First of all, we had a call of one of the major mortgage players
in the country, the organization that establishes the rules for the mortgage industry for
whether the currency statements should be adopted for the mortgage approvals and so on.
And they have a whole team already. They want to adopt, They want
to make a proof of concept. And the question is no longer what is
blockchain, The question is please pay attention to us, Please have a call
with our team how we can integrate it. This content is brought to you
by bitco, which is one of the top crypto custodians in the crypto industry.
Bitco works with many big companies and brands such as Pantera, Capital,
Bitstamp, and bitcoin. Ira Key also selected Bitco to power its wallets for
its NFTs and Bitco has many great services such as hot wallets, custodial wallets,
self managed cold wallets, and NFT wallets. Many institutions trust bitco with
its top level security and incredible services such as being able to deploy your capital
wallet's in custody which includes lending, borrowing, trading, staking, DeFi access
and more. If you'd like to learn more about bitco, please visit bitgo
dot com link in the description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're
home for cryptocurrency news and interviews with me. Today's Natalia carian Neva, who's
the CEO of Poppy. Natalia, great to have you back on. Thank
you so much for having me Toni. Hi everyone, Natalia. You know
I'm a big fan of you and the work you're doing at Propy. I
believe a real estate will be on the blockchain from a transactional standpoint as well
as tokenization. So lots of questions for you and all the latest and greatest
that you as you're doing. So let's start with what's new with Propy.
Absolutely, there have been so many new things in Propy, in our ecosystem
and overall in the crypto industry. So I'm excited to have this conversation with
you. But since we last Charity and your interview, I think the major
update on our ecosystem is that we backed a new ecosystem project called proper Keys,
and then Propy also launched a license title and s group business about a
year ago. And with that business model where we utilize our transaction platform on
blockchain, we're closed to be profitable. And then also last week we'll launched
a partnership collaboration and integration with coinbase, the coin based wallet, so super
super excited. Another item, we launched a AI model for document recognition and
automation of the transaction last year. So again a lot of stuff too update
you with. So let's talk about proper keys. How does that work?
Absolutely? So, this project, proper keys I was beta launched only a
couple of months ago, but last week it was the major official launch and
it is built on base the layer two on Ethereum network. Proper keys allows
users to mint addresses home addresses and then keep those addresses all over the world
on your wallet, in your wallet, and then you can put your ded
on chain attaching it to the address, or even upgrade your home if you
minted your own home to an RWA NFT. Oh wow, So to your
point of RWA and the tokenization and all these things that are happening. So
I can let's say the house I live within here at New Jersey, I
can create the key for this property location and then put the actual well obviously
the deed mintet within the NFT. Is that how it works exactly. So
first you buy your address, you can also buy the whole street, and
then there is a gamification like in similar to monopoly, but it's a very
crypt native staking based the producol that will allow you to mean homes and neighbors
and so on. But let's say you mated your own address. It cost
only ten propit tokens, which is about ten dollars today. Actually we just
reduce it to five dollars and five propit tokens, and then if you want
to keep your date on chain, you click upgrade the NFT, you pay
additional one hundred proper tokens, and then because we have a license title and
a screw company, automatically we extract your deed from the county and send it
to IPFS encrypted with a password so that you can keep it securely. Because
last year alone they were about four hundred million dollars lost in title fraud and
multiple counties are being hacked all over the country unfortunately, so this data,
the data data is not secure for homeowners currently. So can I do this
across the United States? And or is it beyond the United States as well?
Minting addresses actually is a global product, so we call it mint the
world we encourage people all over the world to buy their addresses, play with
them an even mint landmark through our AI integration where NAI will generate an image
and you can add bitcoin or etherory or any popular coins on top of the
image and keep it on your wallet. But the upgrades are available only for
the United States for now. Now can I mint you mentioned? I can
do my entire neighborhood. Is it kind of first, first come, first
serve where I can take the property even if I don't own it and create
the NFT exactly. That's why we encourage people to hurry up and mint their
own home before somebody else grabs it. But if somebody else did it,
no worrise. There is a game between minters and homeowners where the homeowner can
come and claim their address and it will be the upgrade to tier two right
away. The payment is one hundred proper tokins as I mentioned, and then
fifty proper tokens actually goes to the minter, So you are incentivized to mint
your whole neighborhood and then go and explain them, Hey, here's your address,
here's my gift to you. You can upgrade it, you can keep
your date on chain. You need to do X, Y Z steps and
here are the benefits, and then the protocol will incentivize you with fifty proper
organs. It will also give you a special og NFT as a present,
and we'll give you five x staking power in the proper key staking product.
