Why Air Rights are Trading on Crypto Rails | Jonathan Dockrell, SkyTrade

Transcript

hey everyone we all know blockchain is changing the world but who's actually driving it I'm excited to invite you to the sixth edition of Meridian a web three conference hosted by the Stellar development foundation in London from October 15th through 17th get early bird tickets at meridian. stellar.org with code blockworks pod special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us now let's get into today's episode hey everyone Jason here before we dive into today's episode I want wanted to tell you about your wallet's new best friend Harpy Harpy guards your digital assets 24/7 blocking sketchy transactions before they even happen but that's not the best part it's totally free secure your wallet for free

at Harpy doio ire Link in the description now let's get into today's episode this episode is brought to you by Avalanche Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure check them out it's core. appd discover you can explore avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core. appd Discover I was playing around earlier today really cool hey everyone Jason here have you ever wanted to play casino games with your friends right from your couch I'm excited to tell you about my prize the first multiplayer online casino where you can play chat and win together when you make your

first deposit of $10 or more you'll get $20 for free head on over to my prize.com invite Empire to get started all right everyone welcome back to Empire Santi and I are speaking with Jonathan dooll uh Co co-founder and CEO of Sky trade um so first welcome I'll give a little context on the episode but Jonathan welcome to the show man yeah hey good to be here guys thanks good to have you here yeah so the so the context of the show is um you know Santi and I are both investor invested in the precede round of Sky trade and we made this so Sky trade announced

the round maybe a week or two ago and I messaged Santi and said or we were talking about this live on the Roundup the other week we said uh we've never never we've never had so much inbound investor interest from uh like an angel investment that we've made going live on Twitter so as soon as I posted it I got a dozen or so investors reaching out saying can I talk to Jonathan Santi I'm sure got even more than I did um but also on Twitter the contrast was really interesting because my comments were filled with people saying this is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever seen this reminds me of putting Uber on the blockchain in 2017 uh I've done my research air rights is a I don't like air rights is barely

even a Marketplace offchain why would you bring it onchain um and so even though you guys are really early I wanted to have this episode to kind of explore like what I'd Call the Frontier of what could happen on chain um and yeah so just excited to have you Jonathan so I think the first I I hate asking this question because it usually leads to some windy answer about how you got into crypto but I think it's actually relevant for for this for this episode so so I'll ask it here like what what is your backstory and like what how did you get into like this air rights weird Market that that that you've got going right now yeah yeah it's a good question I get asked a lot so my background I guess is uh entrepreneurial really like I've had a

bunch of uh stuff in very traditional businesses everything from Bagel factories right through to startups and property stuff um and I uh also was kind of within marketplaces so uh with delu in the UK and fow that was R share so kind of web two marketplaces uh kind of growth side uh operations supply side um some marketplaces I love Market places so kind of I really kind of like that kind of way a market works I like the supply and demand side so that's kind of my background of what I did um and I was kind of going through YC's startup School uh with a different idea I'll tell you about that sometime another crazy idea but didn't work um and I met my uh co-founder there and he's been in blockchain um for like 12 13 years and I

was kicking this idea around about drones and air rights that was kind of the initial little kind of thing in my head and I was trying to figure it out um and I mentioned it to him and he was like smart contracts you got to write smart contracts for that that's how that will work um and I went okay so we kind of started digging in we spent some time kind of researching this looking into it a bit more I started really going deep into airrs marketplaces had this been looked at before um and I came across a lot of stuff from a crowd called the mercada center it's a George Mason University they've written about this um and started talking to them started reading their papers and I was like hey yeah really is a market if we could get this moving and this could be actually

really valuable but really valuable to people who are who don't realize that they have this value almost sitting above their heads and that kind of was really quite interesting I knew in my mind there was stuff in New York and air rights so we had to kind of dig around on that and we had to kind of find out a lot about it um and through that we kind of met a bunch of people who've kind of done air rights before in kind of small sections in New York and and some in Chicago um started talking to people in London as well because Aires have traded there um in in quite an opaque way but they have been um and yeah that that's kind of where the Nugget of it it came in originally we were looking at kind of the Drone angle but that then quickly

morphed into the property side when we started um talking to real estate guys they were like hey actually we got inbound stuff I I I write a substack and we got inbound stuff from Real Estate guys who were going I know how valuable airs are we're like oh okay all right we started talking to them and they kind of really directed us down that kind of like like look deeply in the real estate side look deeply at that how that can work um and yeah that's kind of how how I got into it um and so yeah it's kind of the blockchain piece of it um was put together by Marson my co-founder he was like yeah and as we kind of work through that kind of how that would work and why it would be better than doing it let's say in a traditional way it kind of just

kind of the light bulb kind of went off so yeah that's kind that was a rambling answer you know by the way you were right we we love we love to ramble here um particular of me how do you think about um so I'd like to double click on this idea of like why does it need to be on a blockchain and like maybe some context for people like why has this Market not taken off in because it strikes me as there have been large transactions particularly in places like New York you know like we talk about like uh you know Ken Griffin I think bought to St Patrick's cathederal and then JP Morgan bought like Madison Square Garden but like these are Hallmark locations um why do this Market not uh matured in a way as others perhaps can can you also just te up

before we go into like why it's not on a why why on a blockchain like can you just really expand on the air rights Market because I think Santi knows more about it than I do like and we've had our calls and stuff like that but I would just love to go deep into the air rits market for a second like even just Sky Trader side yeah sure sure so yeah I mean the the aites market um it's been around for a long time like an awful long time um and it kind of stems from common law jurisdiction so um thanks to the British I suppose really um so in common law you own the airspace above your your land effectively um in the olden days it used to be to Heaven into hell that was kind of how it was turned but they kind of uh watered that down a

bit um and so in different jurisdictions it can be different but fundamentally in the in the us it's up to 500 feet above the highest point of the building is owned by the land owner beneath so if you think about that every piece of land is owned by someone and therefore every piece of air is owned by someone um and then the value of that air is very dependent on numerous factors a little bit like real estate so you know somewhere um you rural Arkansas is going to be different than somewhere in downtown Manhattan just in the real estate as well but therefore the air rights become different value levels as well and as air starts to be used for different things so one you can use it for construction so yeah let's say let's say I have a building with two stories uh and I say okay I I don't have any

money left or whatever uh but I can build five more stories and I sell that to you Santi and you go okay I'm going to go build and then I'll sell it or rent it or whatever so that's utilization of that airspace and that's kind of like a development play um but you can also use it to uh protect your views so you if you had a building and you had a nice view of a beach or youd a view of what's happened in in the US a VI of the Empire State and you wanted to protect it because that's valuable to your property you can actually buy the airspace to protect that so no one builds into it so you can do that as well um then other uses people actually just buy them and hold it um because it can be valuable or they may intend to

use it at some point point in time and then the other one is Transit so this is kind of where we kind of originally started which was like drones um which was like Hey you know why haven't drone scaled okay regulation might be one thing but to permission to be in private airspace you know permission to be in private airspace you shouldn't be there how do you get permission and that's how we kind of uh brought it together so yeah that's kind of the air rits marketplace now it's super opaque right now so as you mentioned some like Ken Griffin sure I mean who who couldn't he talk to if he picked up the phone right I mean you know it's kind of pretty easy but for normal people or regular people who want to be involved in this um very difficult really hard you might need a

