledge requirements for the vast majority of individuals. As a result, most land, and its accompanying natural resources, are often utilized by a singular party, to the detriment of everyone else. We see this in resource management, NIMBY debates, empty condos, etc.

While the modern view is a giant leap above the even more exclusionary practices of the past, where only nobles could own land, it is still a system that needs evolution.

Land especially is a natural resource inherent to the Earth and her children.

Our current diction of “landlords” and “tenants” are subtle social programming reminding us of feudalistic systems that we need to ascend from.

Pathology

The unhealthiness of the system is an attribute of the growing wealth divide happening, at the very least, in the United States between those who own and those who do not. Such social problems affect us all. Human society is an integrated and interdependent system - where the rich in countries with large wealth divides tend to not live as long as the rich in countries with a more equitable distribution of wealth.

It is our duty as builders in Web3 to create new positive sum systems around ownership. We’ve seen it bleed through to ownership over software platforms, but for us to manifest the full impact of this new paradigm, we need to touch Layer 0 - the physical world. We can create better economic games for both landowners and tenants that create integrated success for all.

How

Tools

Ethereum enables the digitization of assets.

Once digitized, such assets can be integrated into positive-sum economic games that are able to generate far more value for all parties than what is possible in the world prior. For example, liquidity mining is being used to bootstrap financial protocols to become competitive with traditional finance spearheaded by Compound and Yearn. In it, the protocol developers, the users, and liquidity providers all benefit from virtuous economic loops.

Land and housing currently have ever-advancing digital interfaces pioneered by Web2 companies like Zillow and AirBnb, but these assets have stayed rooted in archaic ledgers. Similar to neobanks and the financial ecosystem - real estate technology uses advanced interfaces built on the same self-serving infrastructure of the past.

We can upgrade the fundamental infrastructure upon which housing is governed.

MVP

What is clear is that for any new economic system that thinks about housing differently - prioritizing accessibility and distributed ownership, we must evolve past the existing infrastructure.

To begin with, we can play with the smallest unit of ownership - the lease. We can deconstruct the 12-month lease into individual NFTs representing ownership over each of the 12 months.1 NFT representing ownership for January, another for February, and so on.

Future

In the future, once housing deeds exist as digital assets on the blockchain, we can fractionalize or tokenize the ownership such that those using or living on the property accrue ownership.

For example, today someone who rents an apartment for 5+ years ends up accruing 0 ownership in the actual apartment itself. While we have accepted that as an inherent part of the owner <-> user dynamic, what Web3 has taught us is that there is real impact in giving ownership into the hands of people that actively use the platform. Maybe renters should incur some ownership in the apartment they live in and maintain. With some fractionalization or tokenization, streaming ownership to a tenant is totally possible!

Landlords can compete with each other to give away ownership to attract people to live in their space. Effectively making people ape into ownership! Naturally, there is a lot that is being ignored in this high-level theorization - like the advantage to current owners for diluting their ownership. I don’t have very many answers here, but we can imagine some low-hanging financial benefits in decreasing mortgage requirements, transferring debt load, and less operational overhead costs.

It feels unlikely this will make immediate sense in high-demand areas like NYC or San Francisco, but it may make a world of difference in developing areas like Wyoming. One can imagine a property developer wanting to develop Jacksonhole can utilize ownership incentives to entice remote workers to move in. Live in this complex or buy a house in this neighborhood and be streamed ownership!

Naturally, individuals moving there increase the value of the property, increasing the wealth in the local economy, and creating a virtuous economic cycle. Integrated success through distributed ownership!

What

Experiment

Enough theory. What is happening today is that I am turning the months of December, January, and February of my apartment into individual NFTs that people can buy and redeem to stay at my place. My apartment is located in the East Village - super close to Equinox, Whole Foods, Target, Thompkins Square Park, and basically all the cool bars.