Now you mentioned the county will facilitate adding the deed and so forth for a
property you own. So I'm assuming they go through the whole verification process that
if someone tried to say, put a deed they found online or something on
there, the county you may reject. That. Is that how it works.
And once excuse my rookie questions, just trying to figure out the logistics.
If someone was to say, try to take my address and maybe they
found a deed, a copy the deed, but it's an outdated deed and
they tried to add it to it. Yeah, yeah, that's a great
question. First of all, when we add theeds on chain, it's a
time stamp of the past, right you may have a new one, So
it's an immutable record and it can serve as an evidence in many courses in
the United States, but it's not a proof of you to transfer ownership.
That's a grade number three, the tier three, the next upgrade where you
create your uh, you create an r W a n f T from your
home with our help. That's where the final source of ownership is the n
FT itself. While and we did those as you remember, that's when we
had this interview last time. It's so when we were transferring n f ts
of real estate ownership through LLC's records already in the county, instantly entirely obvious
smart contracts. That was the big innovation of the previous cycle. So yeah,
when you upgrade, you did on chain and put you in on chain.
It just an additional evidence of that current deed. We extract the latest
deed of course, uh, and we put it to you your n f
T in your wallet. We also verify through a very simple KYC that it's
you who is upgrading the n f T. That we avoid any strangers to
just meant addresses and personal information, right right, Okay, So I guess
that's the answer, because I was wondering, you know, what if someone
was to you know, try to do something. But to your point,
you go through that KYC process. So natally, I know we're very early
in this cycle of tokenization and putting real estate on the blockchain and much more.
And do you see, you know, the the innovation that you guys
are doing that you know, maybe in five years the National Real Tea Association
and maybe you know, different folks in different states are going to start adopting
this technology. Absolutely, I think we are in the very beginning of this
story where we have a proven track record that this innovation works better than the
traditional real estate transaction. And also all those industry participants that we've been educating
for years now, right, Properly has been around since twenty seventeen, and
obviously we're very well connected to brokerageous leadership, to Fredo mac to the national
sitational fielders and so on. But at this point we're no longer are wasting
our time in education what is blockchain, what is the theory? And what
is a smart contract, but rather providing now more details on how to integrate
it into their processes. And we are proponents of a gradual transition in this
innovation. So we have proper title, which is closing transactions almost through a
traditional way. The consumer doesn't see the blockchain unless they want to connect their
wallet, and then we have This is the most innovative settlement through NFTs.
I like this example with the Netflix. When Netflix launched, they knew that
one day the content the movies will be streaming online via internet. Yet they
started with CDs online, and I compare those the title business that we have
right now to the CDs online. It's on blockchain, but it's still kind
of the CD version thirty days closing process and then the transition to the NFT.
For us, that's streaming streaming ownership entirely on chain, and it's like
the Netflix online CDs. They had those business models in parallel and they actually
stopped the cities online only two years ago. So it's been in parallel working
for many, many years. But now we all just know movies online.
That's how I see in five years it's totally doable that suddenly the real estate
will be liquid entirely on chain. And our investor team Draper Or recently we
had we had spaces on Twitter on x Anthony Pompliano, who is also very
active both in real estate and crypto. Both of them are telling you that
most likely it won't be the government that will change the real estate transfers onto
blockchain, but rather it's a consumer push of the insurance. The title insurance
will no longer be needed. At some point the licenses will the titland esqual
license will know or will be obsolete. Because smart contract is the settlement,
why not have this high value asset to be transferred to a secure producal as
blockchain now related to you being built on building on base right, which is
through coinbase, but it's an Ethereum layer too. Since the Duncan hard fork
on etherorem went live, the gas fie is associated with minting addresses when based
via proper keys went down by over one hundred x. He told us about
that. Yeah, absolutely, I think this upgrade the Duncan hard fork of
ethereum for the industry, it's like the transition from the modems in the Internet
space to broadband. Suddenly we have this affordable network on blockchain, just like
when the Internet has those You remember the noisy modem switching on a lot of
products were not user friendly just yet, but now in blockchain it's more affordable.