broker you need a real estate guy you need all these kind of stuff um so that makes it really really difficult so that's kind of the current the current state of air rights yeah you you mentioned the the Ken Griffin deal can you just expand on that for for people who have not read read about the Ken Griffin deal yeah sure um yeah so yeah s mentioned so St Patrick's in in Manhattan um Church uh they didn't want to build above it because it would ruin it it would kind of make it look look terrible um and obviously the I think it's the arch dasis of New York owned it um and they sold the air rights above it to Ken Griffin who could could then transfer it to his building so effectively they had the rights to build X stories they weren't going to use it

they could sell that and that right got transferred uh I think it was about 164 million so it's about three approximately 350 a square foot is how they kind of look at it um and then if you think about Manhattan real estate prices that's an immediate kind of like 3 4X uh when he does actually build into it on the on the lot so yeah that's that's how that was done and actually there's a couple other churches that have done the same you know the church are clever at making money and and not only churches but uh for any sandwich fans uh there's a Jewish deli called Cates so I I the first time I learned about air rights was not around Ken and Griffin or anything like that there was this uh deal which I'm sharing if anyone's watching on YouTube cat's cuts a $17 million deal with luxury

developers to stay in the Lower East Side uh the business bus sold its air rights in neighboring Lots so cats's they actually even though they're a booming bit like ever everyone goes to cats's they're they're they were not making enough money to afford the the high rent in the Lower East Side so what they did was there was a luxury hotel that was getting built next door and catas didn't want to move their location from the Lower East Side so they made $17 million selling their air rights so that was actually the first time I heard about this Jonathan where does this Market trade right now it just it it it sounds like it doesn't trade right now right it just goes if you're wealthy or you're a big hotel you can call a broker yeah yeah so yeah it it it trades like there's no web two version if you

like so you can't go to uh you know you can't just go to a portal and you get a bunch of air rides there and you can pick one and trade it so you don't you can't do that right now um so yeah you need to be somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody um you know all that kind of stuff um now granted property works that way a lot of the time but at the same time property also doesn't work that way so you can go onto Zillow and you can find a home if you want to buy it and then you can kind of go through that kind of process so at the moment it's it's it's not there um and again that kind of that's really one of the big reasons why we're looking at this on chain as well um so when you think about

it there's no web two version and that means we have no comparable so if if you were bringing something on our contentions if you're bringing something on chain that's already web to that's kind of going from one to n you know it's you're kind of optimizing yes you're you're potentially uh making it transactions you know cheaper price Discovery Etc um but moving it from where it effectively is now non-d digitized onchain uh I'm bringing all of the um uh you know the positive aspects of onchain the mutability um the quick transactions uh the low transaction costs is is a zero to one move and that's where we see it so we see kind of you're leapfrogging this web two you

don't need to go to web two it's almost like cellular net Works in like you know the Caribbean like why do you build uh you know stationary lines when you can go straight to mobile um and that's the way we view it um and that's our contention that we're Lea frogging we're going there because it's the best place to go in so far as the same way you wouldn't uh you you would now only put stuff on a Cloud Server like why would you go old school generally you know it's the same kind of idea we're looking at here so yeah you can't you can't kind of in web too yeah you can if you're a property guy you might know a few things and a few things but there's no real place for you to go if I want to buy it or trade it now

it's it's not impossible but it's very very difficult yeah also know about either so yeah I'm in New York I'm trying to go on Street easy and Zillow to see anything about air rights and nothing um is does the future look like that for you guys um you know in terms of being able to quickly I guess for for the audience most people can relate to real estate like how big is this Market what are the what are the kind of the the different vertical or types of transaction that you anticipate for for air rights is it just places like Manhattan or does this really apply to not just uh you know in large cities but other places and outside the US as well which there's like legal differences in

terms of how air rights are monetized I guess sure yeah I mean the market is is really big so kind of last estimates of and again I know we talk about New York a lot but it's because this is where transactions have happened um well one of the places um so underu air rights here estimated about 500 billion that's what the estimate is uh London in zone one and two uh 52 billion um dollar pounds um so it's huge like it's it's it's really really very very big and yet there are zoning things and there are all sorts of complex things that need to be brought in and that complexity is what we're untangling um which is you know a big part of our value problem is it mainly just in the cities that are confined by space Jonathan because I

think if I think about Like a Phoenix or Kansas City or something like they just build horizontally instead of vertically right they just expand their city limits to accommodate more things but like New York is an island and can't do that yep yeah well yes uh it is in in kind of uh yeah kind of compact cities definitely it's more valuable like the land space is more valuable but in those smaller areas they do build up as well for different reasons it can be just they want to keep people together um and also the land values can kind of change and you sometimes they actually put in barriers to stop you moving out um but there's kind of two I I suppose to kind of go back to the kind of two use cases one being real estate developing into it maybe holding on to it as an asset and

then the other one is for drones to actually enter the airspace to kind of scale so what we're seeing is that it kind of separates naturally right because uh in the kind of dense areas um of real estate yes you trade them mainly for this real estate purpose drones in cities in my view I could be wrong but drones in cities are further away from drones in small rural areas which is where they are at the moment so this airspace then becomes valuable for drones to get into and the people who own the airspace can actually get a rental from it which is what we've also built as well so that when a drone company wants to go from A to B we say fine here's the permissioned route it's a small rental fee and that rental fee is distributed down to the air rights

owners um so that's kind of where we're seeing the kind of the the market if you if you like kind of separate out um but those rights and those air rights then become valuable so in Phoenix if you have drone delivery happening within your air rights your Capital value of your property's gone up but also those air rights have become valuable so you might sell it because the purchaser might go okay there's drones F through that there's going to be a residual and I'll buy that as well so yeah that's kind of what we're seeing on that front uh expand a little bit more about this drone um how do you actually enforce it um you know is there a deepen angle in terms of uh you know looking at hey if a drone flies through my farm my 50 acres who's tracking that and how do

I enforce that I get paid yeah yeah yeah great question yeah so as it stands at the moment the default is the drones can't be in private airspace that's just the default it's private airspace you need permission to be in it um so when a drone does fly through um like how do you know who who it was how do you know what flew through and you know why don't they just go ahead and do it so in the US same in Europe actually you have um an emitter within each drone and each commercial drone has to emit its serial number um its ownership details there's metadata and that also sends its GPS coordinates so we intercept that so the kind of the deep inside of it is we launched an app um only available on Amazon store right now we're bringing it

to play store soon it's free you download it and that intercept the Drone signals from an Android device like phone up to 5Ks um and that picks up that data and then we use that data to cross reference uh to the actual air rights ownership as well and we can say yes this drone went through these number of spaces and the fee is X and we can then invoice the commercial drone company um and interestingly we can do that retrospectively as well um because a lot of these flights can actually be picked up in the back um because sometimes they most of the time they do a flight AR as well um so that we can find that as well so yeah kind of the deepen angle is and what we're finding in um in our communities is people are like like they're just using this for

fun right they're just looking at drones and they're like okay that's interesting a little bit like um what is it like Flight Radar 24 I don't know if you've ever looked at those kind of things oh yeah quite popular with the Russian oligarchs during this war in Ukraine yeah exct Jonathan Jonathan if this is such a big market and such an exciting and like obvious market and there's a I think you said 500 billion why hasn't this be become a big thing in web to right I feel like after Uber and Airbnb like there are so many marketplaces that got funded like why didn't that has anyone tried this before and if so why did it fail and if they haven't tried it why haven't they tried it yeah so there's no particular names you can kind of bring up that has been a kind of a

