Thread by @NataliePropy

1/ Adrenaline and fear of failure: launching the first real estate NFT was no Halloween. It was terrifying. It was as scary as launching a new cryptocurrency. L1 creators feel it when they launch the genesis block. Anything crypto lives its own life after deployment.

2/ Before 2021 I was convinced that a p2p transaction in real estate is not possible in the next 10 years. But we decided to try. It was an expensive and risky endeavor. Being the first put my team and me under a lot of pressure. There were big decisions to be made.

3/ What I previously considered a utopian concept, was probably doable. We were to sell an apartment digitally as an NFT from a wallet to another wallet via a smart contract. We didn’t know if it was executable, but I laid out the idea on @ForbesCrypto: forbes.com/sites/nataliak…

4/ Before the NFT we processed $1-2bn of deals via unique smart contracts so it was close enough to NFT-ing. Our legal council, our MIT scientist and engineers worked on a plan for months and invented a perfect model! We’ve launched the date and got to work.

5/ However, 1 week before the sale, our attorney discovered a flaw: we couldn’t execute it. We needed to know each bidder’s name not just the winner’s. I was devastated. Engineers created a multisig process, so Propy can allow transfer every time there’s a sale. I hated this idea

6/ We needed a way to make it p2p, yet fully compliant. We had one weekend to figure out a better way to do it. And we did. We rewrote the flow and smart contacts just before the auction day.

7/ Tests worked! We were thrilled for the invention. However, we were afraid that nobody would buy this NFT. So we put the starting price at only $20k (3-4 times less the value). Someone could bid $20k, win and get the property that cheap. The worse case was if nobody would bid.

8/ While we were rebuilding the front end and smart contracts, again and again, 1000 people signed up for the waitlist for the auction and news. Then 200 enrolled for bidding. Were you amongst the ones joined?

9/ The property we chose was historical already - the first one transacted via smart contracts.

Ownership was held in a US-based entity owned by @arrington. The gov registry had the record of it so we didn’t have to register it when we’d sell the NFT
techcrunch.com/2021/05/25/blo…

https://twitter.com/NataliePropy/status/1402662012862226432

10/ The auction started. One bid made! And it wasn’t the seller himself :) Then one more. Then more… Within 10 hours the highest price was … only ~$30k. But we were thrilled! Everything worked! Whoever wins the NFT will become the home owner.

https://twitter.com/nataliepropy/status/1402662012862226432

11/ On the 5th restart the winner won the bid! He got the NFT in his wallet with the access to ownership transferring paperwork though a QR code on an image. But there was another moment that kept us on our toes.

12/ We hoped the winner takes over ownership right away. All he/she needed to follow is the QR code in his/her NFT. The winner only had to provide their name and few other pieces of information and instantaneously, he’d become the owner of the property. We waited a minute, two …

13/ If he didn’t then Mike would remain the owner, and the winner could get ownership later. 3 minutes later…

14/ 3 min later we got an email that the winner’s data was submitted, KYC & AML procedures were successful. The NFT holder became the owner of the property! Hurray. I could breathe. One month of excitement and stress was over. The days of “no time for food and sleep” were behind.

15/ Now, similar excitement and stress are expected in the upcoming months. We’ve been selecting properties to be NFT’d next, scoping defi for borrowing against RE NFTs, and developing procedures to scale this process. I’ll share more on November 5th!
propy.com/browse/propy-b…

Happy Halloween! Try new scary things! It may change the world.