Bullish on Blocksquare

Last updated: 05 Aug 2022

It'll be no surprise to anyone who pays attention to my Twitter feed or YouTube channel, but there is one project that I am extremely bullish on at the moment: Blocksquare.

Virtually from the start of my crypto journey, I've been focussed on cryptos with real world use case.

Whether that be a protocol that solves a particular problem (Kadena with it's scalable and green Layer 1), one that eases the transition to a decentralised future (Flux with it's Web3 cloud that competes with AWS) or promising products that are looking to leverage blockchain and it's supporting tech (such as Timpi or Docushield) to take on Web2 BigTech.

But there is one project that I've been invested in since 2018 (when they first held their IDO) that deserves a place in this list, and that project is Blocksquare.

The vision

Blocksquare are on a mission to provide the tools and infrastructure necessary to tokenise real estate. There are three key pieces to their offering:

The Blocksquare protocol - a set of smart contracts and processes that provide a legally binding contract that conveys the economic rights for a given property to anyone who owns said property's tokens.
The shop window - Blocksquare offers a customisable marketplace that partners can use to create a property tokenisation portal that contains all the necessary features out of the box (KYC, propety listings, etc.) allowing someone to set up an end to end tokenisation marketplace in a matter of weeks.
Oceanpoint - Blocksquare's DAO that is looking to democratise access to real estate investment, allowing anyone to join the governance pool and share in the income from real estate owned by the DAO.

An ambitious roadmap you might think but… all of this is already built. Blocksquare have been quietly building all of this out for the past four years.

Oceanpoint: the final piece of the puzzle

The final thing to be released (v0.1 was releasaed in February 2022) was Oceanpoint. Initially Oceanpoint allowed for the staking of Blocksquares token, BST, in a Governance Pool in return for very attractive staking rewards paid for from chain emissions.

This highly incentivised staking came to an end with the release of v0.2 of Oceanpoint which saw the addition of the Asset Pool which allows property owners to stake their property tokens in order to earn a share of the monthly BST rewards that are distributed to stakers.

POINT

The next release, v0.3, will see the launch of POINT. POINT is integral to the future of Oceanpoint, it's the protocols own stablecoin that is collateralised against the property owned by Oceanpoint.

“Hang on a sec…” you say, Oceanpoint owns property? Why yes, this is the ultimate vision for Oceanpoint. Property owners can decide to sell their prop tokens to Oceanpoint in return for POINT allowing the to free up collateral in their properties and use the resulting monies elsewhere.

At this point, Oceanpoint will start receiving the income from the properties (or share of properties) it owns, with revenues being paid in DAI to Oceanpoint which will be used to market buy BST for distribution to participants in the Oceanpoint DAO.

Passive income play

So Oceanpoint becomes the ultimate crypto passive income play, one that is backed by real world assets and delivers a steady and reliable source of income.

In a world where we're seeing one DeFi project after another crash and burn due to unsound tokenomics or ponzinomics, having an alternative that gives us exposure to crypto whilst having the assurance that there is something of substance providing a steady income is something that I think a lot of crypto investors will want to have in their portfolios.

And in order to get a slice of the revenues from the Oceanpoint owned assets, investors are going to need to stake BST in the DAO.

BST… to the moon?

This buy pressure from investors combined with that from converting the property revenues to BST could lead to a meteoric rise in the price of BST.

The interest in property tokenisation is there and Blocksquare has nearly $40m of property tokenised on their protocol, with the next phase to onboard those properties into the Oceanpoint asset pool.

If adoption continues at the pace it is now, there could be nearly $100m of property tokenised by the end of the year. This is a huge amount and would make Blocksquare one of the, if not the, most succesful property tokenisation projects out there.

And the current market cap is a mind blowingly low $1.2m. I've seen projects with vapourware whitepapers have multiple higher valuations than this.

The moon is only the first stop

Blocksquare and Oceanpoint has so much more potential than what we've talked about so far though.

Take a listen to this episode of Block Chat with Blocksquare's COO: Simon Kruse.

In it Simon talks about a number of topics from NFTs (backed by underlying assets like real estate) to what Oceanpoint could turn into over time. It was this part that resonated the most with me and aligned with thoughts I've had about Oceanpoint.

It's not too hard to imagine a world where pension funds are investing in Oceanpoint to gain exposure the the real estate income, or wrapping Oceanpoint and the underlying BST token purchasing and staking into a consumer friendly financial product that can be sold to non crypto savvy investors.

At this point we are looking at one of the first widely adopted DeFi products, that is breaking down the barriers that prevent most of us from taking part in real estate investing and democratising access to the many, not just the few.

This is the power for change that crypto and blockchain has in the world. This is why I love the space and why I will continue to invest in promising projects that are looking to bring about positive change to the world.

Find out more

Cryptovium covers...

Check out this epside of Cryptovium covers for an overview of the Blocksquare project or read my written overview if longform is more your style.