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Abstract

Recently blockchain has become a tool for spatial coordination and appropriation. Globally, the tokenization of land and housing has led to new forms of datafication and increased financialization. In the case of land non-fungible tokens), security token offerings, and blockchain-based real estate investment trusts, blockchains act as exclusionary digital platforms, with new socio-technical assemblages emerging as complex predatory formations of speculation that are intentionally obfuscatory and difficult to regulate. With the security token offering, crowdfunding and venture capital are combined with cryptocurrency to create a “tokenized venture capital fund” tied to tangible assets, such as ownership rights in housing, real estate, or land. Distributed ledgers are proposed to be used as the digital technology underlying new forms of land/property documentation, ownership, and inhabitation – from conducting and recording land surveys and title creation to transference of land/property rights. This paper addresses the question: how equitable is tokenized equity – does it prioritize the right to the city for all or to all but a very few? This paper looks toward the means of contestation against extractive crypto-settlements, speculation, and housing financialization, critically comparing a range of proposed distributed ledger technology projects that claim to inject equity in the system, pose alternative housing economies, or leverage distributed ledgers for land rights and data sovereignty. I question the utility and limits of datafication and explore how engaging with digital technology – with or without distributed ledgers – can raise awareness and enact alternative forms of housing and land stewardship, from cooperativism to Community Land Trusts and to counter-hegemonic commoning practices.

Keywords

Blockchain tokenization financialization equity housing cooperativism

This article is a part of special theme on City as a License. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/thecityasalicense

Introduction

In this paper I argue that blockchains are being used to intensify commodification of housing and land, but contradictorily, in fewer cases, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are also being proposed as tools to reimagine and computationally facilitate alternative housing and land futures.¹ Certain digital marketplaces (STOMarket, 2023; Swarm, 2022) use tokenization to more covertly facilitate real estate investment for high net-worth accredited investors, reproducing racial property regimes (Bhandar, 2018) outside of mainstream planning efforts. With the mechanism of the security token offering (STO), crowdfunding and venture capital are combined with cryptocurrency to create a “tokenized venture capital fund” tied to tangible assets, such as ownership rights in housing, real estate, or land (SolidBlock, 2022). In the STO, distributed ledgers are proposed to be used as the technology underlying new forms of land/property documentation, ownership, and inhabitation – from conducting and recording land surveys and title creation to transference of land/property rights. This paper looks toward the means of contesting predatory formations around the spatial data financialization of housing and land, critically comparing distributed ledger projects that claim to inject equity in the system by extending purchasing power to marginalized people of color in the United States (EquityCoin), others that pose alternative housing models and economies such as cooperativism and commoning (DOMA), and still others that seek land rights (Daniel and Ifejika Speranza, 2020) and Indigenous data sovereignty (Rodriguez-Lonebear, 2016). This research is positioned alongside scholars critically analyzing the implications of distributed ledgers for urban governance and alternative economies (Gloerich et al. 2020).

In this paper, I show how DLTs can act as digital architectures of exclusion and as digital architectures of inclusion. This can mean inclusion in existing forms of capitalism, inclusion in access to the housing market, and inclusion in acknowledging informal land rights to receive state benefits. This paper is not meant as a definitive study of all DLT land and housing projects but rather proposes a framework for critically questioning and analyzing the promises/claims of a given STO/DLT project. I suggest that it is not the so-called disruptive potential (McKinsey, 2016) of blockchain technology at large that will ensure equitable outcomes, but rather the intentionally designed organization, ownership, and management models that the distributed ledger can computationally facilitate. Guideposts for the design of these models may connect with the platform cooperative and technological sovereignty movements. However, the limits of datafication and tendencies of digital technologies toward cooptation and appropriation must be acknowledged (Scott, 2020; Tenner, 1997). Critical scholars should challenge techno-solutionist narratives and question the limits of digital technology on commoning or counter-hegemonic process that demand flexibility, negotiation, and interaction that exceeds computational bounds.

Methodology

Building on years-long ethnographic work on cryptocurrency and blockchain development in Puerto Rico and New York, I pair empirical research with literature reviews of articles and whitepapers for pilot projects proposing the use of distributed ledgers in housing and land markets, examining how distributed ledgers are currently being designed by, and used to benefit, different groups of people. I began this research in 2019 when a research collaborator and legal expert in Puerto Rico alerted me to the launch site for the Viejo San Juan Comunidad Re-Fund STO. STOs like Viejo San Juan Comunidad Re-Fund (STOWise, 2020) leverage Puerto Rico's Act 60, tokenizing access rights and investment shares to an exclusive enclave of distributed residential, commercial, and even agricultural properties. Act 60 gives a wide range of tax breaks to outside blockchain developers and tech companies, as well as zero capital gains on crypto assets for individuals who move to Puerto Rico and establish bona fide residency. These same tax benefits are not eligible to existing Puerto Rican residents. As a result, Act 60 is cultivating crypto-oriented settlement in Puerto Rico, if not introducing new forms of crypto-colonialism on a land and people subject to over 500 years of colonialism. While there is an ongoing movement advocating the repeal of Act 60 by local Puerto Ricans (Atiles, 2022), an increasing population of decree holders is building political sway and engaging in exclusionary digital practices. The VSJ San Juan STO offered exclusive, privileged access to the prospective token holders/crypto-community, mainly venture capitalists from the United States (Crandall, 2019). Here, blockchain acts as a distributed insular network of exclusion that poses to further colonize a land that has been subject to serial colonization. While the VSJ San Juan STO did not reach its funding goal, this led me to question if STOs were being used in predatory ways in other global contexts.

