We believe project development must become a design exercise if we want to constitute a housing market that is more accessible, transparent, democratic and fair, both for its residents and its creators. Therefore, the Block Foundation develops the infrastructure and instruments for the implementation of smart contracts in collective project development. These blockchain-based standard specifications have two main objectives:
- Create a sustainable incentive for architects and other founding stakeholders throughout the lifetime of a building, and
- Better the dynamics on the housing market by increasing its liquidity, access and democratization through fractionalized investment principles.
The goal is to create the fundamentals for what we envision as a Democratized Autonomous Building (DAB), based on the principles of a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO). This designed algocratic mechanism relies on a wide range of emerging technologies and their terminology, specifically:
- Fractional ownership - A method in which several unrelated parties can share in, and mitigate the risk of, ownership.
- Quadratic voting - A flexible design for funding public goods.
- Phased crowdfunding - A means to make investments granular and socially motivated. .
- Web3 - A stateful web, in which places become digitally addressable.
- Mechanism design (reverse game theory) - A branch of microeconomics that explores how businesses and institutions can achieve desirable social or economic outcomes.
