.jpg)
ColivingDAO Insights: The Web3 Path for Regen Living
Hosted by ColivingDAO founders Daniel Aprea and Gareth Thompson, this podcast explores how Web3 technologies can enable sustainable, community-driven, and regenerative living.
Each episode of "ColivingDAO Insights" offers valuable perspectives, knowledge, and analysis on the practical applications of Web3 technologies in fostering regenerative living, such as decentralised ownership and governance models, proptech innovations, community living, and ways to regenerate both the planet and the economy.
ColivingDAO Insights: The Web3 Path for Regen Living
Founders' Deep Dive into ColivingDAO
Welcome everyone to Coliving Down Inslides. This is your co-host Daniel. And I'm joined today by my co-host Gareth as well. Hi Gareth, how are you doing? Hi Daniel, feeling really good. Yeah, looking forward to this one. Awesome. Welcome everyone. And uh today we'll be sharing a little bit more about our story. First of all, uh we're gonna share how we met. Uh it actually happened living in a co-living space. So it's very, very relevant to what we're doing right now. And uh we'll uh go a little bit deeper on uh what exactly we are building here at Co-Living Dow and why it's uh very much needed in our society. So Gareth, do you want to share a bit about how we originally met?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure. So as you said, Dan, uh we met and became friends living in a co-living, so we lived in one of the UK's biggest co-living communities here in London, and we were actually neighbours, so we met because we were neighbours, and it was so much fun, you know, living in the co-living and it was very pro-social. We quickly met people to hang out with, we went to events, and there was a whole variety of events, right? There was loads of different types of events from parties to um professional development events where speakers would come in and and run workshops in the building, which was great, and in a big city like London, because you don't need to travel to go to the events, you can just go to them in your own home and then go home at night, which is great. And so it you know it it was a great experience. And just to explain what co-living is, first of all, co-living is basically a new way of living where residents get their own room or apartment. So we had our own relatively small space, but it was a private space where you live and often included a bathroom. But then you the key difference is you get access to lots of shared facilities in the building. So we had a gym, there was a bar and restaurant, we had a living room, we had co-working spaces, and a whole bunch of other facilities. And also the rent was included, um included all of the bills. And so you get this one monthly payment and you get all the shared facilities and a private space. So that's what co-living is. And do you want to add a bit to that, Dan?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a great concept. I remember when I first moved to London, I had to find a place to live. And um certainly what people would normally do is just look for a flat share or some other type of accommodation that maybe not too expensive in the beginning, uh, but something that is um comfortable enough with enough privacy. Uh, and uh normally when people look for flat shares, uh they don't necessarily primarily look for community living. Certainly, they want to have decent relationships with uh neighbors and and flatmates. At the same time, sharing is not the main reason people look for flight shares, it's more about really having a place, maybe paying a little bit less, and um being uh able to have the occasional dinner together every now and then, and and and so on. That's for the majority of uh of flight shares. Co-living really enhances a few things. First of all, the community aspect. So a lot of people moving into co-living space, uh, they're not just doing to save money, uh, they might not even necessarily save money depending on the the type of co-living. Some uh are a little bit more high-end, some a little bit focused on um um lower costs as well. So it really depends. But the fact that there's a community there, uh, it's really uh a big value proposition, a big advantage. The other value proposition is convenience. In fact, I remember, especially being new to a certain town, why would I have to go through all this uh mess of looking at all setting up contracts for all my utilities and having to pay council tax, having to pay for electricity, maybe gas, having to pay for all sorts of different things, water and so on. Like, why can't I just make a single payment and um not have to think about anything? So definitely convenience is a very, very big factor, community is a big factor, and uh and cost as well. Some people think of this in terms of the three C's convenience, community, and and cost. So, co-living is uh definitely a great way to live, uh but there's also a few downsides as well, which uh we often talk about in uh our podcasts and in our conversations as well, uh co-living DAO. So, Gareth, what else would you like to share about our experience? Uh starting from what we really, really enjoyed there all the way to the downsides.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so as you said, Dan, like what we enjoyed was the community side, there's a social side. It's a lot of fun. You get to meet like-minded people and people that are a little bit different as well sometimes, which is fun. Um but the downsides include obviously because we're renting, it's still a rented uh relationship. You own nothing after paying rent for for months on end or years even. And then the way that the landlord or the the co-living operator managed the community when they had financial challenges, particularly during COVID, started to really impact on the community and cause a bit of dissatisfaction because they really followed their own agenda, um, which is understandable because it's a business and and they need to make money and cover costs. But we that got us talking, and we used to talk about how could we make co-living better? How can we fix some of these problems with the you know the landlord and the operators doing their own thing at the expense of the community?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely. And uh I certainly remember the early days as soon as I moved in, I was so excited. I thought I found a fantastic place, and I did in in many ways. So I I can say I fell in love with the concept. I can say I really had a fantastic time there, and especially in a place like London, I definitely see a lot of advantages in um being in a co-living space as opposed to a simple flight shear or living alone as well. The reason being London is a very scattered place, there's things happening all over the place. There isn't really a go-to place for many people. So I've experienced as well that if I meet people in town, it's not so easy to really keep seeing the same person over and over again. People are extremely busy, people schedule things a lot in advance, uh, people live quite far away from each other. So, what this means is that London, in many ways, lived in the so to speak, traditional way, really lacks the uh the social fabric, the the community aspect uh that can instead be generated or created in other ways. And one way is uh definitely living in a co-living space. I remember making friends, and I I'm a true believer that proximity uh is is really a major factor in uh building friendships as well. I remember meeting people that I thought, oh wow, this person we got along really well, I think we can be good friends, but then we didn't spend a lot of time together, we were probably quite far from each other, and we did not become strong friends. Whereas with other people, I can really see how that happened because we were spending more time together, living closer, and living in a co-living space means sometimes we can just meet for half an hour or 15 minutes. What if I just come back home and we just bump into each other? Or maybe we can just uh text each other, call each