The product
The company behind Elements Estates intends to build a decentralized investment platform, wherein the properties are listed on the service, and represented as offerings for prospective investors. According to the whitepaper, the product is access to a specific market. This actually raises a question about the properties themselves. The whitepaper mentions that different stakeholders are connected via smart contracts on the blockchain, and hence the blockchain establishes trust between the parties involved, but theres no mention about security tokens representing the individual properties, yet. If such an opportunity does arise at some point, it would definitely be an improvement. Otherwise, the system is sufficient for a decentralized real estate agency to operate, successfully in theory. At the moment, the single point of failure is definitely represented by the fund. The smart contract, specifically.
This kind of settlement has to be airtight to work out, because the properties arent represented as tokens themselves. What makes the process unique is that the properties are intended to be auctioned on the blockchain. An auction contract could in fact work out of the box. Theres mentioned deposits, maintenance fees and so on. All separate processes definitely need their own smart contract.
The purchasing process intends to represent ELES as a utility token securing the transaction between the investor and the fund.
There are two ways to purchase a property with ELES:
-50% fiat, 50% ELES over a period of time.
-100% ELES, locking tokens down for a fixed period in case the investor has less tokens than the entire purchase price.
I personally see here a potential risk in having multiple purchasing methods available for the token holder, ie. theres a fiat payment enabled and smart contract -based token locking mechanisms that create some initial confusion, and essentially put the fund itself as a single point of failure in the system. Eventually, streamlining the purchasing process would be the easiest if financing options were externalized and the properties themselves were ERC-721 non-fungible tokens, but this of course is my personal opinion. Maybe locking tokens for a fixed period works, at least this process works as collateral.
The ICO gains are promised fairly straightforward: Fixed number of tokens representing a growing portfolio. If the market picks up, the token value grows exponentially.
I need to judge the project here somehow. I see the main risk in the smart contract governing the purchase and in managing the fund itself, and the greatest reward in potential new market trend created or at least inspired by the fund. If the team can pull it off, and theyll need to focus on developing the smart contract into an airtight, decentralized platform in order to accomplish that they might just create a new asset class that would end the recession in the market for years to come.
The stakeholders
The token establishes a market between banks which hold distraught real estate assets, the borrowers and the investors, mostly retail investors. As a utility, the token represents a private real estate development fund established by the company behind Elements Estates, and by using the token in question, the ELES, the investors are promised to be able to tap into the opportunities unlocked by the fund. The fund takes over as an owner and landlord of the properties it invests into.
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