Who We Are

Vision: Manifest new economic models based on distributed ownership, freedom, and trust to unlock the next stage in human prosperity.

Mission: Digitize the ownership and management of property.

Values:

1. Our organization moves at the speed of trust.
2. We choose to embrace growth hierarchies over dominator hierarchies.
3. When possible, we choose collaboration over competition.
4. When tackling an impossibly hard mission like ours, it is important to have fun.
5. We are a young and evolving organization and as we evolve, so will some of our beliefs.

Resources

Discord: 74 Members

Round Table: 5

DAO Treasury: 0.042 ETH, no token

DAO Assets: NYC apartment, Athens apartment

Review

What started off as an experiment around annoyance over rigid 12-month leases is now slowly turning into something that represents much more.

The fact that there are even 74 members within our Discord community is absolutely mind-boggling to me. Even crazier is that out of those 74, we were able to find 4 others that were excited to commit some amount of their daily lives to see this vision through.

One thing I’ve realized while failing at previous ventures, and building the Index Coop, is that you can’t do anything without other people. What is represented by a modest start is actually a 0-1 moment where an idea slowly becomes a movement that can never die. What is so special about our movement is that we are choosing to tackle one of the hardest problems out there not because it has the highest expected value, but because we have to.

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Fungal Mold recreating the city of Tokyo's subway

Currently, we are like a fungal mold. Rapidly iterating and branching out to find the niches where we can add more value. Our current two streams are:

1. Property acquisition. Here we are exploring how an on-chain entity can go about buying [raising capital, mortgages] and maintaining [layer 0 legal infra] a piece of property.
2. Securitizing the lease. Here we are continuing the initial exploration of how we can deconstruct the 12-month lease and adapt it to a more nomadic lifestyle.

We’ll explore the initial strategy behind each below.

Property Acquisition

Eventually, all land and property will be owned and managed by DAOs. Some by Holon Housing ourselves. We are seeing the very early innings of it happening with CityDAO buying a plot in Wyoming and CabinDAO creating their first Creator Cabin in the outskirts of Wyoming.

The process right now is very ill-defined and unclear. As we attempt to engage with real estate developers to do our first home purchase, we don’t have a ton of clarity as to how we are going to be able to do so.

While we explore this process, we are going to be defining and creating primitives that eventually any DAO can use to engage with the physical world. This includes raising funds from outside investors, working with lending protocols to create a mortgage, and creating the legal organization to interface with layer 0. All of these things can eventually be packed into a service offered to DAOs and those that have a significant portion of their wealth in crypto.

With the home that we purchase, we really hope to explore what new economic models we can build around ownership. Namely exploring questions like

1. How can we make rent-to-own a better system for both tenants and landlords?
2. What token games can we create after digitizing and tokenizing property?
3. Can we make such housing accessible to people that have never had it before due to being unable to access traditional banking services?

Solving such questions presents a massive opportunity for our ecosystem to transform the housing industry.

Securitizing the Lease

What spurred the creation of Holon was that I was pissed off about being locked into a 12-month lease with my name on it and having to sublet every time I wanted to go somewhere without having to pay double rent. It felt like a significant clampdown on mobility.

AirBnBs in new towns were pretty expensive. Subletting was a pain in the ass [and technically against the lease]. Price discovery, in general, seemed totally fucked for apartments and short-term leases. It all felt pretty archaic.

Initially explored doing stuff like apartment swaps as a solution, but apartment swaps require such a crazy coincidence of wants and have a shitty discovery mechanism. Through brainstorming with friends, we figured NFTs could be super interesting in enabling discovery and pricing.

Reasons being:

1. You could list an NFT representing your place and have people bid on it to see how much it is worth.
2. You could swap an NFT with another NFT to basically do an apartment swap.
3. You could speculate on NFTs if you think something is mispriced.
4. You can compose NFTs. String together 12 1-month long NFTs to create a new type of lease. Decomposing 1 NFT into daily or weekly [or hourly!] NFTs to provide way more granularity.
5. You can use DeFi protocols like NFTX to actually create something like an AMM for apartments.

All of these are intellectually pretty interesting! Plus with Web3, we can incentivize the initial liquidity on this marketplace to get stuff on. As an initial target, we can aim for 1000 months of apartments available and then begin to test what actually adds a ton of value to the user experience and makes them want to use our platform. A bunch of fun theses to test out and play with!

Building Out the DAO

To continue growing in our experiments, there are some features of the DAO that we need to build out. The ones in initial sight are:

1. Discourse forum.
2. Contributor onboarding.
3. Token for ownership.

Discourse Forum

Likely the easiest bit here, but we need a place where we can do longer, more asynchronous communication around what our current thinking is. Discord is useful, but more of a synchronous tool and hard for new members to parse as they onboard into our community.

Contributor Onboarding

We need designers, engineerings, marketers, token designers, operations experts, and others to help us conduct these experiments and help us scale. I view creating this community and ecosystem as my number one most important job. If we do this right, we can blow past any challenge that we face.

To that end, people that want to contribute to this community, please fill out this forum here so we can figure out how best to onboard you.

Token

Currently, we have no money and our revenue-producing operations are the minuscule 10% secondary market fee we get from apartment sales on OpenSea. That really isn’t much. The only way we can remunerate people for their work is through equity.

Over the next month or so, if we are able to get over the hoop of delivering work on some of these workstreams, and get some traction going in the projects we are working on, we will launch a token and begin a contributor rewards program. It is still only Week 1 so a little early to be thinking about, but something to look out for as we begin to develop.

It is time for us to start coming together as a community! Let’s get a call on the books so we can come together to talk about what we are all building.

If you are interested in attending, please fill out this link to let us know when you are free. We’ll try to find a spot that fits everyone’s schedule!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading! It’s been quite an action-packed week and now we’re ready to start exploring some of our initial hypotheses and see if we can provide value for people. If we’re successful, this’ll be a step function improvement in how land and resources are allocated across the world.

This is the power of Web3!