I structured my research by analyzing the two most frequented publicly searchable online STO marketplaces (STOMarket and STOWise). There are barriers to research that mirror the barriers to STO investment. In the United States where I am based, there are limitations to investing in public rounds which limits access to certain exclusive STO marketplaces like STOKR and RealT. These platforms require users to submit US-Accredited Investor verification and Digital KYC (know-your-customer) registration as a private investor before search access is granted. US-Accredited Investor requirements of the US SEC are intended to protect lower-income users from disproportionate financial risk; however, at present, this allows tokenization platforms to act as digital architectures of exclusion. “High net-worth” stipulations not only exclude potential investors but also introduce new barriers to scholars attempting to study real estate tokenization.

Nevertheless, while many projects listed on STOMarket and STOWise require Digital KYC/Accredited Investor verification before investing, their listings remain publicly visible online. By searching all project listings on STOMarket and STOWise between the years 2018 and 2023, I identified all STOs that were publicized as tokenizations of land or real estate property. I documented the top 30 projects in a table (see Figure. 1) to identify commonalities and differences. Acknowledging the imperial roots of classification systems, my intent is to leverage and subvert the taxonomy as a means of visualizing information, imperfect and incomplete, while potentially opening a contingently “objective” window onto potential predatory formations or extractive behavior related to real estate STOs. More than a dozen of additional real estate STOs were listed on the marketplaces but were not included in this study due to lack of context information or too few investors. The information gathered for the table was accessed from the STO marketplace listings, coupled with an analysis of the respective project website and external whitepapers if available.

Figure 1.

STO real estate market taxonomy.

Some commonalities were immediately identifiable. The identified STOs were geographically distributed. Only a few companies were registered in the locality in which their properties were tokenized (e.g., some in the United States and Germany). The majority were registered in places that differed from those in their investment portfolio, the most frequent registered in the Cayman Islands. Common claims for utilizing blockchain/tokenization overwhelmingly pointed to increased liquidity, the ability to trade 24/7 as opposed to limited daytime hours on the NY Stock Exchange, lower transaction costs and faster transaction time, and fewer barriers to international investors. Out of 30 projects, all 30 were founded by men. An exception is AspenCoin and London Digital Bond which were both tokenized under the co-management of SolidBlock, whose President and CEO/Co-founder are women. Historically, the production of property under colonial expansion has been tied to racial and gendered regimes targeting women (Dorries, 2022), where dispossession of land is connected to the dispossession of gendered place-based relations and life-sustaining practices (Simpson, 2017). While these STOs may not be directly state-sanctioned, this raises the question of whether gendered/racial property regimes are being encoded via tokenization.

Of the 30 projects, about half appear to still be active in some capacity, either open for investment, trading on a secondary market, or onto a new round of funding. Of the currently inactive projects, about six reached their hard or soft cap for funding and closed. The majority were launched and closed between 2018 and 2020, with fewer in 2021–2022, and one in April 2023 (ABC Tokens). In terms of investment type, the vast majority of STOs were private investment blockchain-equity/REITs, posing to benefiting already-existing wealthy investors looking to diversify their portfolio. Few others attempted to “democratize” investment potential to a more diversified pool of investors, thus expanding crowdfunding potential (Smartlands, 2019). To check this claim, one can evaluate a project's minimum investment purchase and then identify exemptions/exclusions. For example, to invest with ReitBZ in Brazilian real estate, the minimum buy-in was $500 USD, and yet this token offering ironically excludes “persons with residence/nationality from Brazil” (ReitBZ). While the vast majority of STOs were tokenized via Ethereum blockchain ERC20 tokens, the purchase itself in almost all cases could be made in Ether, Bitcoin, or fiat currency.²

Most of the identified STO projects tokenize fractional shares of luxury residential or tourist developments, resorts, and amenities. Two identified STOs were tokenized student housing projects, which are often lucrative investments outside of blockchain. One (SIMBCoin, 2023) represented tokenization of future real estate for a new smart city in Cameroon, which would require the use of SIMBCoin as currency. Outliers included the tokenization and crowdfunding of assisted living/senior living nursing homes in Tunisia (Carthagea) and the tokenization of debt bonds for crowdfunding a wind turbine park near the Baltic Sea (WindMine). Two projects were backed by extraction of gold, silver, and copper in mines in Nevada (Canamex) and Mongolia (Blue Hill Foundation).

The financialization of extraction activities in vulnerable geographies is not new with STOs but may be made more efficient. However, the mechanism of the STO does enable new predatory strategies of financialization of vulnerable properties and populations, namely, those that target “distressed real estate assets” (ReitBZ) which can be bought low and sold high. In the United States, RealT advertises its platform as a way to “become the landlord of the future” via blockchain. RealT aims to attract international investors and works by purchasing the deeds to single-family homes (often those subsidized by Section 8, a US federal low-income housing assistance program) in economically vulnerable areas such as Detroit, Michigan. Profits are extracted via tokenized rental income. According to their wiki, “RealToken holders are only paid when rent is collected. […] If a tenant is delinquent on their rent, they will be evicted from the property and replaced with a more creditworthy tenant.” RealT tokenizes interests in a limited liability company (LLC) that solely owns the property acquired. Tokens represent ownership of a membership interest in the LLC, and the deed to each property is held by the LLC. Property management is outsourced to “local professionals” (RealT Wiki), though more research is needed to determine how this relationship works on the ground.³

