In this article I present the GoKey project, a product for the real estate market, with the mission of developing the benefits of real estate as a source of wealth, on the Cardano blockchain.
Throughout my explanation, you will find eight “writer’s notes“, which are my own observations.
Real estate is important to people, since accessibility to housing is crucial in everyone’s life.
The dream of owning a home is becoming unattainable for most people, who are trapped in the rental cycle, and this is largely a product of bad monetary policy, which depreciates fiat currencies. In addition, low interest rates have fueled extreme investor demand, prompting yield seekers to raise real estate prices to offset low returns.
Throughout the history of English Common Law, ownership of real estate has been referred to as a “bundle of rights”, in which each “right” may have the ability to be individually granted, bought, sold, tested, exchanged and/or mortgaged.
Historically, these rights have been officially registered through documents such as deeds, titles, mortgages, leases, easements, licenses, etc.
The team understands that with Cardano’s blockchain technology and smart contracts, it will be possible to efficiently and inexpensively represent and record these valuable rights in a secure and immutable digital format, and exchange tokenized rights. The idea is to use blockchain technology to get rid of slow, expensive, and sometimes unreliable intermediaries.
NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) will be used to tokenize real estate property rights, and through a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) the community will be able to invest in real estate, developing a novel approach to financing and real estate transactions between peers.
The project believes that real estate ownership is unique, and NFTs are ideal for the digital representation of real-world legal property rights. GoKey NFTs can represent many types of legal real estate interests, including present and future purchase, sale, occupancy, option, mortgage, or security rights.
Owning a “Deed” NFT GoKey will provide evidence of simple title to ownership, but the transfer of these NFTs alone does not transfer legal ownership of the property described in the NFT metadata.
Writer’s Note #1: the legal validity of the documentation that titles properties must be approved by each jurisdiction in which the real estate is located. An NFT on the Cardano blockchain will be legally valid only if it is regulated by the jurisdictional government entity, otherwise it is just a simple copy of a document.
GoKey DAO
Wyoming has earned a reputation as a world leader for its advanced blockchain technology legislation and regulations, and has recently taken a big leap forward with new legislation that officially recognizes DAOs, and provides them with legal authority and protections similar to LLCs (Limited Liability Company).
Investment DAOs allow communities to collaboratively pool their resources, and make decisions to advance their core values, missions, and goals.
The team has published that on April 21, 2022, it incorporated GoKey DAO LLC, a recognized legal entity in the State of Wyoming, USA.
The team is proposing to the community that with GoKey DAO you can use your digital assets to buy and sell real-world property rights, using the most innovative legal structure currently available in the United States.
Writer’s Note #2: the project maintains a website for publication of properties but its links are not active, and it shows only a real listing (Property ID: 19265) 1135 East 26th Place North, Tulsa, OK, USA.
The bill says long-term tenants will also be able to join the DAO, gaining a say in the management of their home, and accumulating equity that they can use to save for a home of their own.
According to published information, membership and voting rights in GoKey DAO will be determined depending on a combination of factors that could include, but are not limited to, the number of $GOKEY tokens held, ownership of property-specific, location-specific, or time-specific NFTs, the amount of $ADA staked in GoKey stakepools, and/or time during the which the prospective member has owned or delegated the required tokens.
Writer’s Note #3: the system of participation and eligibility for voting, as an essential part of the operation of any DAO, is not defined. The voting platform is not active at the time of writing this article.
Writer’s Note #4: the documentation does not explain the business model of the DAO, nor its economic sustainability, such as the collection of fees or real estate investments that provide genuine income.
The team reports that it is developing easy-to-use smart contract templates without individual programming, which will enable individuals and small businesses to carry out simple, secure and profitable real estate transactions, without relying on intermediaries.
Arrangements such as seller financing, also known as owner carry, and lease purchase, can offer advantageous flexibility in real estate transactions, in terms, timing and transaction costs for both parties, compared to the standard process for packaging mortgage loans for sale as real estate securities to Wall Street investors.
