EB145 – Stephen King & Russell McLernon: Distrupting Real Estate With RexMLS - A Decentralized MLS

Transcript

this episode of epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by Jax Jax is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices handles both Bitcoin and ether go to Jay a double x io and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the technologies startups and projects like decentralization and the global product black bean revolution my name is the Resnick Roger Hanoi today we'll be exploring a very special niche or ecosystem of lobstering technology we will be exploring the intersection of real estate and block chains we are joined by Stefan and Russell who are

building Rex MLS so MLS stands for Multiple Listing system we'll get into what what this is but it's it's one of the first projects that really pioneered how block chains can change the real estate industry so we thought it was a really interesting project to cover before we start let us have an introduction from Russell and Stefan so Russell you go first yeah thanks for having us look I've been in the crypto currency scene for the last five or so years and working with Bitcoin and and moving on to ripple and chairs and next and now aetherium and yeah I theory addresses

some of the shortcomings that these other platforms have had and yeah we're I'm really excited to be building wrecks on on aetherium and achieving what we want to achieve cool and Stefan a bit of audio bedroom sure yeah thanks guys for having us my background is in commercial real estate I've been in it for about five years now I Ron King realty group here in New Jersey and I do deals throughout the United States been involved in some development work as well and I worked on some technology startups which has actually

led me into aetherium and I am the founder of Princeton Theory meet up next emulous as I said is one of the first projects I came across that really merges blockchain technology and the real estate side now most volatile real estate side would be well known to our listeners so let's get into what an MLS really is so could you explain what is an MLS and what is it used for sure so a Multiple Listing Service is essentially a large database that disseminates real estate information and the information is sourced and then sold back to the brokerage community it also helps facilitate contracts broker

cooperation and sometimes helps with appraisals but the the abstract that it provides up the property are basically the price the location the size or the occupancy of the building and the operating expenses there are three segments there are there's commercial which were focused on to start there's residential and there's multifamily how long of MLS systems been around for they've been around since the 1800s bunch of guys got in a room and basically in Leeson North America it was down in DC and it was a way of help me

sell mine and I'll help you sell yours but it's matured to where over the years it you know as technology developed a couple of different companies created platforms to disseminate the real information on a much broader basis and some of the large companies in North America are in the commercial industry our coasts are and Leutnant and on the residential side our zillow and trulia and then there's local multiple listing services which are state-by-state and they're owned by independent brokerage houses a lot of the multifamily

platforms are owned by most of the residential guys and so in the real estate industry how much power do these systems these MLS systems have what is what is their impact on the real estate industry it's quite significant so costar was was started in the eighties by a guy named Amy Florence and he's a business guy started a technology company and his business model is simple he's got a slew of researchers they contact different brokerage houses obtain their listing information and then publish it on their platform and they've made significant traction and they're able to charge thirty five hundred dollars a year per certificate

so this is this leads to two problems one if you're a large brokerage house and you have multiple brokers and you want to use more than one computer to basically access this information it gets quite expensive and it also affects the small to medium-size brokerage houses because it adds significantly to their overhead now like I said they've been around since the 80s so they've been able to make traction their one competitor that made traction as well was loop net loop net their pay wall was much lower than co-star and that they charged about one hundred and sixty dollars a month to access their data and it was more of an open system it wasn't just brokers it was mom-and-pop retailers and office users and but what

happened about 12 months ago costar bought loop net and leutnant has been a mess ever since and they're actually in talks right now about raising their prices by sixty percent in the next 12 months which which makes it gives them I'm surprised it got through the regulatory process in the United States but it made they basically have an unofficial monopoly is that is that right that co-star still gathers all this data manually right and then feeds it into their own MLS system and then says access to this database to all parties interested in it yeah so they I mean I'll get calls from co-star once or twice a week and they'll be looking for

not only listing information but deal information so they'll want to know you know a what deal did you close over at X you know address so they want to know how long the lease was who the tenant is the economics involved and then they publish that they sell that to other brokers on their platform and the problem with that is the information has become unreliable because no intelligent broker is going to give correct information because if they do that if they say well I just did a deal for a five-year lease and and and they published that on their website another broker is gonna call that tenant in four years and say hey I know your lease is up in another year and I've got a

