Travis John (00:01.07)
Welcome back to another episode of the Real World Assets Show. Today we have a special one because we are here in person at Consensus 2024. And fortunate enough to have an in -person meeting here with Denis Petrovcic. He's the CEO and founder of Blocksquare, revolutionizing and tokenizing real estate on chain. So today we're going to talk a bit about that and welcome, sir. Thank you, Travis, for having me here. Yeah, likewise. So we chatted yesterday. I know I've been in touch with Julia, your CMO, and we've been

We've chatted over the past month or so, but this was a great place to have this meeting and talk more about what you're doing at Blocksquare. Perfect timing. 100 million, you now have, it's probably over that, but the press release just recently, you have over 100 million in assets that have been tokenized. And this goes from anywhere from hospitality to healthcare. So yeah, tell us a little bit about first, before we get into all this exciting, I always like to kind of...

Give a little bit of a teaser to the fans of what to talk about, but I think first let's just talk a little bit about Denis and kind of this journey into Blocksquare and how this started. I know you said this in other podcasts, but we'd love to share this with our audience too. Sure. So yeah, so it goes way back to 2016, I would say, when I first encountered Ethereum. And then we connected with Viktor, who is the CTO and co -founder at Blocksquare.

And we didn't have at that time any thinking of connecting blockchain and real estate as such, but we just wanted to collaborate and see if blockchain and smart contracts could be useful in kind of different other different verticals. And through that process, we found a recipe of sorts to transfer the value of a single real estate asset onto tokens. And that's when Peter

our third co -founder and chief compliance officer joined in. And that's when we then kind of started contemplating of creating a business out of it. And could this be something that would solve certain actual real world problems? And we saw that there's a lack of financing around the world. There's lack of liquidity because of this or the other way around.

Travis John (02:24.686)
And the access to real estate assets is quite undemocratized. So we saw that there's gonna be a need for this kind of technology to be used by real estate professionals who are often not tech savvy. And we came from a more technical background and that's when we kind of started this journey. That was officially in 2018. Yeah, you're early. You guys were building before...

RWA was an acronym and before many of these these kind of platforms started and that obviously gave you a bit of head start which is why you're having some of these amazing milestones with properties right now where you've reached. I think also it's worth noting like with Victor Viktor Peter, I talked to a lot of startups and just having that trifecta of co -founders that have these different core competencies I think is really key to your success. You have...

someone coming out from the legal compliance side, you have somebody coming out from technical side, and business and technical, you know, being able to kind of bridge all that together, I think has been really important because you've been able to structure it the right way, you've been able to build the right tech, but then also you've been able to build a community around this, which I think is, you know, sounds like the easiest part, or you know, most people know that's not, but I'd say that's probably the hardest thing to do in Web3 Effective.

you know, building people that are here for a quick pump, that's not very hard, but to build people sustainably that they're interested in wanna invest in the project long -term, I think is quite hard still. And you guys have accomplished that and continue to do so. So that's commended. And I think what's interesting is as you've built this, I think even just kind of taking a step back, when you saw this as a real estate vertical, what was your, like,

V1 of the product like you know how does how is this change or like what is your vision you know because I know that this is a Things always pivot I mean this is a startup environment and it's tech and it's blockchain Which is changes you know three weeks is it can be decades in the real world so like what is what does that look like I always like to know about you know those early days and like these pivots that took place that were pinnacle in the success I mean When we were kind of blue blue mapping or blue printing creating the blueprint

Travis John (04:52.832)
of block square. We saw it always as an iterative process and things will need to be changed. However, when you develop a blockchain, then what you have is quite...

a protocol that you've built both out of smart contracts and it's gonna stay like that for a long period of time. So you need to think ahead and there's not much things that you are then changing. However, if you're looking back in 2018 when we had the, we tokenized the first real estate asset that was ever sold online, openly, in a tokenized form, it was basically,

a very simple platform or app, if you will, where it was designed for just one token for that property itself. But it had similar components to what the current platform has, obviously not scalable across different...

marketplace operators and so forth, but it proved the concept. So it proved that you can tokenize real estate value, you can put it on sale online. There's people who are gonna be interested and drawn to it, and those people are gonna be there to collect revenues that are shared and be able to exit through a secondary market. And we proved that all of that is true on a very tiny 15K worth single parking space in Tech Parking in Ljubljana where,

where I come from. That's amazing. Yeah, and that, I mean, just being the first tokenized version, not...