In its current form, it really isn’t much different from a sublease. Maybe I can attach a 10% resale percentage that potentially gives me a monetization on secondary markets for my lease. Eventually, an auction mechanism for my remaining months to improve price discovery.

However, the hope is that when digitized, we can discover really cool things to do with it, and we can begin exploring this space.

I encourage everyone reading this who feels trapped in their 12-month lease to join our Discord, tokenize their lease, and see what cool shit can happen! We can create a governance token that is distributed to people who tokenize their lease to increase this new apartment market liquidity, and as remuneration for community members that took the risk and got harassed by their landlords.

Redemption

To actually redeem the NFT to stay in my place, you’ll need to DM me on Telegram/Twitter/Discord and I’ll still need you to sign a whole sublease thing, unfortunately. Maybe stake like $500 as a security deposit.

I know this is super mega lame, but hey man baby steps. Redeeming may require transferring the NFT to some burn address. Open to feedback on the best mechanism to do this.

Or you can just keep the NFT for vibes as the first example of a housing contract existing on-chain and not redeem!

What will I do

I’m excited to see what happens when we can actually have NFTs represent legal ownership over things that exist in the real world.

I have no idea what I’ll be doing in the months when people redeem my apartment, I’ll likely just fuck-off somewhere random for that month. If you have an extra room or wanna hang out, DM me!

This feels like a fun, cool futuristic step. Let’s think as big as we can with NFTs, DeFi, and Web3!

Props

Mega props to James Duncan for being the only one to tell me that this isn’t a fucking stupid idea and for motivating me to create!

Shout out to Mr. Clean for providing the initial idea spark and for providing new areas of exploration.

Relevant Links

Pictures and Video of my apartment [my room is the master].

Discord for us to coordinate around uploading more housing into Web3.

Collection on OpenSea to purchase the NFT.

Twitter for updates.

Vision: Manifest new economic models based on distributed ownership, freedom, and trust to unlock the next stage in human prosperity.

Mission: Digitize the ownership and management of property.

Values:

1. Our organization moves at the speed of trust.

2. We choose to embrace growth hierarchies over dominator hierarchies.

3. When possible, we choose collaboration over competition.

4. When tackling an impossibly hard mission like ours, it is important to have fun.

5. We are a young and evolving organization and as we evolve, so will some of our beliefs.

Resources

Discord: 74 Members

Round Table: 5

DAO Treasury: 0.042 ETH, no token

DAO Assets: NYC apartment, Athens apartment

Review

What started off as an experiment around annoyance over rigid 12-month leases is now slowly turning into something that represents much more.

The fact that there are even 74 members within our Discord community is absolutely mind-boggling to me. Even crazier is that out of those 74, we were able to find 4 others that were excited to commit some amount of their daily lives to see this vision through.

One thing I’ve realized while failing at previous ventures, and building the Index Coop, is that you can’t do anything without other people. What is represented by a modest start is actually a 0-1 moment where an idea slowly becomes a movement that can never die. What is so special about our movement is that we are choosing to tackle one of the hardest problems out there not because it has the highest expected value, but because we have to.

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Fungal Mold recreating the city of Tokyo's subway

Currently, we are like a fungal mold. Rapidly iterating and branching out to find the niches where we can add more value. Our current two streams are:

1. Property acquisition. Here we are exploring how an on-chain entity can go about buying [raising capital, mortgages] and maintaining [layer 0 legal infra] a piece of property.

2. Securitizing the lease. Here we are continuing the initial exploration of how we can deconstruct the 12-month lease and adapt it to a more nomadic lifestyle.

We’ll explore the initial strategy behind each below.

Property Acquisition

Eventually, all land and property will be owned and managed by DAOs. Some by Holon Housing ourselves. We are seeing the very early innings of it happening with CityDAO buying a plot in Wyoming and CabinDAO creating their first Creator Cabin in the outskirts of Wyoming.