property across the street and I can save you 20% on your rent so a lot of the brokers have realized that they're doing this and have just given either little or just bad information so with this bad information how does this system still work why does it work if if the brokers are themselves not incentivized to give correct information it works because they have scale and because there's nothing else out there that you can turn to quickly and find this information so before the internet black sky and a couple of other companies published a biannual report of information they had costars model but they just published it in a book and

co-star they've been able to make this information more relevant than it was back then so if a guy wants to if a broker wants to go and find 10,000 feet they don't want to search across multiple platforms to do that and make multiple calls they want to just look at one database see what's available and then call the listing agent and obtain more information they don't they're not in the all they want to do is find the space and do the deal they don't want to be bothered by navigating or or finding new information so it's sort of this closed system that hasn't changed and a lot of come have tried to disrupt this with conventional technology and it they just

they're not able to get the traction that costar has well that was my next question so I mean in in in sort of banking and finance we're seeing you know all these fintechs tarps come in and try to disrupt large banks and financial institutions are we saying the same kind of trend in in real estate is that also happening in real estate try to disrupt these large monopolies essentially I would say so real estate is the the last industry typically to get on board with new technology they you know typically developers want to develop and brokers want to just find and source and do deals however the the costs have gotten exponentially higher

over the last five six seven eight years so when we started talking about Rex we've gone to a couple of conferences one which is the international real estate blockchain conference run out in Newport and it's interesting to us because the real estate community is excited about what we're trying to do because they realize that it's going to disrupt the existing systems in a way that will benefit the end-user and will free up the information so it co-star has obviously they they've pissed off the community enough where a lot of these a lot of the development and the brokerage community are yeah they are

they're they wanted to see it disrupted which is an interesting sign for me being in the business because like I said a lot of these guys are you know they're not technologically advanced like some of these other industries so what you're proposing is a decentralized MLS system as you'd call Rex MLS know what what it would excites you about building a decentralized MLS system well there's a couple things so aetherium in particular gives us the opportunity to mesh together the blockchain data distribution and currency all under one roof and and that's important because the blockchain basically gives us

it helps us timestamp transactions and it keeps a reliable track record of the transactions the data distribution we're using IP FS and Russel talk more about this but it's it's basically it makes the data that we're trying to obtain exponentially cheaper across the board and it will basically be free and this information should be free and currency were able to use through aetherium and that'll help fuel our platform and the other thing that it's helping is right now there's no universal system so there's no there's no global system and we're a guy in China who wants to buy an investment property in New York can

access or do some research on his own before he calls his broker he's got to find out what the the local system is in New York and on a residential basis it's even worse because it's on a state-by-state basis it's not even across international borders so to get that information you have to pay for each individual Multiple Listing Service on a very local level so it sort of it brings everything together for us and it opens up it opens up this closed system what is sort of the you know potential advantages that you see for brokers I mean is obviously you know there's there's cost-cutting right as as you described in the white paper these multiple listing services charged quite

a lot to have listings you know set up as premium you know so that they can be visible etc aside from having the cost of listings go down dramatically what other advantages can you can you see for a system like this well so there's there's a couple of different advantages the first and foremost is that we're bringing all this data into one place so right now commercial and residential and basically commercial and residential are separated and we're gonna bring them together under one roof so nowadays commercial guys are doing residential deals and residential guys are doing commercial deals so they're not two

completely different industries they are but they're they're starting to co-mingle so that's one benefit the the other benefit is that the the cost obviously what you mentioned will will go down significantly and we're going to initially pay the brokerage community or anybody for that matter to upload listings to Rex and especially verified listings and that that turns the tide the other way and that instead of taking money from the community we're actually paying you to obtain that information and what's interesting about that is not only have we gotten we've held a few meetings with people throughout the

country in the real estate community who have gotten excited about that idea and even people that aren't in the real estate community who are like hey I live in Minneapolis or I live in Singapore if I if I'm if I know the local market and I've got a property or from a landlord can I upload that and get paid as well which is something that Russ and I didn't think about we said sure of course you can that sounds really interesting because one of many questions was if you're assuming that like coasts are basically does manual data gathering from all the brokers and how does how would you bring all of the data into your platform so right now I am assuming that Rex MLS is essentially like a decentralized database that's