Travis John (06:31.214)
the first crypto sale, but I mean the first tokenized version sold and yeah, it's an MVP. That's the way it starts. And that's exciting. I actually didn't know that part of the story. I don't know why I've watched different podcasts, but there was a parking spot. Minimum Viable Product, but Minimum Viable Property as well. Minimum Viable Parking Space. I love that. But the reason we did it was back in the time,

days. I mean we were an early pre -seat stage, sorry nobody wanted, well there was a lot of...

real estate professionals interested and to learn about what we're doing, but then actually going forward and tokenizing an asset or providing an asset for us to tokenize, it was too big of a leap of faith, let's say that, and they were hesitant. And then afterwards when Bitcoin started retracting in its value and negative news being around a lot of this larger real estate

estate players, they had, I would say, a risk assessment that they should not engage in any activities that would have maybe a negative marketing impact on their original venture, right? So we had to find a way of going around it. And by chance, this parking space need on one side for renting it, and on the other side, a hard time to force it.

or the owner to sell it made the perfect case because it actually solved their issues. And it's still tokenized. People are still, nobody can buy the tokens because it became a collectible. I bet, yeah, absolutely. I can imagine. I'm interested in the collectible now. I didn't realize that, so yeah. And I think that is an important point that you obviously need that demand. You need the buy side, sell side. Liquidity is always, back when you guys started, liquidity was a problem.

Travis John (08:39.836)
Interest was a problem. You know, demand was a problem. The asset class wasn't a problem. So like you were addressing the right marketplace and the right issue, but it was just not fully ready, but you were able to get that small win and, you know, build upon that. So like fast forwarding a bit, what is, like just now that you've reached such a number of properties,

What are the verticals I know, like I mentioned initially, like healthcare to hospitality? This isn't just parking spaces and single family homes. You've got an interesting portfolio that you've been putting together, but maybe share a little bit more about that and how that's come together and what your deal flow looks like, how that process looks like.

We are an infrastructure provider, right? So we entered this real estate organization market before RWA was a hashtag. And we saw that our opportunity is to build a scalable infrastructure that enables any real estate company or entrepreneur to easily tokenize real estate assets and basically put them online under their own brand on their own marketplace. So kind of a Shopify for tokenized real estate.

And the crucial point of the structure is that we can really get into any jurisdiction, any place, any city, any town in the world and provide a technology to a company that partners with us and runs it there.

And when it comes to real estate, the important part is supply. How do you get that supply? Right. So that diversity comes from the diversity of partners that we have because they are mainly those who are bringing lots of assets to our infrastructure. So you can have in certain regions, maybe we have a partner that has good access to single family homes. And that's what they're bringing on on chain. Then in the UK, we have a partner who has

Travis John (10:42.912)
care facilities in their portfolio and that's what they're bringing on chain, right? So it really depends on the partner's ability to secure assets and that's what's bringing diversity and the more diversity we have in terms of marketplace partners, the more diversity we're gonna see in real estate assets. The holy grail, I would say, of real estate assets are the thing that I would be most excited if I would get a partner to come to us.

is sports facilities. And here I'm thinking more of things that have a value for the municipality and the people living there, like stadiums. So places where there's events happening and local teams playing, because those assets, as opposed to any other real estate assets, they have their community and they bring a community together. So this kind of things would be

would be really exciting to see in the future. Yeah, I think absolutely. That's an amazing and that was actually one of the talks today with Franklin Templeton CEO, like her family, they own part of the San Francisco Giants. They should get in touch. They should get in touch. I was going to say we need to try to make that connection because that was a question that she didn't answer the question, but she was talking about...

The question was, your family owns San Francisco Giants, what about tokenization? Has your family talked about that? That would be an interesting use case. But to your point, and like I brought up earlier in the conversation, it's about community when it comes to the buy side. From the infrastructure and from the technology side and from the partners that you're bringing on board, they have portfolios, generally more than one property. They typically have a portfolio of properties. Like you mentioned, it's usually under one version.

because that's typically how investors work. And in that case, if it's single family, they think of how many doors they have. And in health care, of course, it's going to be care facilities and those types of things. But that's what's exciting is your technology obviously is universal and it kind of fits those use cases. It's going to focus on real property and being able to tokenize it. And then we'll talk about that other side of your marketplace side and the buy side, where I think is obviously equally important. Because you're able to...

Travis John (13:08.896)
create a value chain and a buy side to that as well. And that I think we should talk about in a moment. Going back to just even the community, I think having more of the partners come in that do have a community aspect to them, I think clearly it will bring a lot more just attention to your project, number one, but also just it does have a better overall...

the waves that are created from that, like you mentioned, it extends throughout the entire community versus just the number of investors that want to buy the token and the asset.

I think when you look at Web3, the communities around Web3 projects in general, they tend to be drawn to projects where they can get some kind of vested interest in that project. And it's the same thing when it comes to tokenized marketplaces, whether that's NFTs or if it's tokenized real estate. And that's a community building tool that Web2 doesn't have.