This study demonstrates how blockchain is facilitating a platform of extraction and exclusion via security token markets, making the venture capitalist status quo more efficient via digital tools. One exception was FarmCoin (2021), which aimed to provide “infrastructure and resources to 700 M unbanked farmers in Africa, enabling them to feed their families, countries, and the world.” This project falls into a “blockchain humanitarianism” model that has been identified in recent academic literature (Jutel, 2022; Howson, 2020), whereby distributed ledgers are leveraged as architectures of inclusion, often into systems accepted in the West/Global North and facilitated by NGOs. With the rise of blockchain humanitarianism, I ask in what other ways are distributed ledgers being used as digital architectures of inclusion? What cultural value systems are threatened in the process? Are there any projects that exist outside of STO marketplaces that propose to use blockchains or distributed ledgers to benefit those who are not already wealthy? As Leszczynski (2016) argues, “in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance […] we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive projects of future-ing, i.e., of anticipating particular kinds of cities-to-come.” What urban futures can we anticipate from projects utilizing DLTs? Do blockchains de facto computationally embed the status quo? Or could DLTs usher in a new “data commons” (O’Brien, 2018) where citizens and software can govern as more of a direct democracy? Can data “re-articulate notions of democracy [and] participation” (Baack, 2015), and if so, in what ways can data documented on distributed ledgers offer connections between disparate grassroots movements in mutually beneficial solidarity networks? Can distributed ledgers decouple data from financial speculation, and instead use data as a tool toward decommodification of land and housing (Jacobs and Manzi, 2019), enacting visions of alternative economies? Are DLTs capable of accounting for alternative modes of valuation, or will their alignment with individual ownership models coupled with neoliberal trends in public–private partnerships subsume any efforts toward alternatives?

As this is an emerging field, identifying case studies that center social equity as a core value posed a challenge. Academic literature review revealed the proposed use of DLTs in formalizing informal land tenure agreements in Africa (Daniel and Ifejika Speranza, 2020) and projects utilizing blockchains intersecting with the Indigenous data sovereignty movement (Carroll et al., 2019). In terms of housing specifically, I selected a range of DLT projects well-documented online that could be analyzed with a comparative lens, representing a diversity in approaches, values, and proposed implementation strategies: CityDAO, EquityCoin, and DOMA. Primary source material came from project whitepapers, with supplemental phone interviews and attendance at invited discussions with EquityCoin's founder Vernon J. in 2021 and 2022.

Definitions: Tokenization, datafication, and financialization

As Sarah Barns (2017) writes, “today's cities are the engines of the new data economy.” With tokenization of land and housing, blockchains are combining the data economy with financialization, transforming what Park (2016) has called the “fungible commodities” of land, real estate, and housing into “non-fungible tokens” on the speculative market. Few proposals aim to challenge the status quo of housing financialization through the use of DLTs. Before I present these cases, I will define tokenization, datafication, and financialization.

In the field of data security, tokenization is a transformation of one form of sensitive data (e.g., credit card numbers or social security numbers) into another form of non-sensitive data. With the advent of blockchain technology, tokenization has expanded to become a digital representation of virtually any tangible or non-tangible object or thing, coupled with a record of that data and its transactions on a distributed digital ledger. While certain blockchain use cases suggest tokens (computational strings of numbers and letters) can represent non-financial aspects such as patient health records or voting rights, currently tokens overwhelmingly represent financialized ownership rights. Caliskan (2020) defines cryptocurrency as “data money” – giving the example of Bitcoin where crypto-coins (a.k.a. tokens) are the “digitally represented exclusive rights to send data privately in a public economic space.” Both with cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), tokenization has shifted to “the process of transforming ownership rights of an asset into a digital token” (Geroni, 2021). Tokenization is a combined process of datafication (the process by which subjects, objects, and practices are transformed into quantifiable digital data) (Southerton, 2020) and financialization (the “increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives at various scales”) (Aalbers, 2016). NFTs are representations of ownership rights (typically individual ownership rights) to digital music, art, collectables, and even architectural renderings, often purchased with either fiat or cryptocurrency. While some NFT owners may claim sentimental value as the reason for their purchase, largely the buying and selling of NFTs remains a speculative endeavor, contributing to the ongoing “financialization of non-financial domains” (Sassen, 2017).

Recently NFTs have been linked to securities, taking speculation further by tokenizing ownership of physical assets such as land, real estate, and housing projects. Many of these tokenized land experiments occur in areas with favorable regulatory policies. For example, in the United States, Wyoming's “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Law” (2021) enabled a group of tech-savvy investors to establish themselves as a company with the intent to create a “blockchain city” (CityDAO, 2022). CityDAO is tokenizing citizenship and asset rights in exchange for the purchase of “land NFTs.” While CityDAO currently has a 40-acre plot of land, their expansionary dreams include the “hope that CityDAO is able to buy land all over the US and world.” Beyond utopian, their narratives evoke pseudo-evangelical discourse in calling other like-minded individuals to “help us find adjacent communities and share the gospel of the City” (CityDAO, 2022).

The purported benefit of tokenizing assets and using blockchain is to increase liquidity and potential speed of exchange, translating the legal process into “smart contracts” which can be computationally encoded and enacted, rather than having to go through human mortgage brokers, loan officers, and other human intermediaries in financial institutions. Because a copy of the ledger is distributed among multiple computers rather than housed in any one central location like a Central Bank, purportedly blockchains are more secure. However, smart contracts and their underlying blockchains could still be tampered with by savvy hackers identifying loopholes in the code, as was the case in the original Ethereum DAO hack. CityDAO has already been subject to a scam where hackers posed as Discord admins issuing a fake NFT “land drop” (Ongweso Jr., 2022).

While CityDAO proposes to do their decision-making “on-chain,” most of their coordination currently occurs on existing online platforms like Discord to discuss aspects such as DAO structure, land rights and governance, urban planning, and more (CityDAO, 2022). While these platforms are publicly accessible to most who have internet access, the financial accessibility of purchasing a CityDAO land NFT is currently restricted to high net-worth investors only. This is a clear financial barrier that calls into question claims that “digitizing physical assets democratizes access, increases transparency, removes gatekeepers, and reduces complexity” (CityDAO, 2022).