failed Marketplace as such people have tried to trade them for sure but generally it's been traded is part of a real estate transaction um so because it does so if you own the building you own the air right it just transacts it just it just trades um and people haven't really looked to sever them and put that severed air rights into a Marketplace and trade it separately and um kind of my view on why is it's a hard problem right it is a hard problem I mean I'm kind of making it sound like hey you know this is super easy but it's actually quite difficult um and that's again one of the reasons we quite like it because it reduces the competitive field Naturally by doing that and we can untangle it there are legal aspects to it there are zoning aspects to it uh

there are ownership aspects to it so there's a lot of kind of bits in there that need to kind of be tied down and tied together which we can do there's also data pools now that are actually more mature that we can get into which you probably wouldn't have been able to get into five years ago there's actually onchain uh people who are pulling real estate data uh that we're working with like parcel and we kind of pull that in and that's really helpful um there's other databases we can get access to now we wouldn't have been able to five years ago so I think a lot of that is the reason that it didn't go into web to and I think well it's it's so opaque uh the people I think necessarily didn't kind of latch on to it you know they were saying yeah property we can do that but

air rights H that's maybe slightly nuan it's too Niche um but then again with drones coming in like the valuations are going to be going up so again it's kind of a timing thing I think as well yeah maybe on that last point of um the real estate markets I think people like you know in the US you have nmls you know the real estate data is very clean but that's not the case in other places most places outside the US and you know Western Europe I guess is that an angle that you think about like pulling in that data incentivizing people to feed you that data and from a coordination standpoint that being an unlock that perhaps makes it easier uh to to get to these markets whereas historically it's been quite like

there's a webtube company I think uh funded by big real estate developer I forget uh that um went to Brazil and some of these places to like try to build more structure into the real estate kind of data just for like land plots and what have you um let alone air rights I'm curious like if I'm curious I guess like as you think maybe talk a little bit more about like your goto market like how how important is it to go to these other markets is it enticing enough for you guys or are you just going to be focused on like the US and Western Europe kind of yeah yeah so so the US definitely is our primary target right now um and there several reasons so yeah I mean aits New York people know right so it's interesting like the in brand stuff from real estate people knowing

what air rights were you talk to other people in different jurisdictions they're like hey you what are you even talking about this is like you're crazy I get out of my office kind of thing um so when you talk to the real estate people in New York they kind of understand it um and then with the with the difference with the way um low altitude space works so low altitude airspace is owned by the property owner it's not owned by the fa and that's actually really interesting for us that's really helpful um so it means each different state can actually Arbitrage this as well slightly so there's different states who are very Pro drone they're very ProAir rights how they can actually make it work for their people and for their Community um and a little bit like companies wanting to go to like fighting over whether it's you

know Texas or wherever they move to the similar thing is kind of happening in the background um with with with a right so yeah definitely us primary target uh I mean we have limit team as well so I can't put like a 100 teams around the globe um but uh us primary target then UK so the UK um there's been some really interesting transactions in the UK so if you've ever been to London Canon Street Station that was built uh above there's like multi-million pound offices above it Liverpool Street as well and in the UK they have they've kind of loosened things with zoning so if you have a building with a flat roof um you can build two stories above it without like getting zoning permission you can just go ahead and

um so that's a load of people who don't really understand that they have this asset above their building so for us that's really quite attractive um and they're kind of also uh looking to kind of sell off air above uh train tracks as well uh to be built above um so yeah the UK will be next there's a couple interesting markets as well Singapore is an interesting one um so basically if you kind of look at your map of where the British were um most of those places with common law as a base yeah most of them have some level of air rights in there that we can go in and work with um and again for us uh you know we're kind of agnostic if people want to register their air rights wherever they are they can do that now we can't definitely say

that we'll be able to validate them let's say if it's in the middle of the Amazon we probably won't be able to validate that because there's no actual database that we can we can check um but in the more mature locations we can we can go in we can check and we can check the people in front of us so yeah initial us it's a big Market it's big enough for us to to to start with I think without getting distracted um but definitely the the UK would be would be another one um and yeah I think Singapore is quite interesting although the there's different rules and rs in all of these places so again there's an expertise level uh that we need in those jurisdictions so when you talk to uh for example legal folks um like there's ones in New York I'm here at the moment like I can talk to

who have done a r transactions right so we can pull all that information we can kind of mine these guys heads and we can and bring that into what we need to be able to give information to people um one of the interesting things along the data that we're doing as well is we're actually currently just building so you can go in and you'll be able to put in your address and it'll give you um an estimate as the value of your air rights that'll be based off a bunch of stuff um but Pro you know a lot of it from Real Estate data and then a lot of from transaction data and what we've been able to pull from Air rites and then you know putting in a few kind of assumptions in there as well so it'll give you an indicative but the data um

as we pull and as she said some of it is clean some of it's not like you know even even in the US like it's not it's like all just sitting there in one nice Tiny Box that you can go in and look at like just kind of you have to dig around so let's maybe walk through an example um and maybe comparing it to web two kind of flow um particularly interested in this data piece of like the Privacy or is it going to be totally transparent for people to observe the transaction value and then that builds really good com Set uh but like say you own a property in New York like what does it mean for them like walk me through like the flow for Sky trade sure sure sure so uh again if you're an individual you own a property you go

onto sky. trades H and you can register it so you put your address in you just click claim so super simple you click claim in the background then we go about our work um like like little losers and we find out if that stuff that you said in there is right um so is that santis like is that in a register what register is it in is that register valid when was it validated and we go through a whole kind of process in the back again to make sure that that is the case um and then before you can actually transact it or trade it we actually need to know to you as well so we do need to do kyc um and we leave that to the last minute um because nobody really likes doing kyc we understand but you know these are property transactions you do need that

um you know validation there as well so that happens as well that's valid and then that property or the air rights effectively are tokenized we tokenize those uh we use salana as well um to do that so we tokenize those and they're then available in the marketplace when the marketplace is live so we have a a Marketplace which is like an auction house we call it and if you own the property you can go in and set an auction so you can go okay um here's the time limits here's the pricing here's the ranges um and that's what I'll transact this for and then it attracts bids um we have an Uninvited bids um engine we're building as well which I I really quite like I think that's just kind of fun um so that anyone for any air RS that are in the market they can

just throw in a bit and it will like give you a little ping and you will say yes or no what we are what we think will happen with that is yes some people will transact immediately but most people we hoping will then encourage them to set an auction and say okay there's interest here in what I have someone's offered me X price maybe I should offer this out to the market and see if I can get more um so yeah that's kind of how the flow kind of currently currently works if it's a large real estate developer that we've we've partnered with a few um they're not going in and tapping in their their individuals they're just sending us a a dirty file and we're we're cleaning it up and we're getting it all put in and tokenizing those for you J Jonathan how

do you deal with the like licensing and the documentation of this so the way that I'm thinking about it is like an Airbnb or an Uber they're so they're like almost micro transactions they're like you know either five bucks up to a thousand bucks or something like that but like Zillow I'm thinking about Sky trade in contrast to Zillow and Zillow or Compass or whatever might show you the price of a home but then at the end of the day you're still getting in touch with a broker the broker goes to the home then you sit with the lawyer and you do the whole signing and all that kind of stuff like will that will you have to do that with Sky trade or will it all be on the platform yeah so yeah so on the platform you will be able to sign sign off the deal yeah um so yeah