And here what we're doing at Block Square is we are enabling founders of these marketplaces to leverage the community that we are creating through our token and Oceanpoint and Block Square.

And I think that's an added value that I see more and more, especially talking to our sales team, people, founders, executives, companies looking to launch a marketplace like that, they are aware that the buy side is important and that the buy side is starting to get the value of community as such, because it's not just a customer, but it's a relationship that's long term.

Travis John (15:06.51)
right it's not just somebody coming buying from you and then going ahead it's somebody sticking around and providing value feedback education to others in the community so it's much more vibrant let's say

organization around it, right? It's not just a storefront and then there's customers buying, but customers communicating with each other. And when it comes to investment, that's really important because people want to understand how others are doing and learn from them and vice versa, right? And so those who come earlier are able to share that knowledge with others so that the whole community becomes much more educated about what they're investing in and buying into.

And a lot of times we get a question like, all right, so you provide this infrastructure and you provide this as a white label, right? What's kind of the difference between Blocksquare or I don't know, DigiShares or some other player that is in our competition. And I can say for Blocksquare, obviously, because I know it has something to do with others, but I can see that the value that we bring through the tools we've built that address community.

and enable our marketplace operators to not start from zero but at least start from one is quite powerful as a value proposition. So you're not alone, but you are part of family. And that family has a lot of followers, has a lot of people around, and they have an ability through our launchpad to basically get that vested interest into a certain project without that project needing to have its own token.

but they can do it through $BST. I think that's a, it's a governance tool for the DAO members, but at the same time, it's a tool for any new player to attract and have bested interest by 500 users who will follow that company's progress because they, their APY in the end is kind of affected by their success. Yeah. No, that's well said. And then that's why I've brought up community a lot, because you guys have really mastered that.

Travis John (17:20.448)
I know it's a long game. I know there's lots of things that you're going to continue doing. But one of the things that I, to your point, I think you don't see Starbucks with a Telegram group. You don't see, like Web3 has changed this whole dynamic. You don't see Shopify stores with their own community, like Telegram. And there are some really massive...

quote brands that claim to have an amazing community, but they don't even hold a match to what is done at the level of Web3. And the type of rewards and the type of community and the type of buy -in. And again, this goes back to what you said earlier. It's just democratizing everything. It's not just democratizing. A lot of people think about...

And as you know, like a lot of the people that are involved in your project, they're buying for many reasons. It's in, say, Web 2 of buying real estate, people are buying real estate to either one, buy and hold, and again, get like a yield or get returns, maybe as a landlord or whatever.

or buy and flip, which is not usually the advised method. But in general, it's pretty transactional. It's pretty boring. It's pretty static. And what changes when you bring this to Web3 is, and we'll get into your launchpad and things like that, but I think you are able to bring in a tokenized economy, $BST. And I'm a firm believer that Web3 projects should have a token.

when the utility and the use case and the ecosystem, and that's a big asterisk, of course, because I don't think a token is necessary always, but I think that the most successful projects will have a token, and they will be also, the token will have a very integral part of the ecosystem and make sense and have a value proposition, which $BST does. And I think that's, we'll get into that, because I think that's an important thing we should discuss.

Travis John (19:32.142)
But yeah, I love how you frame up the Web 3 and how that's different than the Web 2 aspect. And I think we should talk a little bit about even what the typical process is about kind of launching the property on the launchpad, or bringing the properties into your ecosystem and using your technology, whether it be white label or just standard.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned community and I agree. I mean, and then you mentioned as well, a Web3 project should have a token.

I think first it should have a community, but oftentimes it's hard to have a community if they don't have a way to have a vested interest there. Because Web3 is flooded with many projects that they offered this. So without it, oftentimes the project is stuck.

And I see that happening with real estate organization marketplaces that launch with a white label and they don't have an ability to get their early community vested into their success. And so they switch to something else where they have that option. And people have only.

this amount of attention span to be active in a community. Because you need to kind of choose the community where you're going to allocate your time to. And a lot of people are very present and active in a couple of these communities, but you can't have seriously be spread all over in 20, 30 communities. So you need to pick your battles in a way, or where you want to be present.

Travis John (21:17.488)
And to the point of creating utility for a token before product, or when you have a product, it's really hard then to find a connection when it comes to real estate tokenization in particular. Because a lot of times people try to create a token that gives people access.

