Cryptocurrency had captured the imagination of many when its value went up all those years ago. It's value has since normalized, The Real Deal reported. It was also reported that blockchain-real estate startup RealBlock has managed to secure seed funding for itself. The deal was finalized amounting to $3.1 million.
The funding round was opened by Science Inc., with more than a little help from other investors. Names included Cross Culture Ventures, Morgan Creek Capital, Zelkova Ventures, and Ulu Ventures. The names were released by the same company on a statement revealed Friday.
RealBlock is a platform where global investors can buy micro-shares in private equity funds. They can use any type of currency, be it real world, government-backed ones or cryptocurrency in the form of bitcoins or ether. Investors are actually buying assets backed by a token that gives them ownership over the real thing. With this token, it's easier to trade properties with each other, as well as keep these properties.
The funding, as explained by Silicon Angle, will fund RealBlocks' main business. The blockchain startup is delving into making assets easier to trade and handle by 'tokenizing' them. In doing this, it is also realizing one of its goals, which is to make 'seamless investment' a reality.
Perrin Quarshie, the founder and CEO of RealBlocks, have said that the acceleration of the development of the company's services have become easy following funding from the investors. The real estate industry is in dire need of improvements, he said, and RealBlocks is only one way of introducing those much-needed improvements into the industry.
RealBlocks have stated that the global real estate market has a huge amount of investments trapped in what it called 'illiquid capital investments.' The industry had amassed $8.5 trillion in investments in 2017; about $145 billion of that market is currently trapped in those investments, most of which could be unlocked through the company's tokenization app.
The company isn't the first to offer tokenization and real estate innovations. Only last year, imbrex had developed a listing service that it claimed was 'the first of its kind.' The listing was going to be a global one, decentralized and open-sourced to allow anyone to tap into it, compared to traditional multiple-listing services.
Brooklyn-based Meridio and Knotel have also made their plans for blockchain integration known. The former aims to use it to promote shared property ownership through tokenization, while the latter plans to tokenize office spaces for easier sharing.