we do need lawyers to kind of check through things and each individual can get their own lawyer if they want to check the deal as well there's nothing stopping them doing that but once you've tokenized it and once we've confirmed it's you and you've given permission for that to trade as what it is trading and it trades that's that's deal done um it's an auction so like traditional auction Hammer goes down done yeah pay me a picture of what the market of like what the platform will feel like is it more like like when you are sitting down with your product team or or you I don't know if you have a product team yet but like are you looking at Zillow are you looking at Compass are you looking at Airbnb like are you looking at hotels.com like what like what what Market Place type sites do you look at

suppose we look at them all but yeah yeah Airbnb definitely early days we looked at because I just it feels so nice right I I just like the product I think it I think it feels really nice um and I think it's a good user experience so yes definitely uh we've kind of looked at that um so you'll be able to kind of go on effectively and when you see uh the marketplace you'll see each individual um uh like air rights and you'll see the map for where those air rights are so you'll be able to pick and choose that um and also we're going to bring in a feature where you can actually put in your own kind of properties picture if you want I mean it doesn't need to be for me it's not necessary but we're going to we're going to look at do that because people have

said they would like that as well and so yeah it's it kind of I suppose Airbnb uh kind of yeah right move is another one we've looked at which is like again like a Zillow um so yeah so it'll feel kind of like a a Marketplace that you would go in and use normally in like a web two World um of course we're putting in dark mode because people like dark mode but there's a kind of an angle um to what we're doing as well because it's in crypto um there's crypto people interested in what we're doing right so we have to try and appeal to them in a way way that's uh that balances these two kind of forces because if you think about it real estate traditionally is traditional right there's a lot of traditional people in it a lot of traditional asset managers and then

crypto people a lot of them depending um you know can be quite different like and so those two worlds like we have to kind of get the ven diagram right we have to kind of make that nice in between for for for both of them um I I guess kind of to indicate that we we launched a wait list for the auction house like last Tuesday and we've got like four and a half thousand and signups and I think they're mainly from what we're looking at they're mainly from kind of crypto Community who are looking okay so there's stuff in here to trade yeah we'll come in we'll trade there's value um we can do that so we're also trying to in the product design balance those two out um it's it's but I mean It's Tricky right I mean I'm sure but we're we're open to feedback so anyone who

wants to feedback to us on it from any uh world uh we we'll we'll happily listen to that info you know real world assets that narrative around capturing yield and tokenizing that is obviously something that has taken off how do you think about the different products so like when you transact an airite um are there different types of transactions meaning you're buying them permanently you can lease them obviously there's a drone piece so maybe there could be I'm trying to think of like um maybe go into the different types of products and types of transactions and maybe yield opportunities that may arise in this Marketplace yeah definitely um so yeah so drone side yeah the the kind of the

base uh product is is rans so uh you know you want to rent airspace for a set period of time as a drone company you get that and you pay a rental and Rental goes to the the the the air rights owners we also see long leasing in that as actually being quite interesting so when we talk to Departments of Transport uh in different states some of them um in the more kind of Forward Thinking states are very interested in using the aites above their highways um for drones but not just for like drones sending like a burger and fries like for cargo drones um they see that as being quite an interesting use case and they're talking about long Leasing and the kind of comparable is like Spectrum sales um so you know Spectrum sales for for

people who don't know effectively you sell the Spectrum off or the government sells the Spectrum off crazy option prices uh one person wins and then they sublet it out effectively um and that's how they make their money back so the states are looking at this so send a long lease of the air RS above your highways which will be channels for cargo drones and then whoever purchases that long lease and then um subl it out so that's kind of an interesting one as well you know because it kind of gets immediate Capital injection um then on the kind of buying uh side for for the air rights as well yes definitely uh purchase you can do um and you can also long lease as well so it's up to the person who owns the AES how they want to

do it for for us the long lease actually is quite an interesting product because um long leasing is actually legally easier to a degree than wholeheartedly selling um both can be done um but the long lease is kind of quicker um that's what we're seeing um but both uh can be done and again it depends on what people want it for so uh we're speaking to property developers who have lots you know nothing on them and they're saying okay it's going to take X years for us to build this um but we're only going to build a certain height because of what we're able to get out of the banks or whatever it is so we know we're going to have residual here we know for a fact there's going to be x amount of stories residual so we either Syndicate that and get someone in now or else we can sell

it off and that's one of the things they're also looking at doing um one of the things now we're not building this right now but one of the things I think is super interesting about this whole Market um and you know hopefully what we'll um spawn out of it you can get mortgages on air RS right now so I think that's super interesting like I think if you if you think about that you have these assets that are sitting above properties that are unlevered unused underutilized and can be utilized and can be levered uh and I think that's really interesting so products around that I think are going to be uh going to be pretty interesting and because it's on chain um they can be built on right so that's the beauty of it like you can actually kind of look and go okay you

can look at us and go okay I see what these guys are doing people are originating these air RS they're putting them in they're renting them trading them whatever but there's all these things around it uh that can be done another one we're looking at as well not to build ourselves but someone we're talking to is per minute drone insurance which I think is like really cool right so yeah we only know you're going to be traveling for like 25 minutes so we just ensure you for the 25 minutes why do we need to ensure your drone for like 365 days a year um so I think there's all those kind of products that will be built on it but yeah the main ones for us are the rent the sale and the long lease um and I think certainly talking to the real estate guys and talking to

the Drone companies um they're the ones that they're happy with uh you know they're more than happy with those products but I mean who knows something else might arise who knows yeah I know that's super interesting I mean I think generally the way I thought about it was we know crypto is really good um you know you take something like Unis swap or even curve like it it allows you these marketplaces have been able to get you price discovery on on pretty diverse markets and tail end of assets and the airite market strikes me as like very um heterogeneous in terms of types of transactions types of you know air rights um and that I think crypto lends itself really well and and the more liquidity the better the price Discovery and that flywheel and the

incentivization to get people to get on the platform um you know and and you know earn an additional yield particular at a time where like commercial real estate struggling or what have you like you're thinking about this like from a timing perspective just becomes even more important um so how um I'd like to maybe transition a little bit into the fundraising journey I think Yano alluded to it it's either some of the best projects that I've invested in are very polarizing either people really get it and love it or people have a very strong reaction to it it's like this is never going to work um you and I think that's certainly the case here um what really caught my eye when I first talked to you

was uh you mentioned the mercada center and I've been following this blog uh marginal Revolution which is like from Anon like I'm an eon nerd and so it's just a it's a Tyler account right yeah Tyler yeah yeah yeah and his counterpart and they put out anyways great blog and so when you said that I'm like okay he's clearly done something right um but yeah walk us through the fundraising journey and how that was the type of reception um and maybe why investors really liked it or didn't really like it yeah yeah so I I guess kind of to to to go back when uh I know I mentioned earlier when when I met U my co-founder so as we were digging around and we we came across marcadas and what they had

written um and one of the things I I was then introduced to uh a place in in Honduras it's a like a special economic zone called Prospero um and I started talking to people down there because I was quite fascinated by this they were looking to do air rights as a Marketplace as well so I was like hey you know we could work together and they they were very open to this and there was kind of connection there with the maradas um and then uh they said listen we're going down to zalu which was vitalik's pop-up City in um in Montenegro and they said come down H you know there's people here who might be interested so I said okay I went down uh and I met a bunch of people down there and when I kind of talked about what uh what we were looking to do the