that's the imagination that comes to my mind that you have records about properties you might have certain fields in each of these records that record what kind of property it is except sure where it is etc and all of these records are stored inside ipfs is that correctly what are the basic components of your technical architecture yeah that's correct so we storing the records in ipfs and I don't know if you've heard of the Kappa infrastructure model where it's it's it's a append-only style of database where each user

creates a new record that soup that eat that is added on top of the previous records there's there's an example of a system out there at the moment called patchwork which is doing this for a social network and and it's and it's working really well we investigated using this capping infrastructure and it's it's ideally suited for smaller scale projects so I believe we've got smaller social networks it works great but when you start to scale to hundreds of thousands of of users it can be hard to keep track of you know where where

each user is up to so we we've continued that approach with the kaepa infrastructure but we have merged it with etherium and we are using etherium to timestamp when these users are you know appending to their log so we can go to one place we can go to a theorem and we and we can say give me the hash of the state of the database right now and it will there and we can then straightaway see you know where each of these users append-only log is up to so ipfs is basically we're storing all all of these the users state in ipfs and

we're using aetherium to merge it all together and get a get a quick glimpse of where the entire system is that let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi coin wallet created by the people at the central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle them you either had to leave them on an exchange which was insecure or you had to have all these different wallets which was a hassle fortunately now with Jax knows medieval days of darkness misery and suffering are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing

cryptocurrency so you can do with Jax but you can also exchange them directly from whip inside the wallet thanks to their shape shift integration and since there's only one seed Jax makes it super easy to backup and sync to your other devices Jax works with Windows Mac OS Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome so go to Jack Co that's J a double xeo to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jack's for the support of epicenter let's imagine me as a broker right now when I entered so I open up the DAP I I make a listing so I say somebody let's say somebody came to me and said

he wants to rent out this particular commercial property that commercial property has a certain set of parameters and I want to search for a counterparty for this person so I create a listing and I list this data where does this data data go like what what happens after that and how is the hash in ëthere IAM finally updated what's the flow from from this point to the final point yeah so obviously all the complexities are hidden from the user and the and the user interface but they will basically type in their all their parameters and the information about the listing it will go and create a an IP FS Merkel tag

object get a hash for it and it will do some housekeeping behind the scenes or of that user State and it'll it'll it'll log down what their last state was what their new state is and it will add that that new hash to the top of the list and then and then you'll get a master hash which is you know basically a summary of all that information or bundled bundled up into one hash and then it will create an aetherium transaction which will submit that hash into the etherion blockchain and it raises a log you know an event log for it and then basically the rax

MLS system subscribes to that event log and every time a new hash comes in it basically then goes and asks ipfs ok give me that hash give me the content for that hash and and basically drills down and and and downloads all the data that it needs it'll download all the fields the description any photos that have been attached and that kind of stuff so this system doesn't have any notion of privacy right like whatever goes into the system whatever any broker puts into the system is visible to everybody else that's correct yep so users are

basically it's up to them to decide how much information they put into the system so a private seller might not want to reveal too much information they might just want to put maybe a phone number or an email address or something like that whereas a broker would probably want to market themselves in this system and an ad probably a company logo you know your office address you know phone number you know that and and that broker personality your profile that is in the system would probably start to build up some reputation so you'd want to see you know that this

broker has successfully done you know X number of deals or you know and perhaps even build some sort of feedback system in there so that buyers and sellers can rate each other and and and boost the brokers profile so in that case the broker would want would want to put a reasonable amount of information in there but at the end of the day it's up to the users to decide what they put into the system okay the interesting you mentioned reputation that will I think will come back to that a bit later for now let's stay on this technical infrastructure regarding an IP FS who is storing the data like what ensures that it's just always available for the peers to download it currently we hosting several nodes on the IP FS network that

will host the data eventually we will see users who are enthusiastic about the system who want to run a full node and it is it is a little bit challenging to run a full node it to run aetherium and ipfs and recs all at once it requires a little bit of of know-how so those people who are enthusiastic will probably want to run a node and run although all three of those systems and and and they will be able to choose whether they want to download all the data or or whether they just want to download perhaps one country that they're interested in