By taking advantage of the immutability and security of on-chain smart contracts and NFTs, parties will not need to know or trust each other to perform trades.
Sellers will be able to offer attractive conditions to buyers and obtain higher returns without intermediary fees, and buyers will be able to negotiate better conditions than those offered by traditional real estate brokers.
Writer’s note #5: there are two repositories in GitHub at the time of writing this article, one for the token registration and the other is a fork for the token listing request on the MuesliSwap DEX. There is no smart contract repository, although they were planned for Q4 2022.
Tokenomics
The $GOKEY token is a native Cardando utility and governance token.
GoKey Policy ID: c7dcfa416c127f630b263c7e0fe0564430cfa9c56bba43e1a37c6915
The proposed idea is that the $GOKEY token will track the value of the U.S. real estate market by periodically adjusting its supply at a proportional rate, with a mix of residential and commercial real estate price indexes. Thus, the $GOKEY token will be programmed to adjust supply to increase scarcity, avoiding inflation and devaluation, at a pace that follows the U.S. real estate market.
With increased demand, holders of $GOKEY tokens will benefit from an appreciation of $GOKEY as supply readjusts to be in line with the real estate market.
Writer’s Note #6: oracles are needed to know the off-chain information of the real estate indexes. It is not explained in any document about which oracles will be the service providers. If you want to know about oracles I leave an article I have written (1).
Tokens can be earned through staking rewards or purchased on the open market, and can then also be obtained as rental incentives in the future.
The team clarified that $GOKEY tokenomics could be adjusted to maximize flexibility as the team considers new distribution concepts, team structure, vesting schedules, user incentives, and partnerships. Therefore, this preliminary distribution table is subject to minor changes.
Stake Pool Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO): started on May 30, 2022 and will end on December 31, 2023.
Writer’s Note #7: The duration of the ISPO was scheduled for a total of 19 months. As of the date of this article, we are halfway there, with little progress on the Roadmap.
Writer’s Note #8: 22% of the tokens will go to the ISPO according to its tokenomics, which add up to 990,000,000 $GOKEY, however, the ISPO site mentions 1,000,000,000, with a difference of 10,000,000 tokens.
Currently, the GoKey stakepool registers an active stake of ₳ 2.2+ million, and variable margin of 99%, which means that the reward collection is almost entirely $GOKEY, and only pays 1% of the rewards in ADA to the delegators, obtained in the validation of blocks in each epoch.
The team recently introduced a restructuring to the staking incentive: Introducing the Dynamic ISPO.
I have consulted about my observations in the Discord server of the project and I have obtained the following response:
Hi, I’m a writer for adapulse.io. I’m writing an article about GoKey. I have a couple of questions that I couldn’t answer based on the material I researched.
1. what is the business model by which the DAO investors will make money and how will the DAO be sustainable over time?
2. Do you have any progress on smart contracts? The Roadmap talks about launching in Q4 2022.
Thank you!
Welcome in and thanks for covering GoKey!
We are in the process of updating general info as part of the process of migrating to a new site.
Would you like to schedule a call to talk through some of the updates and nuance around what we’re building?
Regarding the DAO, we had planned to offer a unique opportunity for GoKey community owned and managed real estate. Due to current legal uncertainty around investment DAOs, we will shelve this idea for now, instead, adding a securitized, SEC compliant real estate investment product to the GoKey ecosystem
That is to say, It would only be token economics (tokenomics) the investment?
Are there fees or interest on loans?, or will it just be the increase in the value of $GOKEY?
The utility of the GOKEY token is two-fold – payment of platform service fees and governance. The token itself is not for investment purposes
The Team
GoKey’s founder is Craig Immel, your Community Manager is Jimmy Londo, and the rest of the team is made up of four Advisors.
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(1)Oracles and Data Security – Part I ; Oracles and Data Security – Part II