So since the Theorem merge occurred in twenty twenty two, this significant upgrade
from ethereum from proof of work to proof of stay did not reduce the gas
fees, and only with this upgrade last week suddenly we see a significant,
significant drop of fees. And in our case, when we launched the proper
keys minting and address was about two dollars per mint, where the address itself
costs as I mentioned, about ten dollars. So now and so of course
it's a significant cut ten to twenty percent. Now since the update upgrade,
it is a couple of cents one to two cents only, and you can
imagine that the activity of minting addresses suddenly spiked. The base network also is
experiencing a sudden increase in transactions. So definitely it's a history moment. I
believe in this upgrade more significant, probably even the merge itself on Ethereum.
So the network's performance is definitely now is a foundational change for the whole blockchain
space. Yeah, great point, and to your you know, because people
have been concerned by gas fees and sofa, but that's great that the upgrade
is lowering those fees. And also you know your analogy of going from dial
up modem to broadband, it seems we're in that transition phase. So that's
really great, and then the property token got listed on Coinbase. I've been
a propery token holding for a long time and I believe obviously in properties as
I've been holding the token. And what was the listening earlier this year or
in last year? It was actually previously, but what has happened recently was
listing on the Prime app as well as the integration with a coin base wallet.
So for US, coin Base is this gatekeeper of crypto legitimacy. They
do very high quality verification of projects. They check that talkens are utility tokens,
that the teams are serious executors behind the projects. And for US,
coin Base is this big player similar to Amazon or Google. At the time,
they are building the future economy on chain. Last year alone their revenues
were over three billion dollars, so they're growing very very fast. And now
when you go to coin base wallets, since last week you can actually see
that you can mint a home address through the coin based wallet browser and get
a reward for that. And then this week actually they will also promote a
put your deed on chain through proper Keys, which again delivers this real life
application for users. And this may be a tough question to answer right now,
do you foresee secondary markets or is it too early for those NFTs.
I don't know. Maybe if somebody, I guess, I could obviously resell
it to, like say the property owner who may want to plement that NFT.
But I have that Let's say I have the entire neighborhood, right,
But then could I lend it out? Is that a possibility yet? That's
a great question. We're seeing the first secondary sales of the landmark AI NFTs
on open c There was a Hollywood sign n f T that was sold a
couple of weeks ago for one point three e's I believe. For the addresses
and the neighborhoods, I'm not sure how this whole gamification will evolve. For
now, what it makes sense is actually to steak those statresses. So if
you mint over ten addresses, you can stake all of them at a stake
in producol and get a distribution of proper tokens from the entire minting revenue channel.
Oh wow, Well, you know what I'm going to do after this
interview, right, Natalia, You're going to I want to go grab up
a ton of neighborhoods. And uh and stake them and anybody want fantastic.
So I'm definitely gonna do that. I really want to play around that,
and it's just fascinating to me. Now. Recently, you were at a
conference and I saw clip of it where you were talking about Amazon and I
think Google as well and them potentially getting involved in real estate and tokenization of
real estate and so forth. Can you expand on that and your your thoughts
there. Actually I was at a conference called inmand A Connector in New York,
and it was all about real estate real just real estate portals and how
the residential space is evolving, and many many panels and keynotes were about the
attention of home buyers and the war of portals between zelu homes dot com,
apartments dot com, realtor dot com. Where are the eyes of the consumers
when they are searching for a home? And my argument was that homes dot
Com should not spend one hundred million dollars to attract the home buyers for the
lead generation business because most likely some of the new startups or the tech platforms
such as Amazon or Google could overtake the consumer attention for the real estate.
Because if we figure out the transaction automation. That's Propy's mission. Once the
transaction is automated, then the portals and the attention of home buyers. It's
the easiest task in the real estate industry to tackle and imagine. If transaction
is automated and very secure, why not an Amazon platform just introduces the tab
real estate and then you can securely click click, click and buy through Amazon
or through Google, all through a new startup or through probit And what I
just want one item to add. For example, proper keys could also become
this platform to become the new Zelu but global because now they are attracting the
eyes the attention of people minting their addresses in a gamified way. But then
through the gamified way, the proper keys platform will teach the homeowners on different
items, how to sell, how to buy, how to do it on
chain. So that's what I meant that the current bottle of portals of realestate
portals might be kind of unnecessary. Yeah, a great point, and it's
only going to continue to evolve. So it's fascinating. So on that note,
are you seeing Look, you've been at this since twenty seventeen, building,
innovating and so forth. But we know the traditional industries are going to
be slow to adopt. And don't get me wrong, they are adopting.