But on the other side, liquidity in tokenized real estate currently is very thin. That's a fact. So whatever you're doing, you're just gaining access to people wanting to try. And it's thin because people are only trying. So they're allocating small amounts. And so you need to have on one side a technology that can match demand and supply with demand based on that current demand. And on the other side, you need to have

have a community that can freely access as much as possible.

these offerings, right? And if you create a token, it just adds friction. And that's the hard part of just doing a marketplace. So with us, with the Launchpad, what our community can do is they can basically pledge their BSTs in the stakes form as BSTs for marketplaces that want to launch with our tech.

to raise the required amount in that pool for that marketplace to run without any cost. So we're doing two things at one. The marketplace and the brand and the team behind it gets exposure to a big community. And two, the cost of running or running on block square are basically going down to zero. And.

Travis John (23:05.166)
In this two, with this two, you get basically marketing, community growth initially, and we basically totally commoditized access to this technology. Yeah, I mean, that's amazing. I didn't like you mentioned earlier, like zero to one, going to zero to one.

is infinitely easier with Blocksquare, you know, for someone that wants to tokenize real estate. And you already have an extremely active community, like you said, and they trust what's coming onto the platform. So, you know, what does it look like for...

someone coming in to, like what's the vetting process look like? Sure. So let's say that anybody that's familiar with launch pads in web three, like I don't know, one of the most successful ones from the previous bull run was I believe Polka Starter, know how things more or less go. The difference here is that the projects are not raising money to spend it, but raising money to get licensing.

over our software, right, to be able to use it. And so the capital is not at risk from people in our community. They just pledge it, and as long as they have it there, they're supporting that project, but they can remove that support after an unlock in, let's say, six months. It depends on the pool. And they can pledge it to another provider.

So the incentives are always for that marketplace operator to deliver on the KPIs that they set forth to achieve in a certain amount of time. Now for a marketplace operator, usually it's getting in touch with our team, whether that's a simple inquiry through our website or maybe meet us at a certain event. Then what we do is we prepare all the information that they need.

Travis John (25:05.376)
need to give to us. This is usually something like a timeframe after a successful launch campaign to deliver on certain KPIs. So they will provide standard things like a deck, maybe a video recording of a pitch, anything that you would provide to VC that you want to raise funds from, maybe. And then this information goes to our community.

to our forum and then the community basically can ask questions and engage with that team.

And that's it. And then after we see that there's enough interest and governance board also kind of approves the marketplace pool to be deployed on Oceanpoint, then the launch campaign officially starts. People can enter it and pledge their $BST for it. And that's it.

That's all there is. And then afterwards, in the meantime, the marketplace is prepared for the partner company and they can start working.

I love that. Yeah, and that's a great explanation to explain the difference between anybody that was in previous cycles, and there are a few launch pads in this cycle, but it's diminished a little bit because it wasn't the most positive experience always because, you know, just whoever had access to that early launch pad would, you know, usually make some money and then dump on everyone else. And in this case, like you mentioned, it's completely different. It's more of...

Travis John (26:41.198)
pledging your $BST tokens and for example, like KPIs and again, this is then getting access to be able to use your service almost as a commoditize.

price versus having to pay for the full technology stack. For example, what kind of KPIs would someone? So for instance, we now approved the first project to launch on Launchpad. So as you know, we just launched this feature this week. And basically, in about two weeks' time, probably that campaign will start. We can obviously present the team to our community and so forth. The KPIs are in the

anything that a marketplace operator would like to achieve. I believe that in time there's gonna be a standardization of KPIs. At the beginning we're gonna see many different variations of maybe the same or similar. It might be anything from value tokenized, number of properties listed, number of offerings successfully completed. It could be volumes on the secondary market.

It could be revenues distributed. It could be just, you know, size of the community on telegram. So it depends really, it can range from in different ways. And the reason for it is that the smart contract for marketplace pool is designed that after that target lock period, there's an evaluation by the governance board and the $BST community if KPIs have been achieved. If KPIs have been achieved, then...

collateral that the project is pledging in that pool is unlocked so they can withdraw it, otherwise it gets burned. So there's a stake for the marketplace operator to basically achieve those KPIs. And they decide how much they want to basically collateralize. And the minimum is 500 as $BST, which is currently I think around something more than $1 ,000 worth of $BST tokens.

Travis John (28:54.734)
That's good. And there's there's incentive, like you said, for them to reach the KPIs, which is important. So from a end user standpoint, from someone looking to invest in these properties, like, what does that look like specifically? Obviously, the $BST token is integral in this process. But what does this look like? Just for someone coming in to say, hey, I'm interested, I like this. I'd like to join the community and watch out for the next investment opportunities.

