I recently spent several days at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival. Waking up groggy from fatigue, I gazed at the seascape of Victoria Harbour. A thought struck me about the Summer of Protocols (SoP)—the deadline was only a few hours away. I immediately called my teammate who was abroad, and he readily agreed to proceed with our application.
While reviewing other proposals in the forum, we began to ponder:
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What is the value of SoP in this bizarre world of crypto?
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Which protocols are we truly interested in?
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What kind of PIG proposals are genuinely valuable?
Then, the phone rang. It was the front desk reminding me to check out. I decided to extend my stay for another night to focus on the submission. However, the price had tripled to $300—a typical weekend rate for an average hotel in Hong Kong. As a student and an entrepreneur, this was a significant expense for me. Since venturing into the world of Web3, I’ve faced many awkward moments: project shutdowns, company acquisitions, layoffs, and attending global conferences on a tight budget.
The topics at the Hong Kong conference were buzzing: Vitalik’s unexpected visit, the Bitcoin ecosystem, Ton’s ambition.
I even heard a joke predicting a fierce competition among the BTC, ETH, and SOL ecosystems, describing their supporters as:
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BTC—Purists and FOMO enthusiasts
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ETH—Nerds and developers
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SOL—Somewhere in between
Well, I am that nerd in their eyes.
In a bull market, everyone talks about making quick money; no one discusses Real World Assets (RWA) and NFTs, especially since there haven’t been any impressive price surges recently.
And certainly, there was no talk of public goods.
I believe the blockchain world needs more focus on humanism, addressing real issues, not just fluctuating coin prices. Of course, making money is essential, and profiting in a bull market is normal, but what remains after the hype dies down is worth contemplating. We can leverage people’s enthusiasm for speculation and hype to focus on things with long-term value.
Housing has always been a headache. So many homes are vacant, yet many people can’t afford to live in them, whether buying or renting. Homes have become more of a financial product than a shelter.
RWA was once a hot topic, with everyone excited about mapping real-world assets onto crypto, but it has recently cooled off. Major investment firms are gearing up in the RWA space, but normal people can do little because assets in the real-world are too expensive, whether properties or other valuable investments.
Last year, I was deeply moved by Singapore’s public housing values during my studies at NUS:
- Minister of Ministry of National Development was struck by a poem by Du Fu, which he used to describe the mission of public housing - “安得广厦千万间，大庇天下寒士俱欢颜，风雨不动安如山", meaning: to build thousands of homes to shelter the scholars from the wind and rain, as stable as a mountain. It was in a piece of calligraphy hung in the former headquarters of HDB at Bukit Merah which has since been relocated to HDB Hub at Toa Payoh.
Singapore’s HDB policy carried out by the Housing & Development Board, helps locals, from the wealthy elites to the common vendors, afford homes. HDB prices are just around a quarter of many condos, and the government offers subsidies and favorable policies, making down payments and mortgages manageable.
My teammate is particularly interested in ERC-404, a protocol enthusiast who loves exploring new protocols and analyzing their interoperability and capital efficiency. We met at ShanhaiWoo, a pop-up city inspired by Zuzalu. I often discuss new protocols and market trends with him. He was one of the first to notice ERC-404 earlier this year and has continued to research related new derivatives. However, ERC-404 is not yet officially recognized by Ethereum, although many NFT enthusiasts are excited about it. Current practices include integrating ERC-404 into gaming and other virtual worlds.
ERC-404 could potentially integrate the advantages of both FT and NFT, breaking down barriers between them and enhancing ecosystem liquidity.
So far, I’ve mentioned these keywords:
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The dilemma of housing
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ERC-404
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RWA
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NFT
Let’s see what we can cook up with these points.
Could we use ERC-404 as a protocol to address the imbalances: Excess housing Vs. Poor rental market? Turning houses into ERC-404 rentable assets. By using RWA, we could unlock liquidity from financially-oriented vacant homes, turning them into ERC-404 NFTs onchain, for example, one 3-bedroom apartment could be fragmented into 3 rentable room NFTs, either bought by 2 regular tenants and 1 public goods applicant. This involves both general rental and welfare housing, helping those who can’t afford rent, like young people new to big cities, global digital nomads, and low-income groups, by providing rental subsidies and reductions.
