What’s So Cool About the First Ethereum-Based Home Sale?

If you’ve perused Crypto Twitter at all over the past few months, you’ve likely heard the term “decentralized finance” or “DeFi” tossed around in relation to Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by the market capitalization of its cryptocurrency.

While some see it as a joke, a tokenized home — yes, an entire property — was purported to just have been entirely sold on the Ethereum blockchain, marking a positive step in the right direction for the fledging DeFi.

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Entire Home Sold on Blockchain, Nets Holders DAI Crypto

According to a Twitter thread posted by RealT, a U.S.-based global real estate platform working with Ethereum and blockchains, the “first property ever to be tokenized on Ethereum [has been] sold.”

RealT, which sold the 9943 Marlowe RealToken (which represents the ownership of a Detroit home worth around $60,000), claims that this sale marked a number of “firsts” for the Ethereum ecosystem: these being the first tokenized real estate property, the first security token integrated into DeFi, and the first real estate asset tradable inside of Uniswap exchange and through the actual RealT website.

9943 Marlowe is currently owned by 107 individuals from 33 countries, such as France, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, U.K., amongst many other places. The property is also owned in part by RealT itself, which has slowly been distributing through its website.

Owners of the tokens are also eligible to earn a portion of the current $30 or so dollars distributed via DAI each day because of the rent paid on the property.

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DeFi, Ethereum’s Killer Use Case

With entire homes being sold on Ethereum, some have started to suggest that decentralized finance and related applications are the killer use case for the popular blockchain, which in 2017/2018 was almost solely used as a platform to launch often-questionable initial coin offerings.

Speaking to Jon Jordan, communications at DappRadar, a service tracking information about blockchains, DeFi is Ethereum’s first killer app, not digital kitties or on-chain gambling:

“Depends on how you define ‘killer dapp’. DeFi certainly is the first category of dapps to attract significant amounts of value (both ETH and ERC20 tokens).  In terms of wider issues such as user numbers, however, it’s not clear DeFi will attract millions of users. But, yes, DeFi is the first killer dapp category on Ethereum.”

It isn’t only DappRadar that believes that DeFi is of utmost importance for Ethereum. A Coinbase Product Manager recently tapped the segment of blockchain applications, saying the following on the importance of DeFi in today’s crypto environment:

“DeFi is an opportunity to build financial infrastructure that spans the world, is open to everybody, and starts to change how we interact with markets.”

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