But have you seen a change in these brokers. Is in the National Realtors
Association that they're now maybe having their aha moment, like, oh, we
need to pay attention to this, it's coming. And have you noticed any
changes? There? Absolutely so many changes, especially from October when the first
fake news about bit counitives broke. First of all, we had a call
of one of the major mortgage players in the country, the organization that establishes
the rules for the mortgage industry for whether the cryptocurrency statements should be adopted for
the mortgage approvals and so on. And they have a whole team already.
They want to adopt, They want to make a proof of concept. And
the question is no longer what is blockchain? The question is please pay attention
to us, Please have a call with our team how we get integrated.
So we spent probably about ten ten hours of conversations where they beg us to
pay attention and find resources for faster integration rather than how it was in the
past. Then one of the largest brokerages in the country also just launched a
partnership with US Berkshire had Away Home Services of America. For now it's an
education platform education Crypto Certified C class with the credit for realtors. But it's
a very major point within the Berkshire Hathaway umbrella, which historically has been very
against the bitcoint and cryptocurrency. So that's another win. And then there is
another very traditional real estate media that has just accepted proper tokens as a form
of payment. So we were very surprised how the industry now is accepting cryptocurrencies
payment and not bitquin first, but the properit talken because it's the industry cryptocurrency
that has proven to be a good track record in terms of the project behind
it. Oh man, it's fascinating. I think they're having maybe there aha
moment right they're waking up to yeah we gotter get on board. Okay,
question for you in I don't know if you can answer this, and you
poly say I can't answer it. But if redfin if Zillow or realtor dot
com or somebody came alongside Natalent, we want to buy properly because you see,
this is the direction things they're going, what would you say, Well,
first of all, I would never sell well never say no, never,
but I would not sell to a current realisted player. That's why they're
not in the top ten or twenty platforms on the stock market because they cannot
be the innov that will transform the relisted industry. Secondly, we would never
sell to a brokerage because a brokerage is just one side of a transaction.
They cannot automate the transaction. You have to be on both sides of the
transaction. Our realtor dot com or zero dot com. They are very limited
to the US market. It's a business model that works precisely for the US
market, while we figured out a business model that could work globally, and
so none of those companies would be interesting for US. And we indeed have
a lot of requests for acquisitions through last cycles, not even now, from
all the best the brokerages and portals and software companies related to real estate.
But I can totally see us to entertain ideas with some tech platforms such as
Google, Amazon, those that I mentioned before who have the attention, not
attention, But I would say technology resources, Yeah, that makes sense.
Well, you know, I know everybody usually tries to get acquired by Googles
and so forth. But it makes sense because you are certainly ahead of the
curve and an outlier in the real estate industry because you're doing these fourthinking,
innovative initiatives. So that's really great. Let's see, you know, let's
continue to real estate conversation. We'll circle back to crypto. I would love
to get your take on the real estate market and what's happening in the US.
With rates very high, people are not really selling because many got low
rates, and then it's a tough economy, right, what is your outlook
for this year, maybe twenty twenty five. Well, of course, the
main player in the real estate industrum right now is the interest rate problem.
So I expect there to be some FED interest rate cuts, very modest,
maybe in the middle of this year, and then the market may recover.
And if the FED does not take this path, then of course we'll see
even more stagnation in the real estate market. The most significant change and challenges
are happening now in the commercial real estate, which has more leverage in construction
and development the transaction though last year they fall only twenty percent down right,
even though the stock market and a lot of industries have fallen up to seventy
percent, sixty percent, Crypto eighty percent. But the transaction volume in the
real estate industry, in the reiditional Aeralsted industry have not fallen drastically or stopped
because people still have to make their changes in lives, divorces, marriages,
downsizing, moving, and so on, so the transactions will continue to to
be there. But then we have this news with our settlement, the commission
may drop this year, which is obviously might be great for the consumer,
but the real the realtor community is devastated. Yeah, so I wanted to
ask you about that. It's, uh, you think that's going to go
through? And it's man, it maybe realtors, like you said, are
not going to be as incentivized to work is hard maybe I don't know,
or become more competitive. I don't know what's going to happen, but I
think that's going to help. Well, the real do community will work even
harder than they have been right now, and you will see uh, the
non professional part time ters leaving the space because the fees for the license are
expensive. So in fact, probably will see a higher quality of realters staying
in the market. Yet, of course they are very very frustrated, but
I think they will fight more for the consumer, especially the buyer. So
the seller will remain with two point five percent, they may request an additional
one percent or half percent from the consumer because now they have to deal with
more buyers. Personally, more buyers will come on the market without having a
representation and thus now the listing agent will probably have to deal with them.