OK, that’s the background. Let’s begin.
Our topic is: Is ERC-404 not aligned? Possibility of Unlocking Liquidity for RWAs and Housing the Commons.
I will delve into the following outlines:
Summary:
A public good housing protocol featuring ERC-404 & RWA, unlocking the liquidity for Commons.
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance?
- Three target protocols combined together
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New protocol: ERC-404
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Soft protocol: RWA
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long-lasting protocol: Renting & Housing
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
- By combining and upgrading two new protocols, we aim to solve a longstanding issue in a traditional protocol—using the integration of ERC-404 and RWA to address the supply and demand contradictions in the real-estate market, unlocking the liquidity of vacant housing. This approach will help ordinary tenants, landlords, and disadvantaged groups gain access to the resources or benefits they need.
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?
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User Interviews, expert interviews, historical data analysis, failure event analysis:
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Using on-chain data analysis and research tools, like Dune, to investigate the challenges facing NFTs.
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Researching different RWA markets, such as Franklin versus Blackrock, to identify the issues within the fragmented behemoths of RWA.
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Investigating and surveying the renting market to further uncover the truth and understand the contradiction between high vacancy rates and unmet rental demands.
In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?
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Integrating multiple protocols, conducting top-level design, involving the coding aspects, integrating three protocols into code, and publishing it on GitHub as open source to attract developers to iterate the protocol together.
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Consulting industry experts, including RWA practitioners, ERC-404 researchers, and traditional rental housing professionals.
How will you field-test your improvement idea?
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Conduct experiments by recruiting a small block of tenants and landlords with vacant properties to facilitate their transactions. Manually simulate the matching of trades as done by exchanges.
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Test to see if this is a genuine need.
-Are users accepting of it?
-Are landlords willing to list their vacant properties on the blockchain?
-Are tenants willing to purchase NFT rooms?
-Will people accept this as public goods?
-What should be the ratio between normal rentals and public goods?
-How can financial sustainability be achieved to ensure liquidity?
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output?
- For ERC-404, engage experienced developers and previous EIP proposers for guidance and revisions.
- For RWA, consult with experts who have hands-on asset management experience.
- In the renting sector, collaborate with well-known rental entities like Airbnb, WeWork, and real-world rental agents, and include potential tenants, particularly from vulnerable groups.
- Lastly, hire a compliance lawyer to ensure legal soundness and protect participant rights.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea?
- Submit the proposal to standards bodies such as the EF forum, RWA forum, digital nomad communities, and public goods communities.
- Publish open-source code to attract more interested developers.
- Produce and release a software development kit and participate in hackathons with the project.
- Apply for various grants.
- Engage with pop-up city related organizations.
- Launch a social media campaign to recruit the first 1000 fans and volunteers to participate in the experiment, and live-stream the experiment worldwide.
- Seek partnerships and attention from relevant government agencies, NGOs, and social welfare organizations.
What is the success vision for your idea?
- If our proposal succeeds, it can indeed address the current imbalances in the renting market by using this PIG to help tenants in need and vulnerable groups, matching them with suitable landlords.
- It introduces some new practices to RWA, allowing underutilized and wasted vacant housing to achieve liquidity release.
- Digital nomads and socially vulnerable groups actively participate in our experiment.
- We provide rental public goods to the target audience, establishing this as a newly recognized protocol.
- We have found a more practical application scenario for ERC-404, shifting its value focus from virtual world price fluctuations to tangible world solutions and addressing social welfare issues.
- We redefine the concept of blockchain-based renting and selling of housing:
-renting as a temporary ownership of a room, like a year;
-buying as the right to use and own a room forever, like N years.
When the transaction involves N years, the system switches to a transaction mode of house ownership, meaning this protocol is not limited to renting but can also serve as an RWA trading platform. - We expanded this experiment into building a Web3 version of Airbnb, essentially a dapp on this PIG protocol.
Team member names:
Valerie Shieh
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. Indeed, we hadn’t considered the judicial aspects deeply enough before. A large part of the RWA really does involve legal issues. Like, how can we make sure that both buyers and sellers are not sanctioned by law and that the transaction complies with regulations?