Spatial data financialization via STOs/NFTs

The tokenization of land and real estate is not unique to the CityDAO project. The promise of increased liquidity caters primarily to the interests of the investors rather than the tenants or residents of the actual properties. This bears an uncanny resemblance to the financial instrument of the sub-prime mortgage which was not intended to produce more housing or enable access, but rather sliced up pieces of mortgages to trade as asset-backed securities, enabling more investors to diversify their portfolios (Sassen, 2017). Using blockchain as a record and ledger for transaction, land NFTs and other security tokens are data representations of fractionalized assets. The difference is that with the relatively new blockchain-based STO (security token offering) process, investors may purchase tokens that represent potential future shares of a property that is yet to be built.

Sassen (2017) argues “one of the major challenges in struggles for a more just society is the rise of complex predatory formations” – the increasing technical complexity of which “easily camouflage their predatory character.” For the purposes of this paper, predatory formations are defined as the socio-technical assemblages that seek to further accumulate individual wealth at the cost of dispossession and displacement of existing residents. Land NFTs and STOs recall the “complex instruments” of extraction in the sub-prime mortgage crisis (Sassen, 2017). Global finance has “de-bordered the narrowly defined notion of financial firms and markets, and financial institutions,” shifting power in evolving socio-technical, institutional, infrastructural, and geographical assemblages (Sassen, 2017). In the case of the opportunistic migration of blockchain developers and crypto-proponents, these assemblages include not only blockchain as a digital architecture and as an instrument around which new imaginaries are convened but also include the underlying internet infrastructure, governments looking to leverage blockchain for economic development, hydroelectric power plants around which mining warehouses are built, and more.

Predatory formations often leverage technological innovations, from advanced versions of law and accounting to algorithmic computation and logistics operations (Sassen, 2017). Blockchains add further complexity to the financialization of housing. Crypto-trading and NFT markets act as even more technically obfuscatory “dark pools” – which Sassen (2017) defines as “private trading networks […] over which central banks have little power and about which they know very little.” While certain STOs may launch on technically public websites, many are actually private – open only to invited participants or other tech-savvy people in-the-know, such as the aforementioned Viejo San Juan Comunidad Re-Fund STO in Puerto Rico. While this specific STO did not reach its market cap goal for funding, elsewhere several real estate STOs have been fully funded (see Figure. 1). Funded projects include a luxury resort in Aspen, Colorado (AspenCoin); a student housing project in Nottingham, England (Smartlands, 2019); and a series of commercial and residential properties in Brazil managed by investment bank BTG Pactual (ReitBZ). The majority of real estate STOs replicate profit-seeking and rent-extraction that exists “off-chain,” suggesting capitalist continuation (perhaps more seamlessly facilitated) via blockchain technology.

Replicating racial regimes of property: What is property without planning?

In the same way that crypto-proponents are buying up beachfront property in Puerto Rico, contributing to rising real estate prices and threatening to push existing residents out, the financialization of housing and land has “colonized cities by provoking dispossession and homelessness” (Rolnik, 2019). More broadly, private property ownership has been conceptualized as a white settler colonial construct tied to violence and dispossession of land from Indigenous populations (King, 2019). Bhandar has established how private property and racial subjects are co-produced in ongoing “racial regimes of property” (2018). Dorries (2022) further argues that racial property regimes are reinforced in mainstream planning logics and poses a critical provocation – what is planning without property? Engaging this trajectory of thought, I raise the reverse question – via DLTs and other digital tools – what is property without planning? I suggest that certain digital technologies are used to encode or perpetuate the private property regime outside of mainstream planning structures, and yet DLTs are being used in fewer cases to experiment and imagine more equitable modes of living. More research on land-based distributed ledger projects and digital real estate experiments (along with their racial/gendered implications) is needed.

Even for projects that claim to seek justice and emancipation via blockchains, a form of “settler normalcy” (Tuck and Yang, 2012) makes it hard to envision actionable alternatives outside of the capitalist status quo. While distributed ledgers may open up experimentation with land and property to those outside of mainstream planning discipline, this does not mean such experimentation will inherently be more just or decolonial. Decolonial design strategies necessarily rethink the concept of private ownership and might explore commoning and cooperative practices, collectivism, and multi-species land stewardship (TallBear, 2017; Bresnihan, 2016; Tsing, 2015; Sundberg, 2014). If distributed ledgers are to support the interests of justice, one might first question, as Dorries (2022) poses, “what forms of praxis and modes of relationality […] will best support the ethical flourishing of life?” – and are certain technological configurations compatible?

Research in housing studies and urban policy has also established the need for more equitable housing models, policies, and protocols. This need has been exacerbated since the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing international housing crisis, which as Fields and Hodkinson (2017) describe, is an “enduring state of affairs in which rising evictions, overcrowding, unaffordability, substandard conditions, homelessness, and displacement have become the norm.” The commodification of land and property in service to capital accumulation for transnational housing investors, developers, landlords, sovereign wealth funds, real estate investment trusts, and other non-occupying purchasers has largely been prioritized over housing as a human right (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Marcuse and Madden, 2016). Even state-sponsored policies that consider housing as a human right get subsumed by continued neoliberal private–public partnerships and “market friendly” solutions which have been shown to entrench existing housing inequalities (Wetzstein, 2017). Contemporary “urban revitalization” projects are often posed as means for economic development in vulnerable geographies, where investors acquire and exploit devalued public housing and land from indebted city governments, real estate prices increase, leading to gentrification and displacement of low-income households from what becomes deemed a higher value area (Slater, 2017). Accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003: 148, 158, 184) is also witnessed in the vulture capital behavior of “global capital landlords” and private equity firms who prey on low-income residents defaulting on their mortgages by buying up repossessed homes and loan books from struggling banks (Fields and Raymond, 2021).