So in terms of well what we discussed into the launchpad is we're talking here about new marketplace operators wanting to launch their businesses So that's that's a different type of offering But on these marketplaces you can find real estate assets that these companies have brought on chain And some of them are available either through a primary offering or a secondary market the secondary market is It's a peer -to -peer basically swap between

stable coin and real estate tokens and we're routing it through 0x protocol and on the primary market it's basically a purchase either in a in a private pre -sale or in a in a in a main sale and both are well

In one you can purchase with fiat. And the primary sale happens through a smart contract where you invest in a stable coin. Okay. And what's a typical timeframe of when some of your properties sell out? Like what is that?

What does that look like? I know I'm putting you on the spot there. No, but it really depends on the marketplace. A lot of marketplace operators think that if they bring supply, there's going to be demand. The community is going to happen. That's not the case. So what you need to do is you really need to think ahead of how you're going to raise a community around your marketplace. I think with the Launchpad, this dynamic is going to be different than it was before.

Travis John (31:04.24)
I think results are gonna be much, much quicker or faster, if you will. And that's gonna kind of increase the velocity of development for each marketplace operator for sure.

Yeah, and that is exciting news. I think I should underscore that. Like what you launched this week, the Launchpad focus with Ocean Point is a significant development in the stage of the company because you're now providing a very clear path. Like we talked about, going zero to one for that operator, which is your main client, ultimately, to get to market and rally a community, an early community of supporters.

that are able to get personally invested and financially invested, which again is much more the Web3 ethos. It's not very transactional and that is important to have that kind of like that on -ramp.

and that launch pad that facilitates this in a way that makes it much more in that Web3 ethos. Exactly. And a lot of times we have also discussions with potential marketplace operators that are interested in basically partnering with us. And they question the interest of Web3 native, let's say, users in very boring, not boring, but for the

very small returns that real estate yields, like five, six, seven percent, maybe in some cases it's more. It depends really on the structure of the capital stack and as well the type of real estate asset and the region or where it is. But essentially it's always kind of we're talking about five to 15 % returns, right? And in some cases even less. And so that's, there's a,

Travis John (33:05.648)
a new service that's gonna be deployed soon on Oceanpoint, which basically is gonna create a more Web3 type of returns for people who buy real estate tokens on our partner marketplaces and are able then to take those tokens and stake them on Oceanpoint to earn crypto $BST instead of the normal yield. And that normal yield is then accrued

cumulated in the governance board's wallet, in the treasury, and used to purchase $BST and burn it out of circulation. So kind of boosting effects on the whole community as well. And on the other side, you can basically, we're bringing that value proposition of buy and hold real estate, earn crypto. And I think that's something that makes real estate,

much more cooler for people in Web3.

Yeah, it does and I but I also think what's it what's interesting and you've seen this play out but with the increased interest in tokenization and the acronym RWA and particularly treasuries and T bills which are obviously in that five percent return rate We've seen a massive interest there. I mean most of this of course is institutional but realistically we are seeing that to be you know, kind of an interesting aspect and I think the

I don't expect that investors are going to, you know, Web3 investors do like to see those big returns. Let's face it. But I do think that there's some interest in that like consistency. And we know in Web3, we know from the history of Web3 that there's so much up and down roller coaster and...

Travis John (34:57.102)
particularly a lot of speculative coins that go to zero. So I do think there are more people that are being sensitized or desensitized, depending on how you look at it, to investing in things that are stable, things that are a lot more, you know, calculated returns, even if they're not the 30 or 40 % returns that they typically see. So. Yeah, it's, I mean.

If you invest a thousand, you are interested in a higher return potential, right? If you invest 10, then that return can be a bit smaller. If you invest 10 million, then 5%, 3%, it's already great. And you're looking to diversify capital into safer, lower yield investment.

types of investments, right? So I think that boosting of APY is interesting, especially because it allows people to invest more amounts of their liquidity into a new type of asset, tokenized real estate that they haven't tried so far. So it's kind of a tasting menu that still yields an interesting amount. So if you invest a thousand, then you get 150 APY, percent APY as opposed to five.

at 5%, that's 50 bucks a year, but 150, that you get your initial investment back in a very short amount of time, which kind of de -risks you from saying, hey.

you know, this might be interesting to try with and learn from it and be rewarded as an early contributor to the whole movement. Obviously, this is not something that's gonna be there forever. But now those early, let's say early stage or early adopters of RWA and real estate tokenization are definitely gonna benefit from engaging earlier than later, right? Yeah, no, and that's good. I think that's a good...

Travis John (36:58.576)
emphasis is that the, and we've seen like Celsius, we've seen some of the players in the last cycle that didn't make it with returns that were like 40%, you know, things were insane, but incentives are the key to any business model in many cases of especially new ideas and new business models and attracting new users.