reception was just overwhelmingly positive right it was overwhelmingly like you know it was Pro crypto down there absolutely but there was a lot of kind of network State people as well and they were like no no this makes a lot of sense like sure it's big and sure it's difficult but like that's good like don't worry about that like so this kind of if you're like social proof kind of almost catapulted me it was like huh okay this is really quite interesting and then U the marcadas they have a ground program called emerging Ventures um so I applied for that and Tyler I got talking to Tyler I was explaining what we're we're trying to do and he was like yeah okay get Market in everything yeah there's a market in everything um so they gave us um a grants that program I think was originally funded by by Peter

teal so it's kind of this idea that there can be uh products or like projects that could meaningfully impact Society basically like there's some sort of positive force here and they're light grants you know just go and and and see what you can do um and so that kind of encouraged us we started building the the PC we talked to salana um and then we we got some funding from salana they said okay see if you can do an MVP you got a PC see if you can do an MVP uh and we we whipped that up kind of end of last year and then with that we got like inbound from real estate people um and started kind of talking to people in in kind of venture um and kind of cheer point of the polarizing 100% 100 % right I I'm sure every founder like you know

gets like a million no or whatever I mean by the way just to say I have a contention that you know VCS are wrong most of the time on the basis of the parallel curve they have to be um so I'm okay with no that's okay so I think you need to kind of build a strong a strong neck um but yeah very polarizing so people people who aren't involved in crypto um don't know why you do anything in crypto anyway right whatever it may be they're kind of like so so that kind of narrowed the field down um and then we started talking to other VCS who were kind of interested in crypto and how it could work and how this would uh would work around it and yeah the main things just like you guys mentioned like why blockchain like why does it need to be

there um you know how can it impact Society how can this actually grow um grow the size of the pie right so we're not taking a slice of an existing pie we're actually growing the pie and that is what's quite exciting to the the VCS we've talked to um and yeah so so the journey has been you know interesting um but yeah met some like great people along the way and I I have to say kind of my background I haven't been I haven't been in crypto for like 10 years so that's that's not me my my co-founder has but I found a kind of a community of people who've um overwhelmingly you know generally are very positive there is the polarizing stuff I mean I've been getting the stuff too that probably you've been getting San like you know what are you doing like this is crazy

you know this is you know you know you're you're you're mad why would you try and do this that's okay like that that's fine I mean you know you think about the other interest interesting products or ideas that are out there like I mean always people say people are crazy for doing these that's certainly not a reason not to do it in fact I mean early days when I spoke to uh someone in the uh in the real estate and also kind of people slightly in the Drone industry and he was like no it's never going to work we'll just fly the drones around that I was like no no no this is private property you're going to have to pay my friend like sorry that's just the way it works and they were like no no we're not going to do it and that kind of like

that really annoyed me right so that kind of like you know no no this this is not going to happen like I'm going to shift the over and window here this is like this is going to happen um so yes that's kind of the journey is to to how we've got there and uh yeah I mean as I said crypto communities are ones that have been by and large the the most positive about what we're what we're trying to do because they can see it's not only speculation sure they can see there's an aspect there and that's fine um but it's also a use case for crypto like an actual use case like it's um like one that you don't you don't need to kind of um dig in to Big technical blockchain stuff if you're not a crypto person you can kind of understand okay

it's an asset it's onchain it's not already in web to that's why you're digitizing and that all kind of makes sense to to to the VCS who who like us hey everyone Jason here just wanted to take a a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of blockchain the Stellar development foundation is hosting their sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15 15 through 17th in London it's a 3-day event where the brightest Minds in web 3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to defi if you're a developer Builder policy maker or business leader looking to make an impact in transforming Global Systems through blockchain this is your chance

to join the conversation you'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar or and use the code block Works pod for early bird pricing now let's get back to today's episode hey everyone wanted to take a quick break to talk about your crypto security I am excited to tell you more about Harpy designed to keep your wallet safe 24/7 Harpy is the most advanced wallet security tool it monitors for risks blocks detected threats and recovers your stolen assets all in real time picture this you're browsing late at night and accidentally approve a shady transaction and it's too late to cancel it I know I've been there

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culminated in this moment where today you have institutions and developers able to essentially have Limitless possibilities with the chain they've enabled developers to build cross-chain swaps or create gaming environments where one subnet can unlock features in another or can use USD as a native gas token Onyx for example by JP Morgan or city or dtc's digital assets or uh the Australian New Zealand banking group they are all building on Avalanche Evergreen subnets really cool stuff big thanks to Avalanche for sponsoring this episode of Empire go explore Avalanche subnet ecosystem at core. appd Discover that's core C.A slcover thanks again Avalanche hey everyone wanted to take a second to talk

about my prize the first multiplayer Casino where you can watch chat and play together with your friends and favorite creators getting started is super easy use a credit card PayPal or even crypto to play over 500 games from classic slots to live table games join the my prize Community now and use referral code Empire to get $20 for free when you make your first deposit or purchase of $10 or more head on over to my prize.com invite ire link will be in the description of today's episode I think uh when I I mean I talk to Founders every day and the best ones are the ones that um deliver a key Insight in a way that becomes you can't

unsee it and it and it's one of those things where you're you're left wondering like it it's so obvious why didn't I see it before and and when I had a conversation with you in back in was it April um the minute you talked about aites I was like I think I'd read about them and I you know I like real estate but it was like huh why didn't why didn't I think about that and and sometimes the danger of that is that you think it's so obvious and the question that Yan was asking is like why hasn't someone built this before like it's it feels so obvious um but and then I think that's where you're the reasons that you articulated when I had a call and you're articulating now make sense right from a timing perspective from a it's a very complicated Market uh and so there's a

reason why and um so you know now it's left up to execution guess but yeah I think it's just to to to kind of highlight I I mean it's it's my contention that it probably it would have been like really really really difficult to do this without crypto H without blockchain without that technology um yeah someone we can we can we go there because I think Santi asked like five minutes into the episode and I cut him off and we went on a 35 minute tangent about other stuff so I'd actually love to I think we have to address that like why is it uh and I I know this is a crypto podcast but like I'm TR maybe close your your eyes and think about the the traditional gray-haired real estate person or the the person who the CEO over NATO is

listening to this yeah why what the hell is this guy talking about why does this have to be on Jame yeah yeah well so there's a couple of reasons I I guess what what you guys said as well earlier so yeah price Discovery definitely so we know that's kind of useful in in crypto and that's that's where you can get it the immutability of it is is really really important right it's really really important so you're bringing all these documents you're bringing all these this information and you're putting it and saying yes that's true at this moment in time that's done stamped almost and you're making it immutable that's really really important um also as it trades through so traditionally when you think about um one of the interesting things I think when you think about a real estate transaction so you have a property uh you have lawyers

on both sides right so they're looking at the same documents effectively and then five years later that property trades again so you got another two lawers looking the same documents again and on and on and on and on and on right so I mean it's crazy so you put it on chain you can see it so you can see if any changes have happened as well so you don't need all this kind of stuff in the middle so I think that's also one of the the the key reasons for it um I think as well I think as I kind of mentioned the the blockchain allows us to uh do this quickly it allows the transaction cost to be low um it allows people to see what's going on as well which is it's opaque at the moment so we kind of open it up we make it bright and we shine a

