How we tokenized $200 million worth of assets. History of Barter Smartplace.
The idea of creating a crypto marketplace arose before it became mainstream. The crypto market has firmly established itself in the economy, despite the powerless skeptics and threats from Jamie Dimon to shut down crypto. Moreover, after the sanctions of February 2022, cryptocurrency has ceased to be perceived as just a speculative asset in a volatile market, but also as a way to bypass the sanction restrictions of traditional payment systems such as SWIFT or PayPal.
Nevertheless, in the 15 years of existence of the crypto market, it still has not solved one of its key problems: the crypto market does not extend beyond the digital and financial world. Trading real assets for cryptocurrency remains problematic due to a wide range of circumstances — crypto startups are afraid to deal with logistical and legal complexities that arise during the trading of physical assets. However, we have decided that such difficulties will not scare us.
What is Barter Smartplace?
Barter Smartplace is a blockchain ecosystem of applications for tokenizing real-world assets such as real estate, transportation, clothing, and even services. Our applications support blockchains: Binance, Ethereum, Polygon, Velas, Bitcoin. The native token of our ecosystem — BRTR — is used to pay for services. The ecosystem consists of the following services:
Barter Smartplace — a decentralized marketplace for exchanging digital and real assets. Our barter trading protocol is unique in the world of decentralized commerce and was created by our company in 2020 and audited by the leading smart contract security company Certik. From the very beginning, we have focused on the tokenization of real assets using NFTs. Cryptocurrency holders have the opportunity to exchange physical assets for digital assets and vice versa within our marketplace.
Barter P2P — a decentralized P2P exchange. The platform operator does not hold customer funds during the transaction, and the administrator only has the ability to unlock tokens for the buyer or seller in case of a dispute. The first of its kind on-chain P2P exchange without storing customer funds.
Barter Wallet Bot — functions as a crypto wallet for microtransactions within the Telegram messenger. It was created during the pre-sale of BRTR tokens in 2019 to facilitate the process of obtaining tokens for new users. On the internal P2P exchange, BRTR can be exchanged for cryptocurrencies such as USDT, ETH, BTC, MATIC, DOGE, BNB, VLX, BRTR. There are internal games, a profitable partnership program, free cryptocurrency transactions within Telegram, and much more.
Barter Smartplace is managed through a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). The DAO was initially formed from the main team members, investors, company founders, and large BRTR token holders. In 2022, the DAO voted to allow participation in the closed community with a minimum of 100,000 BRTR tokens in the wallet.
The Era of Hype
The key idea of our ecosystem is the barter exchange of tokenized digital assets for physical ones. This is achieved through the tagging of physical assets with NFT tokens. Our project started using NFTs back in 2019, long before the popularity of the first NFTs. Of course, we also tokenized digital art, but we didn’t want the speculative aspect of NFT art to overshadow the main idea of our ecosystem — the tokenization of physical assets.
Unfortunately, when the NFT hype started, it revolved mainly around digital art and had a speculative nature. Essentially, NFTs are a blockchain certification method to verify the authenticity of a particular object on the blockchain, but during the NFT hype, the technology became strictly associated with digital art, the market of which was clearly overheated. Both the traditional market and the NFT market became immersed in speculative trading. Nevertheless, we remained true to the main idea, which turned out to be worthwhile.
RWA. The Trend of Tokenizing Real World Assets
The situation was saved by the RWA trend (RWA stands for Real World Assets). It is worth noting that this trend became a reality not thanks to crypto enthusiasts from the bottom, but thanks to large asset management companies entering the market. For example, in July 2023, the Avalanche Foundation announced the launch of the Avalanche Vista program, which includes investments of up to $50 million in developing infrastructure for working with tokenized assets. A report by the Boston Consulting Group, published in August 2022, predicts that by 2030, the market for tokenized assets will reach a volume of $4 to $16 trillion. A Celent study conducted in 2022 revealed that 91% of institutional investors are interested in investing in tokenized assets, including RWA. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, a company managing assets worth $10 trillion, emphasized that tokenization is “The Next Generation For Markets.”
This trend has also had a positive impact on the BRTR token. In November-December 2023, our native token was included in the top 15 recommended RWA tokens for listing on the leading US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, according to Crypto Daily.
Currently, the total value of tokenized assets on our platform exceeds $200 million. It took over 4 years to achieve this volume, but the most significant growth was registered in the fall-winter of 2023.
More than half of this value is accounted for by tokenized real estate. By the beginning of 2024, the total value of tokenized real estate on our platform reached over $100 million. Before the emergence of the RWA trend in our project in September 2023, the total value of tokenized real estate was only $2 million. This includes private houses and apartments in various countries such as Moscow, Dubai, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Indonesia, Montenegro, Turkey, Finland, Panama, and others. We are ready to provide a great earning opportunity for those who are willing to engage in real estate sales. Agents can earn 0.5% of the property transaction value.
In addition to real estate, cryptocurrency on our platform can be exchanged for transportation, clothing, physical art, and even mining equipment. However, real estate remains the main driving force behind the RWA trend. This is because tokenizing real estate opens up a multitude of new opportunities for joint ownership and tokenization of various property rights.
Future Plans
Of course, we do not intend to stop at what has been achieved. Here are our plans for the future:
- Our own L2 blockchain for storing data on tokenized assets;
- Staking for participants of the Barter Smartplace DAO. A dynamic interest rate is planned, which will vary depending on the amount of tokens held. The rate can reach up to 100% per year in the early stages of launch. Staking for BRTR tokens is planned to be implemented on the Polygon network.
- Listing BRTR on the major centralized cryptocurrency exchange MEXC. After MEXC, listing on ByBit and other major crypto exchanges is planned.
Among crypto enthusiasts, there are many people who would be happy to spend crypto on real goods and services. Tokenizing physical assets and services is currently a mass trend, so we are happy to collaborate with both crypto startups and traditional businesses that have set out to tokenize their assets. We look forward to collaboration!
Use our apps:
Barter Smartplace — trade real and digital assets for cryptocurrency.
Barter Wallet Bot — use free cryptocurrency transfers in Telegram and earn 22% per annum.
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