Again, it needs to be thought out. It needs to be not Ponziomics. It needs to be focused around something that's sustainable. But like you mentioned, it won't be forever. But if you're an early adopter, you're getting rewarded for participation. And you can buy real estate on crypto. I like that tagline. That's a good one. Yeah. Cool. So what did I miss? I know we talked a bit about the whole flow. And I know, obviously, operators and the Launchpad thing is something we want to see.

We're gonna keep an eye on and have you back to talk about it. I know we want to support as a channel as well. But what else did I miss or what would you like to share?

I don't know, I think one of the things that I like, especially in the last year, what happened, the last two years, I would say, the consistent growth of our team. We're now 35 people spread around the world. We're here at Consensus, five of us, so three co -founders, CMO Julia and our Head of Regional Hubs, Cody, you met him yesterday. And basically,

I think that's that's a way how we really are showing that we're investing in our community growth, not just in terms of growing the numbers, but growing its value. And the value equals to knowledge. And the whole point or the whole idea of regional hubs, why we launched that program and kind of pledged a million BST $BST be invested into it throughout time.

Travis John (39:03.054)
is because we see value in creating local communities around that can kind of grow their own RWA meetups, hubs, if you will, where these topics can be discussed. Because if you look at meetup groups like Ethereum meetups around the world, obviously there's a lot of debate around different technologies within Web3.

and there's maybe space for RWA once per year. That's not enough. If you want that ecosystem to grow, you need to have the ability to get people to get educated about it. And they can get educated if speakers and projects are brought.

to their town basically, right? So how people should see the regional hubs that program that we launched is as a way of an incentivized sponsorship to organize events. Talk about RWA.

mention Blocksquare, maybe give it five, 10 minutes here time as a sponsor of this, but invite other projects as well. So invite projects that are tokenizing.

Bonds, invite projects that are tokenizing other real world assets, invite projects that are creating stable coin pools that are then invested in different real world assets. Why not? I mean, invest in, bring teams and projects that have their own communities to these events so that your local communities can learn from them how things are structured, where the risks are, what needs to be done better.

Travis John (40:54.4)
so that this kind of feedback loop can happen. And I think then the RWA ecosystem is gonna grow first slowly. It's gonna be meetups with 20, 30 people. And then in a year, you're gonna organize events where there's gonna be 300, 400 people coming. And we hope to be, as early movers, able to kind of push that trend as we have done in the past so that RWA is a hashtag that happened.

And now that this trend has happened and it has a big spotlight on all events like consensus as well, I was at the Chainlink event, the speaker, the first thing that they mentioned was tokenization of RWAs and real estate, he put it as an example.

And obviously real estate is attractive because it's the largest asset class in the world. And a very low amount of people will ever be able to own it.

So tokenization kind of opens it up to anyone, which makes it much, much easier for younger generations who are now stuck in this loop of never ever being able to save up enough money to buy their own home, into being able to safely deploy their capital as they acquire it into the same asset class that they're saving for.

without the losses that reads cost and similar because of those management costs and layers that come in between and eat up basically net asset value and returns.

Travis John (42:33.998)
Yeah, that's a huge part of it. You know, democratizing access to real estate, particularly where interest rates are now, you know, in the United States and really even Europe, a lot of the interest rates are quite a bit higher. Inflation is a concern and people's buying power, you know, it's been out of reach for a while but it's even worse than ever. So this is a way to democratize access, to give access to, because hard assets, regardless of where there might be arguments of there being market tops or...

historically real estate's always performed. When you draw the line out far, long tail, that's number one. Number two is if we are gonna continue to be in an inflationary environment, which is very likely, I mean we can't see the future for sure, but hard assets are gonna continue to be where people are gonna wanna put their money.

I mean, hence why real estate's gone up so much already. So this is a way to give access to people all over the world to at least get some portion of those returns and get a share of that opportunity. Yeah, in real estate, there's an asset class, it cash flows. I think that's a unique feature that many asset classes don't have. I mean,

you can invest in stocks and you can get maybe some kind of dividends, but a lot of times these profits are not shared really, but they're reinvested in the business itself to bring up the core value and hence, you know, of the stock. With real estate, that's not the case. I mean, it's obviously reinvested some portion of it into maintenance costs, et cetera, but there's a big portion that then can return for investors.

and can essentially, if done right, real estate can pay for itself in 10, 15 years. So I don't see gold doing it, for instance, or silver. And I think that that's democratizing access to this type of asset is crucially gonna change how people live as well.

Travis John (44:47.438)
And one of the things when we were studying real estate tokenization where is that trying to map out over the world where the opportunity for tokenization lies, we were looking at data that has been reported by GLL on 15 years, 20 years I think, always the same kind of thing, inflation obviously adjusted. But.

around I think 800 trillion is invested, billion is invested every year into real estate and I'm talking here commercial real estate, right? And 80 % of that capital is invested in 60 cities worldwide.

