Introduction SkyTrade was founded by Jonathan and Marcin in 2023 when they met at Y Combinator's start-up school. After extensive experience in web2 marketplaces, aviation, DeFI, CeFi, NFT, and prediction markets, they found a significant advantage in using blockchain technology to open and monetize the highly valuable and opaque air rights market to traditional real estate and crypto communities.

Building began using ImmutableX technology (ZK-rollup equivalent). Subsequently, a grant was given by Emergent Ventures on the basis that SkyTrade could “meaningfully impact society.” Emergent Ventures is a Tyler Cowen-led program initially funded by Peter Thiel and was established to give quick grants to zero-to-one projects.

To give a voice to our thesis and connect with like-minded people, we started a substack called Where is my flying car? on the topic. The substack grew to a 15K subscriber base. Our development moved to Solana, as the ability to tokenize hundreds of millions of air rights was required (using Metaplex Bubblegum NFT standard). Supporting resources were offered by AWS and Google Cloud Services and we took part in the NEAR HZN accelerator program. We received grant funding from the Solana Foundation and launched the MVP at the end of 2023, enabling users to quickly onboard, and giving them a wallet by utilizing Web3Auth technology. Real estate companies began on-boarding and tokenizing their air rights.

The Air Rights Market: A Blue Ocean

Market Background

Air rights have benefited urban development for decades. Access to this opaque market is traditionally difficult, and the assets are traded in a closed way, reducing transactions and valuations. In common law jurisdictions (e.g., USA, UK, CAN, AUS, SG), the rights to the airspace above land and property are owned by the landowner.

The air rights market has a $30T TAM with the value of Manhattan locked air rights estimated to be >$500B, central London's air rights have been valued at £52B and the drone industry that requires air rights to transit through is set to be worth $450B (ARK Invest).

Capital Valuations

Increasing the use of air rights increases real estate capital valuations. This means that any use, market offer, or comparable air rights transaction affects air rights prices in an area. This creates a flywheel - more air rights in our marketplace, more traders to transact, which increases liquidity, increases real estate capital valuations and brings more air rights in our marketplace. This grows the value of the network for each participant.

Drone Delivery (Call Option)

Air rights are one of the primary drivers of consumers' adoption of commercial drone delivery. Without permission to be in private airspace, drones cannot fly legally. Drone deliveries reduce traditional delivery costs by ~90% over time. Walmart and Amazon are expanding drone delivery. Walmart now covers over 2M households by drone delivery. Their goal is to deliver to 90% of the US population, which they can reach by drone due to their current real estate portfolio. They need low-altitude skies opened with permission from the airspace owners to do this and we solve this access problem.