WeHave: making exclusive inclusive

At WeHave we noticed a lot of us and our peers are passionate about things we can't have. Be it a Ferrari, the original Darth Vader helmet or Banksy's art.

There is a 800bln+ exclusive items market (cars/watches/art/collectibles) with an average return of 12-15% annualy but it is only for the lucky few. 95% percent of the population can not invest in, or own these items. We want to level the playing field. We want to enable anybody to own their dream items.

WeHave platform will allow anyone to crowdfund any real world asset. If the crowdfunding is successful the asset is fractionalized. Participants of the crowdfunding receive their share of the asset in fungible tokens. The asset will be governed through a DAO with voting power distributed between token holders. Acquired fractions will be tradable in a decentralized manner.

We are looking to build the bridge between physical and digital assets leveraging NEAR protocol! This has never been done before! We have the ambition to be a cross-chain platform in the future. Like NEAR protocol we put usability first and we are building to be simple, secure & scalable

We finished building our MVP!:

• Propose crowdfunds with metadata that is automatically stored on IPFS.
• Crowdfund items together by means of USDC payment.
• Crowdfunding works like a factory contract: when the crowdfund succeeds it creates a dedicated fungible token & DAO for the item.
• The item token supply is distributed amongst the crowdfunders respectively.
• Claim tokens to see them in your wallet.
• Create proposals concerning the item in the item DAO.
• Vote on proposals in the item DAO. The more tokens you have, the more votes you have!

All this was mostly done in Rust. We also updated our frontend and integrated the smart contracts using the near-api-js. Wallet connect was added as an additional feature. We started doing marketing and set up a legal entity and structures. Applications for the correct licenses are underway. We have been talking to a lot of potential investors and finished our financial plan. This resulted in a lot of interest and we had proposals from 6 different angel investors. We will close this pre-seed round at the end of the year. This is a very small round, to get smart money and experience on board. Lastly we would mention we talked with and are looking to integrate the NearPay on/off ramp to facilitate FIAT payments to make interacting with our platform as frictionless as possible.

We had some difficulties in calculating the exact number of shares crowdfund participants should receive in their wallets after a successful crowdfund. Fortunately we were able to solve this using the Decimals library. Furthermore we have been thinking a lot about our go to market strategy. Determining the right strategy has been somewhat of a challenge. We are currently validating some of our assumptions through social media and our community.

Over the last months we have been successfully building a community. We were accepted in two start-up accelerator programs (Start it KBC and the Birdhouse by Belfius, both big Belgian banks). So far there have been quite a few interesting meetings and workshops which helped among others with networking and defining our mission & vision. There was a week full of physical events we attended. Comparable to NEARCON, this was great in terms of teambuilding and aligning us as founders in relation to the company culture we want to strife for as WeHave. We were also able to get a mentor and a board of advisors on board! Two weeks ago we finished our MVP, launched it on testnet and had our community test it and provide us with feedback.

We feel that over the last few months we have grown more and more into a team with a balanced divide of responsibilities. We learned a lot on the business side and about what our next steps should be to work towards a successful launch. We have found a way to structure everything in a compliant way. We have an international Blockchain expert lawyer as an angel investor too. This is a very big part of our journey. Chris has finished his AML course and will be officially AML certified.

We are waiting for the notary to register our legal entity and include our shareholders agreement together with our investors term sheet. We are planning to do a pilot, tokenizing one exclusive item early next year. This will probably be a Lamborghini Countach on the biggest oldtimer event in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg (Benelux). For sourcing contemporary art & watches we are proud to announce our partnership with Sotheby's!

We are applying for our crypto assets service provider license and integrate a KYC as a service provider into the platform. We will be hiring a full time employee for marketing. Lastly we would mention we will be implementing a ISMS and start working towards our ISO27001 certification.

On the technical side we will start working on the trading part. We have been in touch with Fusotao and want to work with them to integrate their orderbook-DEX. We also want to build a new backend for smoother workflow and the possibility for backend calculations. Since NEAR Foundation announced a partnership with Google we will be building this in Google Cloud Functions. As there is no security token standard yet on the NEAR protocol this is something that we want to propose early next year to make sure our platform and the protocol will remain future proof!

As you may have noticed a lot has happened since NEARCON. We are super motivated and quit our former jobs to work on WeHave full time! The future of finance is NEAR!

Built With

• google-cloud
• ipfs
• javascript
• near-api-js
• near-cli
• near-sdk
• react
• rust
• thin.dev
• wasm