If you look at the 100 top cities, they take up 95 % of that capital. That's 100 cities, the New Yorks, the Londons, the Sidneys, et cetera. But Berlin, the third, I think, largest city in Germany, it's not in that list. So just to give you scale, I think Austin is, right? So it means that a lot of investment capital is not available for this market.

markets. And the reason for it is investors tend to stick where liquidity is higher. And liquidity is higher because they are there. If they move their capital elsewhere, liquidity will go there. So it's a risk move for big funds, pendulum funds, et cetera, to invest in assets outside of those areas.

And what that creates is inequality of opportunity in our population, migrations to bigger cities, congestion in bigger cities, because infrastructure is not being properly developed in those towns where people come from. And so young populations move.

Travis John (46:46.766)
And that's like an infinite loop without a real solution in front of us. With tokenization, we hope that the trend could be reversed where you could have local communities invest in their communities, in the roads, in the buildings, in the real estate assets that create jobs, that keep jobs, and that keep younger populations to stick there and live and raise families. And if that's the case,

happens I think that could be really powerful tool that has a very profound impact on our society. I mean that's a profound statement I never thought about that way but that is a great way to think about tokenization and what that impact can have.

And it's not surprising because that is very common. Like you said, people are going to go where the liquidity is and that loop doesn't tend to change. I mean, you see the major cities like New York or Sydney, whatever, where prices just always go up or they are always very dynamic. They're definitely not.

diminishing in any aggressive fashion ever. So again, that does go back to that liquidity loop and that flywheel that they've created over many decades. So yeah, that's impressive. And I do think that that's, you know, obviously that's the long game, but that does have an opportunity to really change a lot of markets that are not in that top 100, for example. I mean, we are...

trying to make that change happen, whether that's Blocksquare that will make that change or somebody else, another protocol, another company, we don't know. What I am certain, and we talked about this with Viktor and Peter when we founded Blocksquare, is that this future is inevitable. The question is when and who.

Travis John (48:41.582)
Now that we have institutions talking about tokenization of real world assets and that's happening, the future where real estate assets are tokenized and accessible is definitely going to happen.

Not so from today. I think five years from now, we're going to have billions tokenized around the world, many different ways of doing it. But the end effect is the same. People will have access to real estate investments with a click of a button. Yeah, 100%. And I don't have too many conversations. We don't talk about BlackRock and different things happening. But what they've done, you know,

has been a certainly big tailwind that everybody has seen. And you're exactly right. I mean, it's not a matter of if everything's going to be tokenized. It's just a matter of when. And it will take many, many years, especially capital markets, which are even more complex, as you know. Real estate is somewhat complex, but it's quite simple in comparison to most of the other capital market aspects, as you know. And I think that's what people understand in most cases. People can identify

with real estate and some people think they know more than they do and about real estate and things like that but just because it's such a common conversation that people have among themselves. I mean I think that the thing that differentiates real estate as an asset class from any other investment asset classes around is that every person in the world has a direct

connection to real estate, whether they lease it or they rent it or they own it. They need to live somewhere. So everybody has wakes up under a roof. Unfortunately, not everybody. Right. But.

Travis John (50:40.462)
everybody knows about real estate. They understand because it impacts their bottom line at the end of the month. There's a rent agreement that needs to be respected. It needs to be paid. There's a mortgage to be paid. So it impacts on their financials. And they understand that that money transaction goes to someone.

And it's fairly easy to understand that somebody's benefiting or multiple parties are benefiting. The tenant is benefiting because they have a place to live. The landowner is benefiting because they have an investment that yields and so forth. And real estate as such also kind of really...

catches a lot of the labor that's put into building real estate. So all the inflationary effects on labor costs, material costs, energy costs are priced into real estate. And that's why it's performing. With gold,

energy costs are obviously pristine as well, because you know, you need to mine it and store it and so forth. But...

But that asset class is obviously it's different and it's a different value proposition. With real estate, I think it's quite unique and everybody should be able to own it. That's a great sound bite. I'm glad you brought that. This is a great extension of the conversation. I think this also ties back to what you mentioned. I know we talked about this yesterday about the ambassador program.

Travis John (52:20.526)
And that's what I was segueing when I was saying forget about anything on the protocol side. But yeah, like from community side, we talked a little bit at the beginning and then we talked a lot about operators and protocol and the Launchpad clearly. But the ambassador program definitely want to go back and just kind of put a button on that because obviously you have like 65 ambassadors right now. Is that somewhere around that? Yeah, I think. And to the point you just made, I think that's why this is a good segue to this is.

