- [Narrator] Welcome to New York City.
The crown jewel of the real estate market.
Everybody wants a piece.
And now, thanks to blockchain technology,
that may very well be possible.
This $36.5 million development
is being sliced into digital shares,
or tokenized, as it's called,
so that investors around the world
can own as much, or as little, as they can afford.
- We have the typical bank financing on this project
with a conventional bank, and this loan matures in January.
We've decided to take a right turn
and tokenize the debt here on the property.
The construction is 95% complete,
we are starting to get inspections in the next week or so.
- We have a bank deadline on us,
where we have to sell a certain amount of units
or repay the entire loan by a certain date.
If construction's been delayed,
if the market turns, if competition pops up,
and we're not going to be able to hit that deadline,
what do you do?
So by tokenizing the debt,
it gives everyone breathing room
to sell at a normal pace with the market
instead of against it.
- [Narrator] The people behind this offering
reside across the East River, in that other borough.
Here, the blockchain start-up, Fluidity,
has teamed up with broker-dealer firm, Propellor,
to generate tokens by crafting smart contracts,
and in so doing, they could be changing the way
we all do business in the future.
- When we started to look at the real estate industry,
it's probably one of the most inefficient industries
that exist currently.
You have a lot of middlemen, a lot of lawyers,
a lot of bankers and just being able to create
something that has real impact on an industry like that,
I think you're looking at significant disruption.
- [Narrator] But for a project determined
to eliminate middlemen, there's a lot of people involved.
- Motivator. - Coder.
- I'm a lawyer. - Facilitator.
- Strategy. - Project Manager.
- Developer. - Co-founder.
- I'm just the broker.
- I'm a fan.
- [Narrator] An important party that is absent
in this equation is a bank.
- There will not be a bank involved.
- [Narrator] The process goes something like this.
These guys create tokens on the blockchain.
The tokens represent the condo unit's debt,
and can be traded as private securities.
If token holders sell their shares,
the purchaser can either preserve the tokens
on the blockchain, or cash them out,
thereby dissolving these tokens altogether.
This, theoretically, would produce more liquidity
to a notoriously ill-liquid market.
- It's a hard, asset-backed, secured loan.
- We're taking private securities
and we're putting a digital wrapper around them,
which makes it easier to track and easier to transfer.
- There's only four assets you can own in the world.
Stock, a bond, a currency or a commodity.
And we think every single one of them's
gonna get digitized.
Tokenize the world.
- [Narrator] And that's already happening.
A UK company recently tokenized this Andy Warhol.
Now, 100 people own 31.5% of this $5.6 million painting.
And when it rises in value, the tokens will as well.
So, is the same thing happening with
New York City real estate?
- Literally, 25, 30 million people
can own a piece of this at a dollar a pop.
When has that ever been possible?
- [Narrator] Technically, it's still not possible.
At least, yet, that is.
Many hurdles remain before this becomes
a democratizing force for the masses.
Not least of which is the fact that these tokens
are only available to accredited investors,
keeping the barrier of entry high.
Open only to the rich.
But all of this is very new,
and hasn't yet fully impacted the system.
Blockchain innovations like this one,
clearly has the potential to disrupt the way we
do business, and even the way we define
the very things that we own.
- You know, if there's another downturn,
and banks say, oh, we have a hard time lending now,
okay, well, I don't need you,
because I can tokenize my loan that I wanna use
to buy that condo there.
And that's what I'm gonna do.
So now we don't need banks anymore.
That is what's crazy.