The process right now is very ill-defined and unclear. As we attempt to engage with real estate developers to do our first home purchase, we don’t have a ton of clarity as to how we are going to be able to do so.

While we explore this process, we are going to be defining and creating primitives that eventually any DAO can use to engage with the physical world. This includes raising funds from outside investors, working with lending protocols to create a mortgage, and creating the legal organization to interface with layer 0. All of these things can eventually be packed into a service offered to DAOs and those that have a significant portion of their wealth in crypto.

With the home that we purchase, we really hope to explore what new economic models we can build around ownership. Namely exploring questions like

1. How can we make rent-to-own a better system for both tenants and landlords?

2. What token games can we create after digitizing and tokenizing property?

3. Can we make such housing accessible to people that have never had it before due to being unable to access traditional banking services?

Solving such questions presents a massive opportunity for our ecosystem to transform the housing industry.

Securitizing the Lease

What spurred the creation of Holon was that I was pissed off about being locked into a 12-month lease with my name on it and having to sublet every time I wanted to go somewhere without having to pay double rent. It felt like a significant clampdown on mobility.

AirBnBs in new towns were pretty expensive. Subletting was a pain in the ass [and technically against the lease]. Price discovery, in general, seemed totally fucked for apartments and short-term leases. It all felt pretty archaic.

Initially explored doing stuff like apartment swaps as a solution, but apartment swaps require such a crazy coincidence of wants and have a shitty discovery mechanism. Through brainstorming with friends, we figured NFTs could be super interesting in enabling discovery and pricing.

Reasons being:

1. You could list an NFT representing your place and have people bid on it to see how much it is worth.

2. You could swap an NFT with another NFT to basically do an apartment swap.

3. You could speculate on NFTs if you think something is mispriced.

4. You can compose NFTs. String together 12 1-month long NFTs to create a new type of lease. Decomposing 1 NFT into daily or weekly [or hourly!] NFTs to provide way more granularity.

5. You can use DeFi protocols like NFTX to actually create something like an AMM for apartments.

All of these are intellectually pretty interesting! Plus with Web3, we can incentivize the initial liquidity on this marketplace to get stuff on. As an initial target, we can aim for 1000 months of apartments available and then begin to test what actually adds a ton of value to the user experience and makes them want to use our platform. A bunch of fun theses to test out and play with!

Building Out the DAO

To continue growing in our experiments, there are some features of the DAO that we need to build out. The ones in initial sight are:

1. Discourse forum.

2. Contributor onboarding.

3. Token for ownership.

Discourse Forum

Likely the easiest bit here, but we need a place where we can do longer, more asynchronous communication around what our current thinking is. Discord is useful, but more of a synchronous tool and hard for new members to parse as they onboard into our community.

Contributor Onboarding

We need designers, engineerings, marketers, token designers, operations experts, and others to help us conduct these experiments and help us scale. I view creating this community and ecosystem as my number one most important job. If we do this right, we can blow past any challenge that we face.

To that end, people that want to contribute to this community, please fill out this forum here so we can figure out how best to onboard you.

Token

Currently, we have no money and our revenue-producing operations are the minuscule 10% secondary market fee we get from apartment sales on OpenSea. That really isn’t much. The only way we can remunerate people for their work is through equity.

Over the next month or so, if we are able to get over the hoop of delivering work on some of these workstreams, and get some traction going in the projects we are working on, we will launch a token and begin a contributor rewards program. It is still only Week 1 so a little early to be thinking about, but something to look out for as we begin to develop.

It is time for us to start coming together as a community! Let’s get a call on the books so we can come together to talk about what we are all building.

If you are interested in attending, please fill out this link to let us know when you are free. We’ll try to find a spot that fits everyone’s schedule!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading! It’s been quite an action-packed week and now we’re ready to start exploring some of our initial hypotheses and see if we can provide value for people. If we’re successful, this’ll be a step function improvement in how land and resources are allocated across the world.

This is the power of Web3!