Inspiration
When you put money in the bank you expect maybe a 1% return on your money. Banks turn around and use your money to buy land, invest in businesses, and give loans. They make these great returns and give you nothing. When you invest in a mutual fund or hedge fund you expect maybe a 20% return from the direction of a stock price. If you watch stock prices you can see that they move according to buyer and seller reasoning rather than the actual company's worth. Some stocks pay dividends, but a lot of them don't. So where do profits come from if you own stock? Do profits come from the actual income of the company or do they come from other people trying to gamble? The sad truth that I've seen is that most of the time profit comes from speculation.
I want to change that!
What it does
If people invest money directly into real estate or businesses, they eliminate the need for a bank. People can buy a percent ownership in land and make a guaranteed share in the profits. There's no way for people to steal money from each other and the system is completely trust-less. My application allows everyone to have an opinion on what gets built in their town and it allows everyone to share the profits. The banks don't take a percentage of your profits anymore and you receive ALL the money from your investments. All you have to do is find a property on the map that you like and send Ether to it's smart contract. After that you just sit back and wait to make money from rent.
How I built it
I used the Bing Maps API to create a map. I created a page to add properties to the map and then hand selected a few properties to add to the map. I used the maps API to get the coordinates of the property. I created a generic solidity smart contract that I could use for all properties and compiled it into a go program with an Ethereum program called abigen. I created a deploy function to deploy the smart contracts onto an Ethereum test network called Rinkeby. I made an account with Infura so that I could use their Rinkeby node to deploy my smart contracts on the Rinkeby network. Every time I add a new property to the map it calls the deploy function and generates an address for a new smart contract.
Challenges I ran into
Ethereum Solidity Contracts API documentation
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I actually got it working and can actually exchange ether for a percentage of a property.
What I learned
I learned a lot about the ethereum network and solidity smart contracts
What's next for Blockchain For Commercial Real Estate
In order to actually allow people to buy properties, I need to make a better smart contract in solidity. Since all real estate is priced in USD and the exchange rate of ETH to USD is constantly changing, I have to create a dynamic Ethereum to ERC20 Token Contract exchange rate. I need to make a better UI design. I need to be able to convert ETH to USD and USD to ETH quickly so that people's investments don't lose value based on the exchange rate.
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