Real estate is something that everyone identifies with. So this is something that your community building around your local chapters that you're building out with ambassadors, it's just another interesting way to have these conversations. Like you said, your block square is gonna be one portion of these conversations. You're not pushing it, but you are.

you are allocating a million $BST, which is not insignificant. It's already over $2 million in today's value, right? Roughly. I think it's a bit less than a million. But I would price it higher for my personal accounting. And then we were talking about 10 before. So yeah, I was trying to be actually conservative. I was probably not even conservative there. Yeah. But.

realistically this is a significant commitment into the community and obviously to building that and I think that's something that will be payoff for sure. I mean we saw in the past communities with early stage blockchain project. I don't know Cardano community, Ethereum community, etc.

and these local communities organizing meetups on their own, on their own expense, to just get people who are interested in the same, in the same room and have a nice conversation with them. And the reason why this happened organically is that...

Travis John (54:20.334)
people in crypto didn't have anybody to talk to. I remember starting Blocksquare or just before starting Blocksquare and even at that time, it was really hard to talk with anybody except maybe Viktor or Peter and...

there was our community there in in Lubliana was quite small i mean there were people in bitcoin but they were not interested in the usage of that technology for real estate that was nobody to talk to so we formed

community through FIBREE. Eight people from around the world having their own meetups locally joined together form their own organization and that organization in the end attracted people from more than 70 cities to create their own meetups under that flag and basically foster their own communities.

And that was quite powerful because it created data information that was then packaged on a yearly basis into a report that anybody can download for free from FIBREE .org. And as a non -profit, it grew quite a lot.

And it was very important to people who were looking into using blockchain in the built world environment, like real estate, to have a community of people to talk to and kind of iterate their thoughts on that and basically share knowledge and grow. And what we're here trying to achieve is kind of the same with a core difference. This is not on your cost, it's on ours.

Travis John (56:06.638)
And I think that's something that in the end can be quite powerful. Yeah, I agree. And that goes back to the Web 3 ethos of incentives and growth. And to your point, that's how a lot of early communities, Reddit obviously is kind of not that.

place it so much anymore, but that was a place where meetups and Reddit and things like that where people would kind of find their tribe a little bit because there weren't enough people to have these conversations with. But as RWA and as crypto grows, being able to go talk to people locally.

in person will be a thing and will be achievable now, especially through what you guys are doing and through other, just the growth of crypto and growth of blockchain as a whole. I mean, creating a community locally, I think it can be quite powerful. If you think of it, RWA is in its nascent phase, right? It's going to grow into a huge, huge market.

And this local communities are going to be the epicenters for any new projects entering that market to connect with and try to speak about what they want to do to some people who are knowledgeable and attracted to RWA as a market. So basically this hubs are independent units that

its founders are able to create communities of thousands of people even maybe in some regions. And they're gonna be the influencers or they're gonna have the big impact on the outcomes of any projects trying to enter that market specifically with their RWA product. So.

Travis John (58:02.606)
It's not about just kind of promotionally pushing block square as a brand. Obviously that's our agenda, right? I won't hide it, right? But we want to push the whole industry to adopt RWA in a global sense, but it can be done only through local conversations. And here we see that we can really drive that market adoption or help grow it. Yeah. Well, and this is a quick...

this is a great way to conclude the episode and the conversation because just like we're here in person and we're here at Consensus, we both made a commitment to travel here. We don't live here locally. And this is something through your incentives you're doing. And this just proves that the local meetups and the in -person discussions.

are significantly more powerful in many cases. And they also just have a different dynamic. And again, I think it's a way, particularly in a field that's very new and nuanced and even has obviously its track record of negatives, being able to meet with local people and talk about things like block square, talk about tokenized, you know, whatever it is, collectibles or other things that are of interest based on that topic that week or that each person wants to talk about. All of those things are great ways. And,

And Blocksquare is obviously just helping organize some of this and provide some incentives to those ambassadors that are able to grow the community. So it's a great way to do that and I commend what you guys are doing. It's been an amazing conversation, Denis. I appreciate that.

We want to keep looking forward to keep track record of, you know, you're over 100 million now and we're going to keep recording new wins here with your real estate portfolios that are coming online. And obviously the launch pad I think is the most significant thing we should just end with here is this is just a thing announced in this past week. The first...

Travis John (01:00:02.35)
project that's coming through is just getting started. So everybody tune in for this. Make sure that you keep tabs on Blocksquare and make sure that you follow the launchpad process particularly because this is the first project, but they have obviously several others will be coming through. And this is an exciting way to get involved in real estate and participate also in a web three community that's quite dynamic. So join the Telegram. It's a really active place as well. And Denis, thanks again. Appreciate it. Thank you, Travis. Take care.

Right in an hour.