Just as racial colonial subjects are co-produced with private property (Bhandar, 2018), venture capital tends to operationalize crises using rhetoric of social good, leveraging fragile geographies as test-beds, and framing citizens as future consumers (Howson, 2020). Aside from Puerto Rico, in Latin America, countries like El Salvador are running grand crypto-economic experiments such as Bitcoin Beach and Bitcoin City (Vázquez, 2022). While digital literacy training often accompanies these projects, including a workshop in Puerto Rico entitled “bootsrapping your own inclusion”, this education is usually guided under the terms and priorities of outside blockchain companies rather than through self-initiated efforts of self-determination. Increasingly, however, Puerto Rican tech developers are looking to leverage the blockchain buzz to implement projects by and for Puerto Ricans (LinkPR, 2022). Blockchains may provide a conceptual tool to facilitate what Bhandar (2018) calls “radical acts of imagining” necessary to explore “how to collectively create the conditions for turning away from property as we know it.” Those interested in leveraging DLTs for self-determination or for progressive housing and land rights projects (within or outside of mainstream planning protocols) might look toward the following precedents from which lessons can be learned.

Imagining new housing and land futures via DLTs

Alternative funding models for affordable housing: EquityCoin

As an explicit alternative to predatory blockchain-based REITs, EquityCoin (EQTY) is the first blockchain-based token that is backed by affordable housing. According to their whitepaper documentation, EquityCoin (2021) was created “to make real estate ownership and rental income more accessible for those who have been historically marginalized.” EquityCoin's founder is Vernon Jones, a Black entrepreneur with experience renting deeply affordable units to tenants in East New York, Brooklyn with Section 8 (US federal program for assisting very-low-income families, the elderly, and disabled) and FHEPS (New York City and state-funded program for Family Homelessness and Eviction Prevention). EquityCoin has acquired their first properties in East New York and plans to expand to North Miami, South Los Angeles, and Philadelphia (EquityCoin, 2021).

One of EquityCoin's stated goals is to help build generational wealth for Black communities who have been traditionally excluded from the housing market. By fractionalizing housing equity shares as digital data represented by tokens – EQTY – the minimum investment purchase is significantly reduced. EquityCoin leverages the tokenization model not just to provide financial incentives for investors. EquityCoin's underlying goal is to pose an alternative funding model for deeply affordable housing for those who need it most, a type of crowdfunding supported by local community members. Counter to many blockchain REITs, STOs, and land NFTs which are exclusively available to high net-worth investors, EquityCoin attempts to open participation up as much as legally possible under the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) Regulation Crowdfunding category (Reg CF).⁴

In 2021, the amount that can be raised for a project under Reg CF crowdfunding was raised from $1.07 million to $5 million. While it is unlikely that the full cost of new construction affordable housing projects can be covered by EquityCoin's Reg CF measures, rehabilitation of existing housing stock is certainly feasible. Additionally, there are a wide range of supplementary financing programs through New York City's Housing Preservation and Development that can offset additional costs rather than having to rely solely on venture capital. EquityCoin already plans to partner with existing federal, state, and city agencies – such as HUD, FHEPS, and local housing authorities – to determine guidelines for these affordable units.

The profit model is as follows: each EquityCoin (EQTY) token represents an equity share of ownership in the company Equity Platforms, Inc. Each token is backed by income-producing (affordable housing) rental properties, with dividends paid out to investors in crypto or cash payments. According to Founder Vernon Jones, “the real estate that we own and will acquire are all backed by government tenant vouchers, which guarantees cash flow.” In technical terms, EquityCoin uses an ERC884 token, like ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, but with a token specific to a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. As a Delaware Corporation, all future EquityCoin property acquisitions must be vetted through an underwriting process and be determined to have a positive and sustainable impact on their respective communities. To leverage the interoperability potentials of DLTs, EquityCoin could connect to other local sustainability initiatives, like Brooklyn Microgrid, a distributed solar microgrid network which also runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The carefully considered utility of distributed ledgers could help facilitate, record, and manage urban data transactions in mutually beneficial networks, from housing to renewable energy, perhaps facilitating more self-sufficient local micro-economies.

EquityCoin's wealth redistribution goals are currently rooted in capitalist logics, working within the system to try to achieve a more equitable capitalist environment. However, the equitability of a project situated within the private property regime deserves to be critically questioned. The assumption that all housing and land should be owned is what Fawaz (2017) calls the “property affect,” which limits the imagination of more equitable alternatives. Expanding access to private property ownership to Black families may push at the edges of the racial property regime but ultimately fail to dismantle it, since “struggles against dispossession too easily become struggles for possession” (Porter, 2014). Distributed ledger real estate projects framing equity and justice through the lens of private property will necessarily be limited if they “[fail] to challenge the racist legal framework as well as the anti-Indigenous and anti-Black assumptions upon which the racial property regime relies” (Dorries, 2022). At the same time, EquityChain's goals toward creating a new “sharing equity economy,” where “each person in the neighborhood owns a little bit of the community” (EquityCoin, 2021), seems to challenge the individual private property ownership model, aligning with more collective, commons-oriented economic alternatives. A question I posed to EquityCoin founder Vernon Jones (2021) was what new directions could EquityCoin (and other projects like it) take if they explored alternative housing models that explicitly aim to decommodify land and housing, such as the Community Land Trust (CLT), Limited Equity Cooperative (LECs), Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives, or the Tenement Syndicate model? While Jones agreed these models are interesting, he identified that EquityCoin was prioritizing complying with US SEC regulations, which may inhibit certain experimentation and sandboxing. He indicated EquityCoin was prioritizing capital investment backed by affordable housing in “opportunity areas.” Opportunity zones according to the IRS are identified to “spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities while providing tax benefits to investors,” following a capitalist, neoliberal development model. DLT projects that attempt to push against these commonly accepted models may face many more challenges in getting buy-in and approvals, unless the regulatory environment is amenable to experimentation.

