This classical piece of real estate was tokenized yesterday on Tezos.

By Allen Walters | Publish0x posts | 4 Mar 2020

Following up on yesterdays announcement: The first STO on Tezos has taken place yesterday on the Equisafe platform and the NYX Standard. This was done at the "French Tech Night" at the Consulat général de France in New York. For the launch of the Equisafe platform, they promissed a "tropy asset". And boy, did they deliver:

The asset that was tokenized is the "Pavillon de musique de la comtesse de Provence" in Versailles. It's officially classified as historic monument, Built in the style of Neoclassical architecture by the French King Louis XVI in 1784. The architect was Jean-François Chalgrin, who also built the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, which is now the Seat of the French Senate.

An STO is a Security Token Offering. This means that issuing, launching and trading is regulated. To take part in the STO and to be able to buy tokens, you need to register here. More information on the details will follow later, including an AMA organized by Equisafe next week.

You can see the smartcontract of the STO on the Tezos blockchain here.

Why tokenize assets?
Security Tokens are tokenized real-world assets such as real-estate, bonds equity, etc. STO's are a new form of assets. Registering assets like this on blockchain will be cheaper, faster and will make it easier to be complaint with regulations worldwide (NYX can be used to issue securities from more than 70 jurisdictions). From the Equisafe cheatsheet:

"The reduction of costs for issuers which should increase the number of offerings and therefore should induce more market depth in the long run"
"Allow for rapid settlements of trades which should decrease the number of entitlements and so intermediations and create a frictionless market with new investment behavior;"
"Ease the reporting requirements which should open up the dark side of Finance and help the regulatory entities do their job more effectively."

Just an example: After your KYC/AML registration which is necessary for participating in STO trading, you will have a unique Hash ID associated with a wallet address. This is an on-chain registration. If you want to participate in another STO, you can be verified within a split second. In the old-fashioned way, you would need a separate KYC/AML check for every investment, and your legal contract would need to be checked by a lawyer at hundreds of dollars per hour charge to verify the compliance of the sale.

The real estate use case.
Why tokenize real estate? Besides the benefits I mentioned above, tokenizing assets means you can divide an asset in a quantity of tokens. This means that assets that used to be too expensive for a large group of investors, now can be bought partially. This lowers the investment threshold drastically, opening up an entire new market for people who never had the chance to invest in real estate. This works both ways, since sellers of real estate (and real estate projects), will be able to tap into a whole new group of investors.
We can get creative here, besides the possible increase of value of the particular property, income from rent can be earned and paid to investors.

There is more to come! Equisafe has kicked of the STO erra on Tezos!