maybe they just want to maybe they're only interested in United States commercial property so they'll only download that data and they'll ignore the rest and then you'll get some operators who who want to just store everything or all the countries all the markets so is this sort of a closed ipfs network of nodes or is this operating for the you know primary IP FS network yeah it's currently running on the primary IP FS network and I don't see any reason to separate it and run on a separate network it seems to be running fine at the moment okay then I mean I haven't stayed completely up today what's going on with ipfs I

think they were at some point working on some system to incentivize users to provide data that was called foul coin is this something that basically could extend them to you know anyone using IP FS would be able to store this data or we risk would be restricted to only those those people are using Rex MLS no absolutely I think ipfs they're the incentivization his scheme is called file coin and it's entirely possible that we could incentivize people to to store the content using file coin I mean

that would give us a better distribution of the data rather than a handful of nodes hosting it themselves but you know there's also a theorem swarm is being developed and they're going to have their own incentivization mechanism so yeah look we're we're pretty flexible at this stage so we'll evaluate swarm when it comes along and and we'll monitor how the distribution of the data is going and and adjust accordingly okay so let's talk about the user experience a little bit so tell us how you know if from from all perspectives these Nyonya you have

the brokers and you also have the people who are looking to purchase a property or walk us through the user experience for for someone using Rex MLS yeah look the user interface is always a tricky tricky part of it we've we've tried to build a UI that's as user friendly as possible but there's just some concepts in the crypto world that that are difficult for regular users to comprehend creating wallets and backing up seed phrases and that sort of stuff so our initial release is pretty much targeted to tech-savvy

people and you will have to may manage all of that on your own but we see in the future that we will be investing resources into improving the UI but we also see down the track I need for a UI that pretty much strips out all of that all of that crypto stuff and and basically just gives them a UI that says list your property put in your fields and hit go and it and it'll forward on their request to a you know a publishing house or publishing site that will basically take care of the crypto stuff for them so it'll

bundle that into the appropriate transaction pay the SV and the recs fee for them and and listed on their behalf yeah I I think that's the only way to go because not everyone not everyone is as keen as as us for the for the new world of decentralization so we've gotta cater for them as well so the interesting part about this kind of architecture of an MLS is that in theory now there could be hundreds of so like hundreds of services that display this data right so if I'm if I'm a broker I might in the future

have an option of like five different services that run on the same data of X MLS which is on ipfs but display things differently and I might like one way of displaying the data over another so for example in one system if I might search properties in New Jersey I might get a set of results in another system I search properties in New Jersey I might get different different set of results and maybe the second one is is better suited to me so I can choose that user interface right yeah absolutely the the UI and the and the system that we have built can be hosted by anyone

very easily so we expect that there will be you know potentially ten different websites hosting the same Rex UI so you could go to any one of these sites and create your listings or or search for properties and that's fine but yeah you're right people will customize it people will tweak it people will hone in on particular areas that people will find of interest and the other thing is that the existing players in the in the space here in Australia like real estate Comden au there's no reason

why they can't in pull our data out of Rex MLS and include it in their in their results as well so yeah the data is free for everybody to use which we can't do that right now we try to do that with another app I try to pull data off a loop net and it's it's it's you can do it well you can't do it anymore but it violates all sorts of end user licensing agreements and that was some of the discussion that Russ and I had that we wanted this thing to be completely opened and and like Russ said any of these current brokerage platforms can pull the data so I think the the central challenge with the system like Rex MLSE seems to be how do you incentivize

brokers to put data in and and how do you prevent kind of civil attacks like like data which is not correct entering into the system because some party wants to let's say spam the system so what's the what's yours what's your idea for incentivizing brokers to put put actually put data into the system well so the first part of that I can take the incentivization the incentivize them we are what we talked about we're paying them to get on the system but the incentivization is already there the pricing like I said for a lot of these other platforms especially in the commercial sector which we're focused on