And then the platforms like properly and other platforms will occur, will be introduced
that will have the will help the buyer to through this process easier. But
there is one good news for realtors and for the consumers. It is their
increased liquidity now that the transaction is more and more automated through platforms like Propery.
We're very passionate to achieve this better affordability. Ten percent of the value
is lost now in those fees, ten percent of home value. So imagine
normally you need five percent in down payment, but instead you have to pay
the mortgage fees, title escrow, the title insurance, the commission. And
thus even the new generation when they move, they're afraid to acquire a home
where they cannot afford it, but as all the fees are decreasing than any
time the new generation move from one city to another city instead of renting,
they would be more inclined to sell it and buy a new one because the
fees are lower and we will get rid of the bureaucracy. See, I
wanted to ask you about because you have a great perspective there. So let's
switch back to crypto. What are your thoughts on the Bitcoin SPOTTYTF launches and
the performances. The inflows have been pretty incredible. Absolutely. I think BITCOINITYFS
is the most significant marketing campaign for the blockchain industry. All those eleven bitquinity
F vehicles have been very serious in attracting the Wall Street investors to the space,
both institutional investors as well as retail investors, and I think they've been
very successful. Of course, this initial gray scale sale off was very harmful
and warring for all of us. But nevertheless, now is it over twenty
billion dollars in flows? Yeah, it just keeps going up every day,
so I think it's around there. Yes, it's incredible, and it's probably
the bitquinity F approval is comparable to the telecommunication Act of nineteen ninety six for
the Internet. So when the Internet was still in the gray area, it's
this Telecommunication Act of nineteen ninety six that made the Internet kind of legitimized,
and it gave the opportunity for commercial use cases to come on Internet, and
it provided the nest for infrastructure competition, different ways to get on Internet by
serious companies. Now, with the Bitpoint TFS, we have invited the Wall
Street community to invest in bitcoin without having the headache of setting up wallets and
keeping the private keys and worry about custody. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's
fascinating and I can't wait for it to go beyond Bitcoin. Maybe that'll happen
later this year with Ethereum, and then eventually, you know, other all
coins and all coin baskets will have to wait and see. You know,
what are you most excited about for this upcoming cycle? What we are in
a bull market cycle right now, and it's certainly different. Bigcoin is ahead
of schedule, We get the ETFs and much more. What are you most
excited about for this cycle? Oh, that's a good question. Well at
if Denver, of course, I think there are there were about four trends
that most of investors have talked and entertained about. That's the bitcoin derivatives,
of course, driven by bitcoin ATF's news. Then it's RWA's real world assets
and loans and real estate and mechanization and so on. That's the second one.
Then that's a deep in where we will see more real life infrastructure projects
come into on chain. That was super super exciting. And what next?
And fourth, I'm kind of blanking right now, but these were the most
exciting new projects. I'm also hearing a lot about midpoints, which personally I
cannot grasp why it would be the big trend of twenty twenty four. Hopefully
other trends will win and we'll again see more utility and real life applications.
So I would say after bit quantity of approval is the biggest news, and
then the Duncan upgrade is the second biggest news in the hour in the crypto
industry. I hope that the next big exciting thing will be something around real
life applications, whether it's car applications like Demo, whether it's dippy in smart
cities being connected and scaling through blockchain. Also, I'm super excited about the
base community now that we've been building on base and interacting with the coin based
ecosystem broadly. I just can see and appreciate the value of the community and
the community of developers and executors in one ecosystem. So that's also another item.
I'm excited a lot in twenty twenty four. Yeah, for sure,
it's exciting times. Natalia is always a pleasure, and as I said it
before, after this, I'm about to go check out proper keys and mint
some addresses and starts taking really great stuff. Thank you so much for joining
me. Thank you, Tony. It was a pleasure as always. Thank
you so much.