Assets becoming tokenized are starting to be the new norm. In Switzerland, two cryptocurrency-based real estate blockchains in BlockIMMO and SwissRealCoin have begun to come out into the open. These two blockchain platforms aim to make real estate investments easier by transforming asset trading into bitcoin peer-to-peer transactions.
According to CCN, BlockIMMO has been the first to become legalized, enabling policies and rules within established legalities. The blockchain platform had been performing tests by using prototype property listings. If these work according to their specifications and to expectations, they plan to have actual real estate listed in the property by 2019.
Another cryptocurrency platform, SwissRealCoin, wants to follow into the steps of BlockIMMO. The Swiss real estate platform wants to use blockchain in the same way-to enable affordability of properties, integrity, and transparency in transactions.
Bitcoin Exchange Guide reported that SwissRealCoin already has one factor working for it; Switzerland is world-renowned for its stability in politics and, more importantly, the economy. Based on those alone, SwissRealCoin is primed to thrive, especially since the Swiss real estate sector has been known to weather bad financial situations really well.
SwissRealCoin and BlockIMMO operate similarly. Each property is represented by bitcoins. These bitcoins can be bought as parts of a real estate stock or can be bought to represent an entire property. By then, properties will be easily viewable with the use of a dashboard. BlockIMMO and SwissRealCoin have different platforms, but both operate with similar technologies.
The limits of these platforms, however, is that they are not available worldwide just yet. On blockchain, they recognize that any property is fair game; for that reason, BlockIMMO has limited its scope to just Switzerland and Lichtenstein for the time being. Once the regulation is approved and they have created clear rules for trading properties on the blockchain, they would think of expansion and more availability in different territories.
Aside from official rules and regulations, the biggest news remained that FINMA, the Swiss regulatory body for financial transactions, has since approved most of their operations, namely their business model and security token offering. Again, Swiss laws bind them to operate only within the territory for the time being.
Currently, the platform offers two sample properties for the public to see how everything works. BlockIMMO and SwissRealCoin, however, look toward the future, where they can list actual properties on their respective platforms to trade.