are exponentially high and they're adding overhead to the large CBR ease Cushman and Wakefield even big large investment companies like black stone in New York City it's incredible how much it's adding to their overhead and then you've got smaller firms like myself and in other you know local brokerage houses where again it's the the the pricing keeps going up and loop net has been an alternative to CoStar in terms of price and it's going from something that's been not reasonable but at least affordable and now it's going to jump from 160 to like 250 or 260 something ridiculous

it's going to go way up and they're also going to loop in you're gonna have to pay for some of the plugins on top of that so it's going to end up being about $350 a month and the broke the larger houses can afford this and take this on but they're there right now the meetings that we've taken they're investing in companies like ourselves we've actually had a couple of larger companies talk to us about investing in wrecks because they're trying to come up with an alternative means and when we talk about ipfs and data decentralization it's amazing how exciting how excited they get about that and so that's that's that's really the the big incentive here for both large and small companies and

in terms of spanning the network rush I'll let you attune to that youyou had a pretty good response for that yeah yeah we're basically two approaches to combat spam and and fake listings and what have you firstly is you will need a small amount of rex token to create a listing where we're aiming for it to be pretty insignificant you know around the ten cents or twenty cents or something like that just enough so you've got some skin in the game to post content on there and the other approach is we're introducing a concept called a meta feed which is

basically a user that you subscribe to who basically blacklists spam adverts and that kind of stuff now this is completely user configurable so in the UI you can say you can easily remove meta feeds you can add new ones if someone if someone started to get a bad reputation for blacklisting you know properties they shouldn't be then you can easily remove them and find someone else who's doing a good job and the incentive for these meta feeds to to do this blacklisting is in return for for their efforts they are able to post

you know promoted listings or you know basically put a bit of flair on a listing too and they can then sell that service to two little asti's so at least he who might want to put you know a nice and a nice highlight over their listing they can contact the meta feed and say you know I'd like to buy one of your promoted listings and this meta feed might might have a pretty good subscription you know he's got a he's got a thousand users who subscribe to him so you know it would be a good value transaction so you talked about reputation is there some sort of a token that represents reputation in reximus

how do you establish reputation reputation for a meta feed would be quite would be quite different because it would mainly be how many how many how many valid spam listings has has he blocked and how many people subscribe to his feed so there wouldn't be a single metric that that people can contribute to it's more how successful is this meta feed would determine you know how many how many people choose to subscribe to him basically okay so at when when one of these participants points out a feed

as being our listings as being spam who who then backs that up by saying ok if this was this was accurate this is accurately spam or not like how that that's where I'm still not understanding at the moment that would probably be more of a oven off chain process so the users would probably communicate over Reddit or some other system that would be built that would review these these meta feeds and or it could even just be word-of-mouth you know that that that this account here has been doing an exceptional job and everybody subscribes

to him it's probably important to mention that Rex will come with a built in meta feed that will be run by us and we will be flagging spam content so in in most cases that will be sufficient we you know it's in our interest to to ensure that we get rid of all the spam that shouldn't be there but if anyone at any point decides that they don't trust us or we all we're censoring certain properties and they can easily remove us and switch to somebody else okay so let's talk about the token then the Rex token what utility does a server in the system

the rex token primarily is is to pay is to pay the listing fee and as mentioned that's mainly to prevent spam it'll be further down the line we've got two phases in this which we'll touch on I'm sure later but we're going to add plugins that'll have comparable properties other other data that's relevant that right now on the current systems you have to you know pay a certain amount for the Rex will act as sort of a gas or a currency I guess to purchase these services or these plugins

I forgot to mention probably one of the most important things which is when people list a property they can allocate how much of the value of the property they wish to accept in Rex so if you're selling a property for $500,000 you might say I would like to accept I'm willing to accept up to $1,000 in Rex as part of the trade so and the the idea here is that the more the more you the more percentage you pay you accept in your in selling of your property the

more the the more preferential treatment you get in enlisting in the position of your listing in the system so we're hoping that this incentivizes people to slowly increase their the percentage of Rex that they accept as part of selling of a property and and and competition there should push that up and if and if we start to see 10% of property sales being settled in Rex then we've already we've already won so that's a very important feature okay so when you pay Rex to to establish your listing your your burning that Rex essentially or