Housing and platform cooperativism: The DOMA project

In co-design projects, tech developers might work with grassroots organizations who have long considered the design of protocols, organizational frameworks, and economic architectures that might help facilitate more equitable alternative economic futures.This is the approach that a group of architects, artists, and designers took at Strelka Institute with their DOMA City proposal: a “blockchain-based affordable housing platform that turns its users into homeowners” (Rokmaniko et al., 2018). It should be noted that the DOMA City project was speculative and appears inactive as of 2019, yet it is useful to study because it proposes a novel approach and addresses questions that differ from most active STO/DLT real estate projects.

DOMA (2018) aims to game the system, asking “what if we could [intentionally] misuse the financialisation of housing, play the market against the market, use its considerable power to achieve opposite goals to its current ones.” DOMA is like EquityCoin in its goals to work within the existing capitalist system to achieve a redistribution of wealth from the housing market, but how they pose to do so differs. DOMA explicitly intends to work as a platform cooperative. Platform cooperativism is a growing international movement focused on building a fairer economic future – digital platforms with collective ownership and governance by and for those who need it most (Scholz and Schneider, 2016). Existing platform cooperatives range from alternatives to venture capital-funded start-ups, to cooperatively owned online marketplaces. DOMA (2018) engages the housing cooperative model with “an organizational structure that is jointly owned and run by its members, who share the profits and benefits that it generates.”

Housing cooperatives are a housing model that shifts the single-family private ownership model to one of collective shared ownership in which “the members’ resources are pooled so that their collective buying power is leveraged, thus lowering the cost per member in all the services and products associated with home ownership” (DOMA, 2018: 7). While housing cooperatives pre-date platform cooperatives by nearly a century, the idea of introducing digital platforms to support and scale the housing cooperative model is relatively new. Housing cooperatives have historically been a means of providing and maintaining affordable housing in urban areas, posing an alternative to private individual ownership or extractive rental–landlord relationships (Davis, 1993). Coop residents also have increased agency in decision-making processes in relationship to their buildings.

Digital platforms alone cannot replace strong policy support around affordable housing cooperatives. However, digital technologies could possibly supplement and make more efficient the management of coops, if they adhere to the Rochdale Principles (Crandall and Mercado-Vázquez, 2022). Specifically, distributed ledgers pose a way to record and facilitate coordination and consensus among members in cooperatives locally but also offer a way to connect different coops with each other in mutually beneficial ways. Using a distributed ledger to facilitate interoperability could help connect and coordinate solidarity networks at scale, a federated ecosystem of cooperatives across geographical distances, something that has been one of the “biggest obstacle(s) to cooperative, collaborative, unionized action” (DOMA, 2018).

The DOMA protocol proposed a similar strategy to EquityCoin, tokenizing fractions of housing equity shares, reducing the barrier of entry to investment. Some of the biggest challenges with traditional coop housing for low-income families are mortgage approvals and down-payments. Rather than prioritizing housing stock as a speculative game for non-occupying individuals, DOMA prioritizes affordable crowd-buying of property for future residents of the cooperative. Dividends would partially go into maintenance, emergency reserves, and continued affordability, partially into the resident's pockets and partially into the acquisition of other properties to establish future affordable cooperatives.

The DOMA team leveraged the blockchain buzz to raise awareness of the housing cooperative and platform cooperative model, attempting to reach new audiences of younger generations and techno-savvy people working toward a more equitable future. DOMA succeeds in this respect primarily as a conceptual framework. DOMA's legal and technical specificities are currently vague and would have to be carefully calibrated based on location of implementation and evolving regulatory constraints. Presently there are no implemented projects that combine fractionalized equity tokens with housing cooperatives that can be used as case studies, and the uncertainty for people looking to establish these types of projects may be prohibitive.

Aside from legal roadblocks, there are also several drawbacks to the DOMA proposal as a technical model. DOMA (2018) indicates the tokens distributed to the tenants would be “mined” and “verified by the decentralized nodes in the P2P network, so as to reflect the incremental value rise of the platform.” The indication of mining suggests the use of a Proof-of-Work protocol, which should be cautioned against for those with environmental sustainability in mind given that the computational mining behavior around Proof-of-Work blockchains has been shown to increase global carbon emissions (Stoll et al., 2019). Additionally, “mining” crypto-coins or tokens encourages speculation around the token itself, which should be avoided. Instead, housing platform coops might consider the “Proof-of-Cooperation” protocol developed and used in the FairCoin/FairCoop ecosystem (Balaguer Rasillo, 2021) or comparable energy-conscious protocols.

Beyond any one technical solution, a project interested in equitable urban futures must focus on the design of equitable frameworks and their protocols and guidelines. The Rochdale Cooperative Principles are one starting point as guideposts for ensuring equitable system design and continued operation, but this process is flexible enough to support other forms of communal ownership such as the Community Land Trust (CLT). Some drawbacks to the CLT model are that mortgages can be a barrier to entry for those with poor credit. The tokenized rent-to-own model that DOMA proposes offers a way through this challenge. More critical research, collaboration, and testing are needed to specify the ways in which a tokenization model could be hybridized to lower the barrier of entry for marginalized populations without coopting and compromising the CLT underlying principles.

Land rights and data sovereignty

Beyond the scale of the apartment or house, distributed ledgers have already been implemented in land titling and registries in cooperation with governments. In recent years, academics and blockchain developers have proposed to use cases of blockchain for land rights to support alternative land ownership and stewardship models, to acknowledge, document, and legitimize informal and communal land tenure agreements as valid data. This land access often falls outside of Western land administration conventions “deemed as informal regardless of the resilient communal land systems that uphold cultural identities of communities over generations” (Daniel and Ifejika Speranza, 2020).