light on it h we see how these are working and then we bring other people into um the marketplace so if you think about it it's a closed relatively closed Marketplace because you know a few probably uh large companies they're okay with that generally but they're not okay with that forever because you still need growth right so you can't just keep trading between the three people or the three companies or the five companies in New York right you need new capital in like it has to happen and crypto brings that as well um and they bring the trading ability from the crypto communities in so it's one of the things we've noticed as well is since kind of there's been a if feel like kind of I don't want to say a change but a kind of a development in crypto with you know tokenization KKR

looking at tokenization Black Rock looking at token yeah I mean you know this is all very much happening you know you've got the the the ETFs with Bitcoin like I mean this is happening right it's it's moving that way and the people who are making money within real estate um yes sure there's people sitting there happy to take their five or s% a year and sit back and count it but there are other ones who can't do that right because they're leverag they need to actually move things they need to move them forward and tokenization is very much in their minds so when I talk to real estate people it's not that they're anti- crypto they don't necessarily understand all of it that's fine but they understand the concept of tokenization and why that's useful to them um and I think that's kind of the

the why blockchain moves into that as well it's like they can see there's a value prop here for what they're trying to do it opens the the market up and it makes it more fluid so a market that's more fluid for the real estate people makes the more money uh there's more trades more transactions so so that's what I'm seeing from them so if I was you know we were sitting down five years ago and I was saying okay we're just going to do this in web to and I'm gonna like build a Marketplace and then like what are they actually trading right so what can they trade there so they trade what the promise of this going to happen and this way you don't need a promise you actually have the thing you're trading so you know you can open it up so yeah that's that's for us it kind of

made a lot of sense and as I said when I kind of met Marson he he he's his background is like everything from prediction markets right through to kind of dii and you know when you dig into the use cases for blockchain and put real estate in there if you step back and you forget everything you know about real estate if you were to redo the system today for Real Estate you do it on chain of course you would you I mean if you didn't I think you'd be crazy right and and that's me not blockchain for years you know I can and I think maybe that's helpful to me as well is I'm not kind of I'm coming to this slightly not fresh I guess but I have no preconceived notions I'm just looking at the technology that my guys can build um and I'm looking at that use case for

that not um there's not like a an overarching like you know like I don't have this idea that yeah you must hold them like loads of Bitcoin you must like I don't have that the technology good useful and so let's use it yeah I think sometimes uh when I talk to traditional people in finance or or Skeptics we come defensive and and we sort of seem to think that we need 10,000 reasons why it should be on the blockchain and the reality is we need one but very compelling one and that's enough and it might be just it's not a perfect solution uh but it's marginally better and by law of inertia you just the market will flow into that and and

the compounding effects of that are meaningful like if you're marginally better more trans like you know I mean like the effects of that over over a longer time Horizon are explosive um and like the thing that you said of all of that that strikes me the most important is the fee component um I just generally think real estate is a scam industry because you it's like the entry and exit um costs are are very high like two to three% and so that reduces the number of transactions and the velocity of the market and the liquidity of the market and the type of participant that can get into this Market but if you collapse that then it like is explosive like it just you see all of a sudden a market as you said really flourish um and and I think that's what we'll see here right

because if you have the the transaction happening on chain the immutability of the data is there it allows you to do so many things and invite New Market participants and just opens up in a really nice way and so as you said like there is no other reason to go to a web two provider it's just to go on a web 3 provider because there's lower fees and that's it like we don't need a Justified I think yeah that's I think you're going to start seeing like this question of why is it on chain I think you're going to start asking this question why isn't it on right you've got global scale of users and global scale with payments where the fees are lower like why why would you build it in I mean uh I remember like probably Tyler cow

probably writes about this a lot but like Rando tooto theories of Economic Development he talks about the single number one important thing of why countries have developed and others have not is property rights y and you needed a strong government to enforce the title of your land well do you don't really need that like if it's enforced in the block I mean of course like you need a strong foundational government but like if you have the immutability like of these transactions on chain and the certainty of like of that and the that you're transacting then that's kind of a new chapter in property rights and and economic development I think if it's change yeah absolutely I mean I think I think one of the things with property rights as well and and again I know I mentioned I I I write a substat called where is my flying car

and I write quite a lot about kind of air rights and property and so on um kind of you know just from my own being you know like property is like incredibly important and you know when you look at things like and I'm not I'm not American right so but when you look at the US Constitution around property like it it it is so strong like like on the dollar bill I know you guys have you know in God we trust but it's it's in property we trust you know I mean property is what builds everything and the right to own transact uh dispose of and use your property how you see it fit is like the essence of Freedom like I mean that is it like if somebody else has taken that from you what can you do so I think property rights are so strong um particularly in

the US and and and other kind of common law jurisdictions that this idea around air rights as being part of your property means that you're taking what you already have to make more of what you already have and I think that like really fits into kind of a narrative as well that we're we're getting people who um and again marqu you know writes a lot about property rights and all that that kind of stuff and kind of it feeds into that as well it's like okay this idea that you have space above your property there's drones that want to get in and you can give them permission uh fine so why are drones flying into that property space without permission well that seems kind of wrong so let's try and write it so that's also one of the kind of property angles we're looking at as well

is to kind of we're not enforcing people's property rights but we're encouraging them to um to enforce them themselves I suppose at least use them in a positive way for society as well so uh but yeah I mean I think you're right there's kind there's a whole property angle here because we we've also got kind of as you said this polarizing thing we've also got people saying hey uh you know drones should just be able to fly wherever they want you know but why are we stop Flying you know that's fine that's somebody's view um I don't think it's the right View and it's certainly not the view of most people um who own property but people who don't own property yeah that's fine maybe serve you um but in order to make that market work we need to get it on chain and make

it liquid and that's the way that kind of I think it's really interesting what you said around this question of like if you were to re reinvent the system from scratch you would do it on the blockchain and that's that's I think like a really good like kind of way to invert and like ask a question and inform how you build something um or disrupt a particular industry um should we talk about um I know your co-founder is more crypto native but I am curious uh you build on salana how you think about the infrastructure um and the things that you can do today and the things that maybe you can't do today and your kind of dependent on infrastructure that may not be built yet and I'm curious what else you looked at like what other l1s and l2s and stuff you looked at yeah sure sure so I I think

really early on we were using a mutable X which is like a ZK rollup equivalent um for our kind of proof of concept and that that that worked reasonably well um and you know as we were starting to build build uh just and this was probably 18 months ago um a lot more of the developers within certain my co-founders kind of network uh you know where evm you know Finding salana Builders was kind of trickier was harder so people were like no no no go go go that way but what we discovered when we started talking to the real estate guys and you know it's it's kind of it's pretty clear we're gonna we're we're tokenizing like Millions like Millions here like this is not just like like

thousand it's Millions um and to do that in a kind of a a way that's affordable is really important as well um because we're actually doing it for people when they register their rights for free right now because we can um because the salana costs are low we're using compression nfts um and that makes it really useful for us and when we started talking to salana earlier on they were like no no when this Market gets moving there's a large number of transactions on this like so tokenized on salana blockchain makes a lot of sense to them and for us it's quick um I know it had problems a couple of months ago but like those seem to have been ironed out which is good um it's uh for us it the salana blockchain from what we can see attracts