does it someone basically the fees are collected into a into a into a separate pot within the contract and and then it's up to the Rex core dev team as as to what they do with those collected fees basically they have the choice of burning them outright they have the choice of using them to add liquidity to the Rex Dex order book and buy tokens or they can withdraw them and use them to fund development of the platform today's magic where it is listing li st ing head over to let's

talk Bitcoin comm to sign in enter the magic word and claim you're part of the listener award so there are lots of blockchain projects that are essentially trying to create an open data layer what I mean by open o an open data layer is a set of data items that are valuable when organized together for a large number of people and most in most of the cases this data is kind of centralized across various companies today and people imagine that the blockchain will be this open data layer blocks in ipfs will be this open it earlier so other examples of such systems might be things people

are building for media right some people are building like content attribution systems like who created which song published on ipfs and blockchain or there might be things like open Bazaar right like that's an open data layer that says who is willing to sell what right now as an open data layer and in all of these open data layers kind of projects and Rex is one of them I would say once all of the data is open and now rex has this requirement to pay 20 cents using the rex token somebody else can any day come and create an alternative service which does not

this listing fee and because all of the data is open that other person can create has paid the same service and add maybe very low cost so how do you defend against that I believe that the 10 cents is is is insignificant enough to not be a huge problem and it and it does serve the purpose of reducing spam I think someone who creates this system with no fee at all is going to struggle with with with a huge amount of spam on the system and and all that does is is make make make more work for the meta feeds

to then have to be forever chasing down the the spam posts and and blacklisting them so I don't see the ten senses as being as a big issue it also has the added benefit of if those fees do get burned of reducing the supply of rex token and and increasing its values so i think there's benefits in in the fee model and yeah it would basically be up to two people to decide and and yeah i think i don't see a problem with the with the fee model to be honest yeah the

other thing is to with the real with the real estate community with the crypto community it's easier to sort of jump ship from one platform to another but for the real estate community like i said they're their main business and I think this will translate in other industries their main business is transacting and building and obtaining real estate information so if there's a platform that works and they're used to it and the they're used to one UI over another they're gonna go with what they're comfortable with and with what costs obviously the least now if something's free but they're used to something else and the cost is nominal most likely they'll stick with what they know so my question is actually part of a broader set of questions which is for

any business that's building an open data layer what is the mode what is the thing that defends that business against competitors jumping in and copying them at low cost and your answer to it is user comfort like the users are familiar with these set of user interfaces that you will develop for them and ultimately that is what makes them stick to stick to the next service and not jump ship later look you guys know you guys have built platforms getting a user base is very difficult to do and once you are able to do that it's very difficult for somebody to come along and disrupt that we're running

into that right now with going up against a company that is dirt they're treating their customers in a way that just doesn't make sense but their customers have to put up with it so if someone comes along and offers Rex you know forked and in it's free like Russ touched on there's probably going to be a lot more spam we don't know what it's going to be but to get that traction if you get that traction that's a very difficult thing to disrupt especially if you're treating your your users fairly yeah the only other thing I was going to add to that is is if you're if you're looking at investing in a platform and and one system has has a

supply that that can be reduced depending on how much usage it gets potentially increasing your investment in in the tokens that you in whole that you hold I mean or choosing a platform that that that has no basically just slowly increases the the tokens you financially better off choosing the one that might cost a an insignificant fee but potentially will see the value of your tokens increase so coming back to the token can you talk about how the tokens are distributed I try reading the white paper mentioned you had this a

little liquidity injection distribution model can you talk about yeah this is a novel approach we've taken into to solve this distribution problem with a lot of with a lot of these tokens that are coming out we weren't comfortable with with assigning ourselves all of them or a large portion of them from the outset we were pretty hesitant even to to go with the with the crowdfund but but you know it would be really handy to to boost our resources and development speed so we've gone with this zero token launch and basically the

only way to get hold of the rex token is to put buy orders on the order book and the audible quill every six hours it will calculate the top ten unfilled orders and and basically just create or issue new tokens and give them to the to the top ten orders so I believe this is a very fair way to do it because you've got to put a buy order on the book which is available for anybody to buy so you might want to win the the liquidity