Daniel and Ifejika Speranza establish the need for new ways to legally recognize informal and communal tenure agreements, giving the example of agricultural livelihoods in Trinidad and Tobago. Farmers can only claim state benefits (e.g., for land preparation, irrigation, etc.) if they possess a farmers identification card, but such a document is dependent on the possession of legally recognized tenure documentation. Distributed ledgers would offer a means toward inclusion in a system that traditionally excludes farmers from accessing state benefits. This may require that distributed ledgers get creative with accommodating various forms of land agreement data that may not be easy to digitize. For example, in Burkina Faso, land transactions practices include “visible customary acts of gratitude e.g., gift exchanges,” as well as “little papers” that may include handwritten contracts. The proposal by Daniel and Ifejika Speranza appears not to replace nor directly translate these transaction practices onto a distributed ledger, but rather add a supplementary digital data transaction layer to any handshake or oral agreements of land use, after which a series of smart contracts would be executed.

Daniel and Ifejika Speranza acknowledge the challenges and limitations of both establishing and maintaining the initial distributed ledger record. A range of critical blockchain scholars have established how “blockchain cannot magically fix per-existing contestations over lands and the bringing of communal tenure under statutory regulations. Such issues are related to the institutional and legal pillars of land administration which have to determine how best to bring diverse tenure regimes under statutory oversight” (Daniel and Ifejika Speranza, 2020; Vos et al., 2017). It is important to challenge the rhetoric of “immutability” often is connected to blockchain narratives, since blockchains and smart contract algorithms can still be exploited by in possible code loopholes. Additionally, DLTs are reliant on a digital internet infrastructure that will require maintenance over time, dependent on human, institutional, and technological capacities in overall data management. Reliable access to the underlying internet infrastructure is also a concern in terms of digital equity. While sub-Saharan Africa is the “global frontrunner” in using 3G/4G mobile payments, Africa commands only 4% of global internet access (Daniel and Ifejika Speranza, 2022). To help close the digital divide, farmers would need access to internet networks and internet-enabled devices, education on digital services within agriculture and how to use them to secure land access, and technical workers who can maintain the infrastructure long term.

Distributed ledgers may offer a technical solution amenable to the state to legally recognize informal land rights, but the technical complexity in this project is daunting. In any digitized land rights project, one might ask – to what degree are informal land agreements and cultural practices being forced into a techno-rational process that serves to mirror, if not replicate, racial property regimes? What new vulnerabilities are introduced and what socio-cultural practices have the potential to be overwritten by code? Instead of asking marginalized groups to fit their practices into a techno-rational system that is traditionally recognized in Western land administration systems, why not ask that land administration systems be more flexible in recognizing alternative land transfer processes? Even with all the best intents, non-governmental organizations that try to roll out a uniform system with the intent of social good and inclusion (e.g., banking the unbanked) might threaten to erase certain cultural practices of exchange. How any digitized land data system is implemented, for whom and by whom is of utmost importance. A co-development strategy could be undertaken to ensure important cultural practices and values are not erased but rather supported by any new digital infrastructure.

Co-design is one of underlying processes in the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. In Canada, a program has been launched through the University of British Columbia (2022) with funding from Human Data Commons entitled “Data Sovereignty for Indigenous Sovereignty.” The project seeks to develop a “resource management platform for First Nation communities” while also “using data analytics to identify cultural bias, augment reconciliation and drive public policy through deep democracy” (UBC, 2022). The project has direct engagement with the First Nations Technology Council and is facilitated by James Delorme, an Indigenous technologist aiming to avoid appropriation and guide authenticity. These groups see an alignment with the utility of DLTs and the concepts of personal sovereignty “reflected in traditional Indigenous sovereignty with an emphasis on interconnection responsibilities” (UBC, 2022).

The UBC project is positioned amidst the existing global Indigenous Sovereignty and Indigenous Data Governance movements. Primarily, data sovereignty seeks to decolonize, emerging from a pushback against misrepresentation and the ongoing use of data as a tool to “marginalize Indigenous peoples, eradicate their ways of life, and rewrite their histories to advance the colonial project” (Carroll et al., 2019). While digital data sovereignty may be relatively new, Indigenous knowledge practices have long been linked with data collection and recording. As Rodriguez-Lonebear (2016) writes, “Indigenous data were recorded in oral histories, stories, winter counts, calendar sticks, totem poles, and other instruments that stored information for the benefit of the entire community.” DLTs offer a digital space to record, maintain, and collectively manage Indigenous data – by and for tribal citizens and communities.

Shaping the future of DLT for data sovereignty will have its challenges. As Indigenous software developers Animikii acknowledge, “it's hard to even think about funding expensive Information Technology (IT) projects when your community doesn’t have reliable internet, much less affordable electricity or clean drinking water” (Cullell, 2020). The equitability of access to distributed ledger projects hinges on the underlying access to robust internet infrastructure, as well as a baseline of digital literacy among citizens. What sets this project apart, however, is that the teaching can be done from within the knowledge base of Indigenous technologists, framing technological utility through the lens of Indigenous values and principles.

The rising prominence of technological sovereignty movements around the globe (Lynch, 2020) suggest ways forward for marginalized populations whose agency and decision-making power has historically been limited. While distributed ledger projects emerging from these movements are not without challenges and pitfalls (see the FairCoin/FairCoop project, Balaguer Rasillo, 2021), a growing global awareness of technological/data sovereignty can provide lessons and offer access to mutual support networks with shared values of “democratic and cooperative practices of work, property, production, and consumption” (Lynch, 2020). Technological sovereignty is flexible enough to intersect the work of local grassroots organizations, cooperatives, and community initiatives attempting to enact alternative housing economies and values of communal land stewardship. However, cooptation is always a concern. It will be of critical importance to question how distributed ledgers produce, record, and manage data and to whose benefit, to contest further commodification of data via crypto-utopian techno-capitalist logics, and to challenge racial/gendered property regimes.