kind of a wide variety of people and users which is nice I mean we we like that so there's people coming from all angles on this um which which is really interesting and helps kind of open the market as well um so yeah that's kind of why we why we went uh to salana and you know I have to say they've been incredibly supportive you know they're they're they're available all the time if we have questions they've been able to kind of link us into people in in kind of some of the technology side that we needed information on as well um so yeah they've just been a great partner so yeah that's why we went there yeah um that's great what what um I guess um from a road map perspective and what it means for listeners and how

they could get involved like walk us through kind of what does a product look like like um you know we talked about what we do today but what does the next six 12 months look for you guys where you going to be most focused sure um I suppose there's there's kind of a couple of ways people can get involved on the road map so the next big thing is the what we're calling the auction house uh so you can be able to you you'll go on and be able to um offer your air rights for for auction uh or you'll be able to do an Uninvited vid if you don't have air rights and you want to get involved so that's definitely one of the big ones um we have it testing at the moment so we're I'm not going to give you a date

by now because you I'll get it wrong um but that will be released soon um and that I'm I'm I'm really excited about that um then otherwis people can get involved so we do have a point system so we don't have a native token right now uh we do have a point system so when people uh sign up to our wait list which they can get on the on the website they get points 125 points uh will be then be given to them with their first successful bid um we also have the Drone app uh it's called so Sky trade links radar you can find on on the Amazon store so you can go there and get that and we're going to be giving points for picking up Dr own data as well we're incentivizing people to do that if you register your air rights we're going

incentivizing with points for that and if you don't have property that's okay you can go in register you can get your code and you can actually refer people in as well um so you can be part of that as well so you don't have to be a property owner to to take part so that's kind of the kind of shortterm road map um and then towards the kind of latter part of this year we're then just tightening that whole thing up and going to make it kind of transact much easier we're also building a widget at the moment for mls's so we're talking to a couple of them at the moment so that you'd be able to put our widget in there you'll be able to che check what your air rits are worth and then come to us and kind of register in there as well um

and the mlss we get a get a part of the action as well because we we realize they have kind of captive audience um but that captive audience isn't necessarily kind of immediately trading um which is fine but they may want to trade their airit or they may want to see what value they are um and kind of sever them out from the from the main transaction I mean the interesting thing as well with the air rits pieces even if you don't think they're valuable today someone might think they're valuable tomorrow right so that's the interesting thing as well so uh you know when I walk around New York like I'm here I'm here all week um and I'm like I just can't stop myself I'm looking I'm like Lego bricks right I'm going okay so was that has that been sold or would that be sold and all that

data is kind of available it's all messy and stuff uh and so so I'm like okay so move that there and move that there and would someone buy that there and even if you don't know 100% um you know uh you know will someone build into that in the future will zoning let you zoning changes so like the one constant is change so you know Manhattan used to be a swamp right so it's not that's a beauty that's a beauty about markets it just uh if when you invite Market participants uh you know you just create more consumer preference and then all of a sudden you unlock these more transactions lower fees more transactions Better Price Discovery and that and a whole slew of things that you know you never thought were of interest but there's someone out there that might be and you just need to allow them to

open the door and come in a transact exactly yeah yeah 100% Jonathan I'd love to uh bring up some of the counterarguments that people brought up on Twitter when I when I announced when when you when you guys made this announcement so I'm just gonna read a couple of these to you U maybe we can start with the first one so someone said yeah but this is only so practical in Manhattan where you can provide example air rights where you can uh bad grammar here but in Manhattan where you can provide where you provide example air rights can only be transferred to adjacent properties not universally through the city so the respective buyer audience is relatively small let alone and not considering the other encumbrances neighboring properties may have so I think the gist of this is look in Manhattan uh you you actually not

everyone can buy the air rights it's the neighboring property can buy the air rights not everybody how how do you think about that yeah so so I guess everyone can buy the air rights what you can use them for then is different in different locations so um they they it was much tighter originally in Manhattan so yes you could only do a neighbor um then that slightly changed where they could transfer them between um the amount you could transfer changed as well um so yeah that's changing as well so and the zoning regulations then are uh you may not have the ability to develop into your air rights already so when you sell it how valuable is that well I mean that's up to somebody to decide whether that's valuable will it

be valuable in the future will that zoning change Etc so there's there's definitely an element of of like their right U but there's also an element of that they're not 100% right in there um and that's okay you know I mean it's okay that there are these restrictions in fact the restrictions can make certain parts more valuable right because the ones that are restricted the ones next to it become more valuable I mean it's a little bit like um uh you know the The Architects you say they need constraints to build nice buildings you know I mean if you let them unconstrained they just build grotesque things you need constraints in a market also add value um in in areas so it's again and to give an analogy to the Drone one as well when when we talk to people with air rights in areas where

drones are flying they're saying well I don't want drones to fly in mine I'm like that's great that's good because you're narrowing the market and those other air rits that allow it in become more valuable then you may open yours up and the market kind of moves and the same is true in Manhattan so the reason that the rules changed slightly is because people wanted them to change and there was Demand right so right if you start having more air rites being bought and sold um perhaps not being built into not all of them need to be built into I mean they're not being built into right now um but they can be built into in the future um or they can be used for other things so we we we're partnering with and we'll announce it soon I I won't totally give it away but we're

partnering with a company who um who do helipads and drone pads um and they're also looking at this for buildings um so a little bit like cellular towers right so yeah you might not build 10 stories above but you might put in a drone pad for example example or you might put in a verti port for a flying car and so there are a bunch of different things that can be done with it but yeah I mean our our Twitter friend is right and wrong nice uh next question is air uh air rits can only be used once so there's only a one transaction event per set air rights before you have to go Source New Deals completely yeah I think what they're referring to there is if you trade air rights and there's the right to build into it once you build into it you can

trade what you've built in again now that that's not true for a start so once you've build into you can trade it as real estate so um yeah you can't trade necessarily the airite but you have the air rights above it still so you have a 500 feet above the highest part doesn't mean you can build into that bit because zoning may be different right so H that's again not not not fully grasping it I don't think but uh yeah if you build into it you can't build into it twice for sure but you can build up again if you have zoning permission but and you can also trade the bit above it because it could have other uses as well or it could be zoned in the future got it and I think the last one here is it requires you to go through the

department of buildings regardless generally there's incredibly small Demand right now for air RS let well actually I guess there's a couple things here which we've covered already but the respective pool of buyers that can acquire them is small there's no encumbrances on their respective properties to apply and use near one of the worst deepin ideas I have ever seen so I think we've actually covered most of the pushback there but I guess I guess the one thing we didn't cover is it requires you to go through the department of buildings right so yeah so if you do any real estate transaction need to go through the through through the right channels um and have it registered if you need it registered um there are not you know you don't necessarily have to have it registered um if it's sold yes you should and it should be open um but yes you you do and

uh part of what we're building as well as a flow to be able to to be able to do that and have it registered um also by doing it on chain the first time um we effectively become the defacto register so yes you will want to look at the official one for sure um but we become the defacto one as well on Shane um which valuable nice I love I love these comments the worst the worst dpen idea I have ever seen uh so I've seen some terrible ones no I just remember getting those comments like that when we like a lot of different things we've done at block works like when we launched our news site was like why would you ever launch a news site there's already the block and coindesk and all these it's like I don't know these things are funny