injection and get some half-price tokens but someone can also come along and and sell their recs and take your order so it's kind of like mining but I think it's a very fair and and and evenly distributed way of of distributing the tokens okay cool so so but you also you mentioned I think earlier that you're having a crowd sale let's let's dive into that a little bit you can talk about the token sale we have kicked off the contract and it's I think the the the token swap is due to to start in about six days and basically

we're looking to raise I think was about forty five thousand F that's alcohol and the the token swap will forcefully close itself once it reaches ninety thousand F I believe and basically this will give users a chance to basically buy bulk Rex before anybody else and yeah the these Rex will they'll be issued with Rex reward points which is basically just a a receipt to say you you are eligible to claim X number of Rex

when the claims process becomes active and we're looking to do that when we go live proper in about three to six months one once we've bedded down the system over the next few months and and ironed out all the kinks so so Rex is not really a share in the system or or a security it's it's it's like it's like an entry fee to an amusement park right like whenever I'm a broker and I want to put something on the deck system then I and then I need to have this entry ticket and that's the Dex token is that a right way to think of it yeah pretty much yeah it's yeah you'll you'll need a you'll need the Rex to use the system

but it won't entitle you to dividends or shares or equity in anything it's simply just a means to utilize the system when when's it starting exactly and until when is it go it's set to run for about fourteen days but if it sees a huge amount of interest it will potentially end a lot earlier than that I instead of 14 days we we set it to 14 tranches of tokens with the with the X with the expectation that each tranche would be a day but if there's a if there's a huge amount of

interest those strategies will sell much faster than than 24 hours and therefore the so you can swap could end sooner than that I I don't know the exact time it's on the it's on the website it's on the adapt at the moment it's about 6 days from now it starts yeah like it it seems to me that the X is going after the ripple model right like they have this token X of P which you need which you need to have you know in order to you should transactions on the ripple network but it's going for a much fairer and broadly distributed token supply right like ripple is pretty concentrated

in the in the hands of the core company but in case of X you're targeting a more broad distribution yeah look I I don't think it necessarily is just specific to ripple I think III compare it similar to aetherium a theorem you need to hold some of the token to use the system yeah but you're right it's the distribution model is I think as as fair as as we can get it so it'll be interesting to see how the how this distribution model plays out hasn't really been tried before so let's see how it goes but I

assume that you have a company of your own right that is also going to somehow have a different business model on the X and X platform so so there's this directs the platform and the token and that's open data but do you do you guys ever have a company as well that would want to build some service on Drake's in the future and monetize that yeah so we have a separate company that we are what we'll do is we'll build some of the plugins that we mentioned earlier a lot of people in the real estate community which is an excellent use case for blockchain are trying to do title

and escrow services and contrast contracts to some extent Russ and I we spoke about this when we first got a going with Rex and we were sort of taking the Reed Hastings Netflix approach right so when those guys got started they provided a convenient means to mitigate the retail experience by just ordering a video online and having it delivered to you meanwhile as the technology and the infrastructure developed the bandwidth went up they were able to they're now one of the biggest media platforms and people are more comfortable with subscription-based online models we see the similar path for blockchain so we feel it's the

Multiple Listing Service is a good entry way to get the brokerage community in the real estate community comfortable with cryptocurrency and as the infrastructure develops adapt central we would like to provide plugins that would adhere to title escrow services like I said some some contracts you know even eventually down the line you could get into construction construction bonds and things in that nature let's let's walk through all of these alternative places where block chains and real estate could intersect so one of the most common intersections that you find in many places is you spy to like some land registries and recording who owns what

and at what time instant so I've seen that factum was pretty active in in in this space what what are you thoughts on that does it really make sense to have real estate linked to private keys that can be stolen I I do I don't think right it makes sense because people aren't responsible or they're just not they don't know how to deal with it yet even even some of the the technical guys you know you misplace keys and and they're gone so I like I said as the infrastructure develops I think that Land Registry and title makes perfect sense and it's a great use case and eventually it will be done

