Tezos Successfully Incorporates Central American and Saudi Arabian Real Estate into the Blockchain

Vincent Ferraiuolo
Coinmonks
7 min readNov 17, 2020

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Queretaro, Mexico — the location of 2 new digital real estate assets built on the Tezos Blockchain

Note from the Author — I refer to “Tezos” multiple times throughout this article including the title. These references are to the Tezos ecosystem and the companies, organizations and people building useful things on top of Tezos. Tezos, like all other blockchains is not a central entity — but rather a decentralized commonwealth for those who choose to utilize it. As always, this content should be used as educational news only — never financial advice. I am not sponsored or directly associated with Tezos, Aqarchain, MountX, Vertalo or many of the other links I reference throughout the content below. As always, I will do my best to approach this topic from the neutral perspective of an individual that loves innovative technology.

Introduction

Earlier this month, the Tezos ecosystem accomplished some tremendous milestones — somewhat overshadowed by bitcoin dominance and price action. Let’s learn about what significant and exciting updates have gone on over the past few weeks.

While Ethereum gas is through the roof, Tezos is thinking one step ahead and making large changes to eliminate future issues. As summarized in a recent article by Decrypt, Tezos’ recent upgrade via on-chain governance cuts gas consumption for smart contracts by roughly 75%! If you’ve had a chance to interact with smart contracts, you know gas efficiency is one of the current barriers to entry for proper scalability. Extremely high gas fees are not sustainable in the long-term. Each interaction on the blockchain needs to be smooth and accessible to everyone. This means low gas fees.

I’m not going to focus on all the technical nitty-gritty of Delphi in this article, but know that Tezos is operating exactly as it should. Governance on chain, making logical improvements as necessary. If you want to learn more about what happened with Delphi, I recommend reading up here. Nomadic Labs did an excellent job summarizing the updates from a technical perspective for those interested.

From a very high level these upgrades will make Tezos more suitable for Defi applications. Here are a few of the top key takeaways from Nomadic Labs:

  • A block may now include 3.5 times more simple tz to tz ops
  • A block may now include 4 times more FA2 transfers
  • A contract may perform 10 times more internal calls

In addition to making huge technical improvements via the recent upgrade to Delphi, the Tezos blockchain saw successful real world use case via tokenized real estate this month. Let’s review the two most recent examples.

MountX & Vertalo Utilize the Tezos Blockchain For the First Tokenization of Real Estate in Mexico

In this example, we see two unique companies partnering together side by side to bring real estate to the blockchain. MountX is a new Real Estate Capital Investment Platform looking to approach the market in a unique way. You can read more about them here. This new organization worked alongside Vertalo to completely tokenize two apartments in Queretaro, Mexico. This represents roughly $250,000 USD in real estate transformed into blockchain metadata. These companies plan to tokenize many other real estate assets in both Mexico and Canada through the remainder of the year and into 2021.

According to the press release from MountX, some of the benefits of this new system include:

Access to an on-chain shareholder registry with triple-entry bookkeeping

API connections to broker-dealers

Digital Custodians

Portable eligibility with KYC/AML investor verification processes

Secondary liquidity via partner ATS’s, and key-less custodial blockchain wallets via Vertalo.

Assuming that these apartments were tokenized as FA1.2 tokens, I reached out to Vertalo to get more information on the subject to confirm technical specs. I received the following response via Twitter.

“No we tokenized them as Vertalo VTokens, a cross-chain standard we developed before Tezos Mainnet went live and before F1/2x”

Source- Vertalo.com

It appears the Vertalo VTokens are blockchain agnostic but currently being focused within the Tezos ecosystem. This shows me that Vertalo has both a dedication to bridging different blockchain ecosystems together while also having an eye for what makes Tezos so special.

Aqarchain Launches Digital Real Estate Platform on Tezos in Saudi Arabia

According to Aqarchain’s Whitepaper, Aqarchain is a technology-driven company focused on enabling digitized real estate solutions. The company comes from a 32 year background in the family real estate business within Saudi Arabia. Their Whitepaper covers everything from their goals, to their solutions to what their vision is for the future of real estate. If you want to learn more about what Aqarchain is doing, their Whitepaper is most likely the best place to start your research.

According to the press release from Future Tech Magazine, Haitham AlHammadi of Aqarchain stated — “The readiness and ease-of-use of the Tezos platform, along with its robust security standards, gives us an infrastructure and the capability of adapting to our business model. Tezos has also recently acquired a shariah compliance certificate which enables us to offer 100 percent, sharia-compliant investment option to our investors. This will help us widen our investor scope”.

Shariah compliant essentially boils down to business that is compliant with Shariah/Islamic law. In plain English — the Aqarchain real estate platform built on the Tezos blockchain is completely legal in its residing jurisdiction within Saudi Arabia. This is essential for proper and legal growth within the area.

Conclusion

Seeing real estate successfully get tokenized legally in two very different locations has me optimistic for the future adoption of smart contract platforms. Last year, the total size of U.S. commercial real estate was estimated to be between 14–17 trillion dollars. This is a huge, untapped market for technological advancements. See you on the other side.

Want to Learn More?

Want to learn more about Tezos? Tezos is blockchain built with governance as the key focal point. Tezos users can participate in the governance structure and vote for the future of the protocol. Tomorrow there is a Tezos Town Hall with many of the most influential figures within the Tezos community. You can sign up to attend for free here.

“This moderated conversation, based on your questions, will provide information on the Tezos governance process including the path to this upcoming amendment proposal, how these improvements will help the Tezos ecosystem going forward, and an updated plan from teams in the community to roll out more regular update proposals.” — TQuorum

I hope this article was informational, educational and inspired you to look at the world differently. If you found it useful — be sure to like or retweet the post on Twitter.

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