Welcome to (ATL) ATLANT: The Future of Real Estate
Hidden in the shadows of lesser known exchanges covered in the muck of coin pump and dumps lies a hidden gem soon to be revealed to the world wide exchange known as Crypto-Land. So, gather around children as I bestow upon you what I deem a diamond in the rough.
A Glimpse into the Company
Atlant (Atlant White Paper) seeks to revolutionize the rather antiquated real estate market fraught with high fees, unnecessary intermediaries, lack of transparency, and finally a restrictive mechanism holding the vast proportion of the population unable to participate through high minimum blocks (think a down payment on a house in a metro area). If you have ever purchased a property, rented an apartment, booked a hotel through a major hotel vendor or Airbnb, I highly suggest you continue reading. Since most of my audience will be millennials –as am I — I will start with the hardships of the current rental landscape and Atlant’s proposed solutions.
Rentals
Freshly out of school — and bright-eyed — I vividly recall my first experience with a NYC rental broker. After multiple iterations of craigslist bait and switches, and sketchy private listings, I decided to embark on a journey to midtown to meet my broker. After showing three listings far outside my reach we finally reached a consensus and I was ready to sign the papers — all that remained was first and last month’s rent in escrow, and TWO MONTHS RENT FOR A BROKERS FEE!
Atlant will alleviate this cumbersome “necessary evil” by circumventing the middleman all together. The advent of P2P lodging has experienced exponential growth and will continue such trajectory for the foreseeable future. Not to belabor in detail (though I highly recommend reading the white paper), Atlant relies on three main protective mechanisms: escrow, reputation system, and decentralized arbitration. As an example, let us first take the view of a lessor. A lessor may list a property on the platform by providing real-world identity and sending a security deposit into escrow. The reputation system acts as a decentralized rating and review system and the white paper provides ample detail into this process. The final component is a decentralized conflict resolution process similar to the methodology found in most Bitcoin based companies.
Home Buying
Those of us lucky enough to go through the joyous process of buying a property will likely look back with only positive nostalgia. That of course was dry humour because we all should understand how inefficient and rather crude this process can be. Starting with listing, to this day all on-market listings need to tunnel through MLS which has the feel, and functionality, of a 1990s website. Improvements have come in the form of Zillow and Trulia (respectfully 5 billion and 2 billion dollar market caps mind you) but nevertheless, MLS is still a mainstay in the real estate industry. Post home selection, you must place an offer and hope for the best. To enlighten anyone not yet familiar, an offer even at asking price does not necessarily mean a transaction. Quite the opposite, for the offer process undergoes this opaque negotiation among brokers which usually results in collusion to increase the price — they are in fact incentivized to do so. Nevertheless, consider that your offer of 130% above ask was lucky enough to have been accepted and you are off to the races of post negotiation — aka paperwork and levies. To name a fee, I mean few: realtor fees (6%), lawyer fees (usually in the thousands), city fees, the state’s pension deficit problem fees, etc. You get it, for lack of better terms, this process is a bitch.
Atlant’s solution is the first decentralized real estate platform built on the ethereum network of smart contracts. Gone are the days of opaque pricing schemes, Atlant will serve as a turnkey solution for listing real estate assets for trading similar to stocks — or in more contemporary terms, cryptocurrency. Atlant token holders will have the luxury of investing, or buying, property in its totality, or a portion of the property. This will not only create full transparency but open the doors to millions of folks currently unable to partake in the real estate market.
For My Big Picture, Macro Friends
Real estate is the largest asset class toppling 217 trillion and accounting for over 60% of all mainstream assets. To put this into perspective, the total amount of ALL global equities outstanding equals 55 trillion, fixed income and other securitized debt is 94 trillion, for my Ron Paul supporters, gold stands at ~6 trillion, and we all know where our baby cryptocurrency AUM currently stands (spoiler, less than 1 trillion). What I am trying to impress upon you is the broad scope of the opportunity that sits in front of you.
In terms of public proxies, as I alluded to earlier Zillow & Trulia both have market caps in excess of a billion dollars. Airbnb is valued north of 30 billion, Priceline stands at 91.3 billion, and I suspect Hotels.com would exceed the 100 billion dollar mark if it traded on a public exchange. Atlant, as it stands today, has a market cap of ~23 million… [editor’s note, the first iteration of this paper the market cap stood at 18 million]
You may be saying public proxies are not apples to apples. I’d say, fruit connoisseur, you’re correct so let’s take a look at the other real estate cryptos.
Final Remarks:
I applaud those who have made it this far. Let me conclude with a few facts and my long term prediction. Atlant, symbol ATL, has a circulating supply currently of 12.7million, a market cap of 23 million, and is currently only listed on HitBTC, YoBit, EtherDelta, and a few others. The Atlant platform launches in Q1, P2P Rentals launch in April, and partnerships with major governments will come in later stages of 2018. Make no mistake about this; Atlant has assembled an incredibly strong, talent, and motivated team and put together one of the most comprehensive white papers I have had the opportunity to read. Go to the website (https://atlant.io/), read the white paper in the link above, and consider investing in this company before it is listed on one of the mainstream exchanges.