Spectators commenting so yeah absolutely um yeah go ahead STI I'd like to ask Maybe someone that is coming into the industry relatively fresh I guess what is something that surprised you the most about crypto and then what is something that the industry can do better um that's a good question what surprised me about it um I suppose the biggest degeneracy well actually kind of the oppos the opposite actually um so so the people I've talked to um in general I mean this is not everyone but in General have been really positive about what we're trying to do um now that doesn't

mean all of them don't like some of them who are positive don't think I'm crazy as well but they've been overwhelmingly positive in so far as that yes moving it on chain or putting it on chain makes sense to people within the crypto Community um growing the size of the pie uh is is is really net positive we found from people in the crypto Community um a lot of them we've talked to is bringing something real world in um kind of legitimizes um to a degree what's going on um so I I've been actually really surprised with the support levels I've got from people and the connections people are just like super happy to say hey this is someone who you might want to talk to and kind of do that um I'm not so close so you know I've worked in

in other Industries um in in web too and you know sometimes very people are very precious you know they don't want to kind of open the open the doors quickly H and I think in this community they do and that's kind of what I've been mainly mainly surprised by um I mean what could it do better I don't know uh you know I mean I'm not um I mean I think there is a narrative around um like allowing real world stuff in um you know so maybe this is more DJ stuff that like it's almost seem like the real world stuff is like hey they don't know what's going on we don't really want them involved that much whereas I think getting that side of it in I mean even

the fact we call them real world assets like I mean of course they're real world assets they're assets right they're you know I mean you know this this separation between like you know one world and another world it's like hey you know it's it's all part of the same thing the technology behind crypto is really valuable and I think if more people are looking at it from that side more things will be done on it which will allow kind of the general population to say okay yeah crypto isn't just this crazy thing and you know I mean I look at it as well people have ated all sorts of things in crazy ways forever so just because it's called crypto you know I mean my view is cryptography saved the second world war you know it was cryptography that was like used and broken in order to save it

so I think we're very kind of um if we don't kind of connect the dots on that one um there is a danger that um you know the real world quote unquote uh will be nervous of it so I think it's important to kind of welcome people who are questioning of crypto in um and let them question it is without that questioning um they'll never come in forly I think yeah maybe as a last well I don't want to end with risks um but as a second to last question what if we were to talk to you in a year or two from now and the project didn't take off what could materially derail the project and the ability to really scale is it the BEC so expensive to ingest the data is

it because a particular government just really doesn't like this idea at all or Market participants don't like it at all you never get scale what what are the things as you sit here today that concern you the most yeah I mean I I I think definitely there's a a government element um to it um but I think that's just NE I think that's just around crypto in general right so I think if I think if the narrative around crypto goes wrong within government certainly within the US side um that'll make it very hard for everyone I think um won't be impossible uh but I think that will make it very hard and I think that's just a necessary that's just a risk factor of it the whole industry right now I don't think we're we're

unique to that um for us specifically yeah I mean like if people who we're talking to at the moment people who've expressed interest people who've signed up if they decide they don't actually like it or it's not for them uh yes that will that will not be helpful um but kind of for me the thing I guess that we kind of I supposed to keeps me up at night most to make sure we get this right is actually making the product like useful uh like making like when someone can go on and transact something even if it's just a couple hundred bucks and they can see it works right and they can see what they're buying or they can see what they're renting um from a drone perspective uh you know that that will be uh that will be enough to to to

Kickstart this on the Drone side so kind of the way we kind of view the business we we we have the real estate side which we kind of view as kind of a B2B uh kind of um and then we look at a consumer side which is the Drone side um if the Drone industry doesn't take off that side of the business probably won't take off but we look at the Drone industry as like a call option that's what we look at it like so we're there yes you can register your air rights yes you can rent them out H you can trade them whatever drone companies can get permission to be there um and the Drone business is is expanding faster so the new chief of the FAA used to work for a flying car company so he's issuing more um you know licenses and stuff but you

know that could maybe not take off so that could be a side of the business that if that takes too long just becomes side of the business that's there but maybe not kind of generating what we need to generate so our kind of main focus right now is the is the B2B and the real estate side so yeah I think those are kind of things that that you know we look at as been um I don't know problematic but you know certainly concerning um the blockchain piece as well making sure that we're on salana making sure that upgrades as as as well as it can and continues to do so and I think that's happening there um and continues to be uh like Fast uh useful and the CTS don't go crazy um that will help us as well um so yeah I think that's kind of about

it how big does this get what's the end game so well for us this is without doubt a billion dollar Business Without A Doubt um endgame uh I don't have an endgame sany right now um I'm I'm like I'm too uh in kind of in the middle of it and kind of getting this thing moving um again for us if this thing is moving and this thing is increasing uh valuations this thing is increasing uh passive income to people if they're renting this thing is generating revenue for people that to me is just net positive all around um and for the people involved in the business you know they'll do well out of it and that's great and that's a wonderful thing but I

think for society in general having an asset that's locked above your heads and can be opened up I think is just great I think that and that for me is is really what I'm looking at I mean we we open that up it's a new market it's it impacts Society in in a good way in a positive way um and that for me is is is endgame once I can get to that I'm I'm I'm gonna be very happy um but yeah I mean this can be this can be like or will be um huge I mean it's it's already a big Market that's untapped right um so yeah it's it's it's going to be big for us well we certainly believe in that Vision um well I I'm we wanted to bring you on and this has think been a fascinating discussion across just

understanding a market that perhaps most people may not be as familiar with and wanted to replicate that initial call that I had with you and hopefully that was the goal of the Pod and I hope hopefully that really came across of just at minimum to understand that uh at a time where you know crypto is being questioned in terms of real use cases and why it's necessary I think we have enough proof points to understand that this there's a reason why you're building onchain and there's a reason why it hasn't been built before and these are not small markets by any stretch of the imagination so yeah I think your version of success is a really good one and hopefully uh you know especially seeing someone like uh Tyler traditional investors appreciate that and Real Estate Investors which the real estate industry like Finance like

is is really like hard to convince I appreciate um and the resist change but whenever you give them an opportunity or an extra yield yeah they're gonna take it it's not just uh it's not just unchain Farmers that want to chase you no absolutely no that's what we found and you know there's there's there's going to be some announcements as we come come along with the real estate guys we're talking to and um you know as you said they're looking for yield but uh you know there's also a reality um of how the world is moving um you know and and it is moving in a direction of tokenization like that is happening it's not it's not we're walking on the sidelines it's young but it's it's happening for sure and like real estate people you're the one like they're

they're they're not stupid right they're very clever you know they they they know how to manage assets they know where value is uh so you can offer it to them you show it to them yeah absolutely well awesome uh John I don't know if there's any parting thoughts or maybe just tell folks where they can find more about the project potentially get involved and yeah yeah sure sure sure yeah you can find us at sky. trade um so that's the the main site and you can kind of sign up there um you can register a rights or you can just sign up and you can sign up to the wait list as well for the auction house um yeah you can get us I'm we're at Sky Trade Network on on X or me I'm at drone EV VTO um so yeah I guess you

can also subscribe to your prop subscribe to my newsletter yeah so where's my flying car so yeah actually you know I know we didn't say it but like that was like pivotal in in this whole thing I I I need to write things down just myself I always need to write them down to kind of get my head straight um and so I started putting it on substack and yeah people were like hey this is quite interesting so yeah we got a bunch of subscribers I don't know what we got 15 16,000 now so yeah please sign up yeah amazing Jonathan thanks for trading us for the episode those thanks guys appreciate it hey everyone big thanks for watching today's episode wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar development foundation's sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17 in London this is an incredible

opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing [Music]