Conclusion: Encoding or decoding property regimes via DLTs?

In this paper I have shown how DLTs act as exclusionary digital platforms, facilitating predatory formations to further accumulate wealth. I have also shown how in fewer instances DLTs have been posed as digital architectures of inclusion. This can mean inclusion in existing forms of capitalism, inclusion in access to the housing market, and inclusion in acknowledging informal land rights to receive state benefits. While these proposals might be useful stop-gap measures in the absence of systemic change, it is important to question what racial/gendered property regimes are reinforced, what new vulnerabilities are introduced, and what socio-cultural practices have the disturbing potential to be overwritten by code. Facilitators of alternative housing or land economy projects via DLTs should be careful about how inclusion is determined, by whom, for whom, and under what conditions. In this respect there is much to learn from the Indigenous data sovereignty movement and other technological sovereignty movements across the globe.

Connecting to a growing technological solidary network can help provide precedents and knowledge resources for groups looking to build technological platforms and projects in explicit contestation to crypto-settlement and gentrification. Where this is occurring in Puerto Rico, for example, the technological sovereignty movement could intersect with the existing agroecology and food sovereignty movements (Diaz and Hunsberger, 2018). Platform cooperativism could intersect with the robust cooperative network in Puerto Rico in a carefully orchestrated DLT Coop (Crandall and Mercado-Vázquez, 2022). For many Puerto Ricans, Hurricane Maria exposed the inequity of access to FEMA recovery funds for citizens living on “family land” without any formal, legally recognized deeds and title documents. DLTs pose one way to document and record family land rights as legitimate data, while connecting to a broader network of cooperative and CLT properties that might expand across the archipelago to secure affordable tenure for existing Puerto Rican citizens. Under a technological sovereignty umbrella, these digital platforms, via DLTs or not, could help ensure that future datafication of urban and rural space is determined, managed, and controlled by and for the people, rather than operationalized by outside forces.

The implementation of DLTs in support of alternative housing economies would not be without challenges. As Mattern (2013) points out, there are issues with “data-fication” of the city, “the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured.” We must consider the limits of DLTs and digital data in supplementing the work of organizations looking to implement alternative housing/land economies, cooperative, or commoning projects. For example, in Puerto Rico's Bosque del Pueblo, the People's Forest, the community-based organization Casa Pueblo was instrumental in working with the government to arrive at a co-management designation. Beyond just an alternative economic vision, Casa Pueblo considers commoning as a “counter-hegemonic” practice, an ongoing act of communal re-negotiation, education, and embodied action “beyond representation through direct participation” (García-López et al., 2017). The forest is not simply a techno-rational object to be extracted from or conserved and monitored on a distributed ledger. DLTs may be good tools for management, record-keeping, legal documentation as recognition of land rights, platforms for connections, and interchange between other globally distributed mutually beneficial networks. However, no technology for accounting and recording, distributed or otherwise, will be able to replicate the everyday practices and work of embodied education and cultivating care that are essential to understanding what democratic rights actually mean.

DLTs are not necessary to enact alternative housing economies, land rights projects, cooperatives, CLTs, or commons. At the same time, one must keep in mind that the left's tendency for critique and apparent desire for “radical perfection” – a dismissal of the transformative potential of alternatives – often ends up being debilitating and even paralyzing and serves to perpetuate the hegemony of capital and the idea that there are no alternatives (Gibson-Graham, 2006). The buzz around blockchain can raise awareness of the technological/data sovereignty movements, platform cooperativism, and alternative housing economies. These movements can leverage the scalar capabilities of distributed ledgers to share knowledge and resources via diasporic and mutually beneficial federated networks across the globe. However, it is important to interrogate how new digital technologies can “serve to support local initiatives and alliances […] given the almost exclusive emphasis in the representation of these technologies of their global scope and deployment” (Riemens and Lovink, 2002).

To conclude, at present the vast majority of real estate STOs and land NFTs are making venture capital investment more efficient and exclusionary via digital platforms. Contradictorily, blockchains are proposed in fewer cases as digital platforms of inclusion. These “inclusive” projects often mean inclusion into techno-capitalist or neoliberal humanitarian systems, forcing compliance into with Western/Global North value systems, and threatening cultural land-use practices outside of these value systems. This paper argues that while tokenization is not inherently incompatible with alternative models of housing and land stewardship, (1) there are far fewer implemented projects to study, (2) the privilege to experiment is systematically limited, (3) there are challenges to finding regulatory environments amenable to techno-economic experimentation outside of the “property affect,” and (4) threats of cooptation and unintended consequences of datafication may outweigh the benefits.

Overall, this paper provides a framework for critically analyzing the claims of STO/DLT projects, questioning if they act to encode the racial/gendered property regime or play a role in its unmaking. Blockchain or otherwise no one technological tool can ensure equitable outcomes. However, distributed ledgers may act as devices around which more just modes of living can be imagined, making the implementation of alternative economies more believable. To prevent predatory formations from using land NFTs, blockchain REITs, and exclusionary STOs as instruments to become landlords of every square inch of the planet, policy first must change. However, if policymaking and planning continue to be complicit in extractive behavior, activists, technologists, and designers might begin leveraging digital tools to support and supplement efforts toward enacting alternative housing and land economies outside of mainstream planning structures. The limits of datafication and potentials of cooptation must be carefully addressed in each specific case. Critical scholars should challenge techno-solutionist narratives and question the limits of digital technology on housing and land practices that demand flexibility, nuance, and negotiation that exceeds computational limitations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jillian Crandall

Notes

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