How Imbrex’s Approach to Real Estate and Blockchain is All About Data

Imbrex’s vision of a global, decentralized marketplace for real estate data takes quite a different approach from our peers: we believe the connection between the physical world and the digital will first begin with the trustless exchange of data.

After reading Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum White Paper in 2015, we saw how Ethereum and smart contracts would be great tools for transferring physical assets like real estate and the instruments that go along with them. We held discussions with accountants, attorneys and regulators to get a sense of the real world viability of the technology going mainstream. Based on our findings, we realized other factors need to fall in place before blockchain technology can evolve from securely transferring digital assets (cryptocurrencies) to securely transferring physical assets (real estate).

A fundamental piece of infrastructure required before this can occur is a global consensus on addressing. Accurately identifying a property today (digitally) is difficult. The address typically lives on several different databases that don’t talk to each other or interact. Therefore, if I want to use smart contracts to digitally transfer physical value, the transaction is somewhat arbitrary, and therefore, insecure. People will not become comfortable transferring their home if they’re not confident in the technology.

Toward establishing confidence, we can look to the digital signatures already in use to exchange cryptocurrencies. Today, we can quickly and securely send, receive, and store digital assets like Bitcoin, ETH, and DASH because we’ve established and adopted global technical standards like private/public key encryption. It’s the underlying set of application standards for creating these keys that secure a trustless exchange. Another example of a globally adopted standard is the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is an essential component to the infrastructure of the internet; by providing a generally accepted method for identifying digital ownership paths. DNS translates Google.com to its numeric counterpart (IP Address) ensuring a secure path from the user to a Google owned server. Verification requires an agreement on the terms of authentication, or in other words: standards. You don’t want to be transacting communication without them.

So, to evolve from digital asset transfer to physical asset transfer, we realized that someone had to do the initial groundwork for universal property identification. There are thousands of listing portal providers around the world, all with very little interoperability with each other. This restricts listing exposure and is expensive for the industry as a whole. It also restricts any chance of creating identification and standardization.

To underpin global identification, at imbrex, each listing uploaded is given a publicly available unique ID through a smart contract that creates a permanent digital claim to of its physical address on the blockchain. Multiple claims of the same physical address in an open source environment will set the stage for the real estate community to institute a decentralized global identification system similar to DNS. Next, by open sourcing these standards and collaborating with the community, we can begin to use these validated IDs and create trustless transaction environments where physical assets can be transferred safely and securely.

Data standards may not represent the most titillating subject matter to many, but it is a necessary component if we want to get the real estate the ecosystem operating efficiently. This is why imbrex is a long-term, collaborative project.

Back in the early days of imbrex, when we started out with the goal of providing a syndication layer between the many disparate real estate networks, we didn’t realize the project’s potential as an initial layer required to establish a trusted environment for transactions. Now, we think about the many ways that data standardization and reliable interoperability will benefit the real estate industry world-wide.

For firms, the issue lies with communication. Say, I am firm X and I have offices in the US, China and Australia. I am using three different portal providers in each country, making it virtually impossible to efficiently transact a deal inhouse. Using imbrex’s Enterprise API, the firm can organize their local systems in-house, and then port selected data into the public ecosystem. We are building the infrastructure for this to take place, and even in this instance, imbrex does not own or control the data — it is retained by the firm, individual or institution.

So when we say “data-driven” at imbrex, that actually means a whole number of things. As the Ethereum ecosystem grows in scale to be able to handle the flood of complex and delicate transactions required for a blockchain-enabled real estate industry, we’re working on enacting the imbrex Roadmap in lockstep.