Introducing RealEx, the First Real-Estate-Backed Cryptocurrency

The RealEx “steadycoin” allows holders to benefit from both the upside of crypto and the security of real estate.

The problem

As of today, according to the Student Debt Crisis Center, the student debt crisis reached a whopping $1,859,218,098,736: nearly two trillion dollars, and that’s just in the United States.

Spend enough time scrolling through first-person stories on the SDCC’s website and you’ll begin to feel the crushing weight of a deeply broken system. Young people are constantly told that a college degree is the ship they must board to access the shore of stability and well-being, yet from the outset, there’s a gaping hole in its hull. The irony is deeply upsetting: the very thing that’s supposed to facilitate financial freedom is contingent on the sacrifice of years (sometimes decades, sometimes a lifetime) of financial freedom.

We live in a world where monetary power has been consolidated so absolutely by centralized institutions that our banks and governments can print and hoard currency with impunity, before releasing it in slow transfusions of high-interest loans that citizens must spend the rest of their limited time on earth repaying. Something needs to change.

The RealEx Steadycoin: democratization through currency diversification

The problem here is two-pronged: first, the control of currency by centralized institutions, and second, the glacial pace at which most jobs allow people to pay that money back. The solution, therefore, must also be two-pronged. Short-term, we need a realistic investment mechanism by which indebted people can get out of debt more quickly. Long-term, we need to fracture the vice grip centralized banks of currency have on individual freedom and well-being.

This is the two-part solution that we at the RealEx DAO are hoping to incite through the creation of a real-estate-backed cryptocurrency that we’re calling a steadycoin. (Steadycoins — digital currencies backed by real assets — are nothing new; most recently, KlimaDAO launched the first carbon-backed currency.)

Here, two obvious questions arise. First, why real estate? And second, why crypto?

Let’s begin with the latter. There’s a reason why, last year, CNBC reported that students were investing their loans in Bitcoin. Crypto has a low barrier to entry: all you need is a few dollars and a stable internet connection to play, and if you play smart, the pay-outs can be huge. Plus, beyond the sheer size of the market, crypto is spurring a mass decentralization of finance and diversification of currency — for the first time in history, anyone in the world can create money and deploy it across the world, which represents a revolution at least as big as the internet. (El Salvador just made its reserve currency Bitcoin; meanwhile, New York’s next mayor is requesting to be paid in crypto.)

Real estate, on the other hand, is one of the most secure, stable, and traditional markets out there. It is an ecosystem of solid assets in both the literal and economic senses of the word — buildings are physical, inflation-resistant assets that tend to appreciate steadily over time.

RealEx is hoping to bridge these two markets, allowing investors to access both the upside of crypto and the security of real estate. The RealEx token is “steady” because it’s backed by inflation-resistant assets (instead of being backed by fiat currency, like DAI, or hype, like Dogecoin or Shiba) and so the value of the token is unlikely to dip below the underlying value of the property that backs it. RealEx’s real estate and crypto holdings (which will be held in a treasury) support the value of the RealEx tokens (which are staked in asset vaults and liquidity pools).

If RealEx property holdings appreciate over time, so too will the value of the steadycoins. The Protocol behind the RealEx tokens will eventually allow anyone with a stable internet connection to stake real-world assets on the blockchain and transform their property into NFTs. The RealEx steadycoin (ticker RLX) will be sold on decentralized crypto exchanges as soon as mid-January 2022.

The RealEx DAO

As an impact-driven decentralized community, the RealEx DAO strives to solve the two above problems by a) creating a new low-barrier investment vehicle that will facilitate steady returns for the indebted, and b) accelerating the diversification of currency to fracture the vice grip of centralized powers on individual freedom.

Real estate ownership is one of the surest paths to financial freedom, so we should be using the new permissionless technologies of web3 to increase its accessibility. Soon, with any luck, knocking on a long series of gilded doors to request access to lump sums of inflated fiat currency will be a thing of the past.

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