I just think in and Russ thinks collectively that it's it's too early and that some of these some of these processes need to be developed more and once they are then it'll be a very efficient way to see who owned a property throughout the process I mean right now I'm in the process of buying a house and the title company it's a great business to be in it's they've got about eight thousand dollars in fees and they're just ensuring about against any possible cloud that could be in the title which if you look at the report there's none so they're they're basically printing eight thousand dollars and so on a

residential level when you're buying a 250 thousand dollar house and you have an $8,000 title fee that's that's a big expense and that adds up and so you know that'll be a great use case to get rid of that you won't need that anymore so you know but like I said we believe it's it's a little early for that another interesting use case is when you're looking to buy a property and you get you've got to go get a you know a building and pest inspection done and and usually you know there might be 50 people looking at the house and there and they've all got to go and pay for this silly pest inspection report at

five hundred bucks or a thousand bucks a pop there there's there's some companies out there that are starting to try to optimize that and improve that and and try to and make that a bit more affordable but I think in an open data system potentially those those pest reports could be uploaded into ipfs and the cost-shared or or or put up for free I think that's an interesting use case as well and and what like like really the real estate industry also has a big like financing component to it right so

there's like trillions of dollars in mortgages these mortgages are taken and then they're bundled together and then securities are sold in these mortgages do you think that kind of process could also map onto the blacktop chain yeah I we do but I think that those are they're gonna be there's a lot of FinTech companies that are working in the banking industry that are trying to disrupt that process and a couple you know a the stock market and a couple other financial instruments and we're not attacking that head-on but I do believe that a couple of these companies that are working on it will be successful and absolutely will we'll be able to incorporate that it incorporate

that into the REC system so just before we wrap up here coming to the end of the show one topic that comes up quite a lot in discussions around the AO is governance you mentioned earlier some things regarding the regarding fees for instance and that fees could be used to provide liquidity in the system or could be used to fund development and and some other things how do you foresee these these decisions being made moving forward what type of governance models have you envisioned for rex unless we've already built a decentralized governance application for

from for managing these kinds of decisions so basically the that that platform is will be integrated into rex or it already is integrated into rex and and it has it's it's kind of like a by invitation governance model so users who have worked on the system who have who have contributed over time and who who the dev team or the other governance body deems as as trustworthy will be brought into the into the government governance

body and and then they will get a say in all the decisions that are made so to start with it'll be fairly small just Stephen and I most likely but we as the system grows and and the and the dev team gets larger we will you know incorporate and include more and more people into that into that model okay so then decisions would get voted on in some sort of voting systems I mean since there's no shares what you're saying is that any any sort of decisions around the codebase or around how fees are gets redistributed would what those decisions would happen in this platform and in

which I guess the members have voting rights is that how it works yep correct so each each member has basically one voting right and and it's a hierarchical system so that you can include a group of of 10 developers under one under one voting right so those 10 developers will have their own governance contract and and their vote will basically pull together and be one vote in the parent in their parent contract so it can scale out in any way you like but yeah basically they they

everyone gets one vote on on proposals whether on what to do with the with the fees or whether to add new members into the into the body or yeah anything that you want to do basically and and it interacts directly with with with the recs contracts so you don't need to pick one person say okay you do it they cut the governance body will interact with Rex and perform the actions if the proposal was whether it passed passed consensus all right Greg guys thanks to Russell and Stephen for coming on the show today it was great to

talk about Rex MLS and how you guys are disrupting the real estate market it's it's sort of encouraging to see that you know you didn't mention that the real estate market was always the last industry to embrace new technologies but it's it's quite encouraging to see that that there's a lot of interest around around blockchains in that industry yeah fantastic thanks for having you something yep we appreciate it thanks guys and we'll have links to the Rex MLS soft launch platform that we've just launched actually I think in the last few hours we'll have links to that and shown us along with the white paper and other documentation about Rex moss so thanks to our listeners for tuning in we are part of the LTV network you can

find lots of great shows about Bitcoin blockchain and decentralized systems on let's talk Bitcoin comm we released in the episodes representing Bitcoin every Monday you can find us on iTunes SoundCloud or wherever you get to I guess you can also download the video at YouTube or watch the videos on youtube.com slash epicenter of EDC and of course if you would like to leave us a review on iTunes you can do that and if when you do send us an email at show at epicenter bitching calm and we'll send you a free t-shirt so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week