other, say, Hey, are you around? Shall we have a 30-minute lunch together? Shall we have just a quick chat, just a hug, something? So this really makes a massive difference and it compounds. So after six years living in the in the equal living space, I really felt that my experience living in London was uh incredibly enhanced. So there's definitely massive advantages that go far beyond uh having a few events here and there, having um all the bills included in one payment, and so on. So definitely a great way to live. And I'm sure you had a similar experience as well, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it reminds me of a fun story actually. I remember coming home from from working one day and there was a comedy event with multiple comedians in the building, and so I was able to go directly from my small apartment to the comedy event, and I was late and and had to go to the front row and had to sit like next to the comedians, and of course they started making fun of me right away. But then like some of my friends were in the audience and and they found it really funny, and it and it was just such a it was such a fun night, um, partly at my expense because I walked in late, but to have that on your doorstep was so amazing, so much fun. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:And this really cannot be underestimated. I know some people are worried, especially the introverts, they're worried, oh, if I live in a community, does it mean I always I always have to be talking to everyone, even when I don't want to talk to anyone, it's on. Uh and obviously we discussed this already many podcasts, it doesn't have to be the case. People have a private space. But what's really beautiful, something that I really enjoy is knowing that I can go out to meet people and in any moment I have a way out. So even people that are introverted could say, hey, right now I'm enjoying my time here. The second I stop enjoying my time with other people and I want to be alone, I can instantly just go back to my private space within the co-living space and I will be alone, which is different from having to, for example, commit an entire night or an entire period of time to go out maybe far away from where you live, and then you can't just say, Oh, actually, I don't want to be with anyone anymore. What do you do? You live, and what if you change your mind? Sometimes I remember I was going out and having a lot of fun with other people, and then I say, Hey, I want some me time now. Go back to my room, and then I'm like, you know what? I want to hang out again, then I can go back and hang out with people again. So this is really something that suits um introverts as well as extroverts and uh pretty much anyone because there is choice and uh having the option of really deciding how much or how little social life one wants to have is a massive, massive advantage.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Should we go into some of the problems that we saw and then how that how we saw that relating to the bigger problems that the world's facing right now?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, of course, the culture here has a very specific idea in mind of what people should do with the property and real estate. And um co-living traditionally exists on a rental basis, and this is something that doesn't really fit well with the standard narrative where people are incentivized to really own their own space, uh, to own where they live. And uh it becomes very frustrating for a lot of people, uh, and I can feel it for myself as well. After living for six years on a rental basis, I sometimes think, what if I had bought something instead of having to rent? Uh maybe I'd be better off. I'd be owning an asset as opposed to simply making rental payments month after month after month. And uh this makes a lot of sense. Now, of course, buying right now might not be the best choice for everyone. Some people already decided I don't necessarily want to own property, but the the number one reason people don't want to own properties right now is because there isn't a convenient way to do so that is flexible enough and doesn't involve a big deposit or getting into debt and so on. Um, but in general, there's certainly advantages in owning equity because it means that people have exposure to an asset that could potentially appreciate in price, and also that with ownership, there's other things that uh go together as well, such as uh governance and so on. And we'll talk more about this a little bit later on, but certainly it was a massive uh downside uh to just uh having to pay rent every month without owning anything, and um, at the same time, the fact that co-living is uh managed in a traditional way, typically, where residents are not really necessarily hurt, uh, that was also a major issue. I remember there were conflicts occasionally, actually not occasionally, quite often, with the with landlords, with the managers as well. And the reason was the community wanted certain things, and the landlords wanted very different things. And it used to be a fight. It used to be like, hey, we as the community want this, landlords was that, uh, how do we do that? And uh we don't believe that this happened simply because that particular space was mismanaged, certainly uh it was probably mismanaged, but there's something a little bit deeper in uh the entire way the system is designed. The system is designed in a way where there isn't really a major incentive um in alignment between uh residents and uh landlords. So this is something that uh we realized there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the community uh when our voice was unheard. And uh Gareth, you want to share something about this in particular?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh I we started to see the events and some of the social aspects have less priority from the management is one thing. Like they they took away some of the regular, most popular events, and that started to impact on the community because we quickly saw okay, they're not prioritizing the community, they're prioritizing short-term cash flow and reducing costs. Um and the other side of it was they did say that they wanted to listen to our views to take on board some feedback, and they held like um town hall events where you could go and tell the management about the problems, but those events sometimes became quite confrontational. It was like the management on one side of the room and the residents on the other, and and you know um them both defending their positions really hard against each other, and it wasn't so productive, you would expect it to be much more of a collaborative space to help make those connections, you know. We're we're we're all in it together. You make the community stronger, it benefits you as the landlord or the operator. Um but that's that often wasn't the case, it became quite confrontational at times, I would say, which was interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. So definitely something that can be uh done better, and that's exactly why we're we're here at Cont Living Dawi uh designing something different. But if we broaden up the scope a little bit, if we zoom out, uh what we realize is that these problems are not limited to just uh one co-living space or even the concept of co-living, in general, we realize that individualistic living uh is literally destroying the social fabric of communities, uh, not just communities, we can talk about ecosystems as well and nature and so on. But the fact that we are following the sort of uh social escalator where people live with their families when they're young, and then gradually they go and live maybe in a student house or a campus, so that's a form of co-living in a way, and then gradually they move maybe into a flat share, and then the more status they have, the more money they make. Uh they gradually live with a fewer and fewer people around. In fact, the pinnacle of society is um living alone or or living just uh in a single family house, and uh and and that's it, which is something that uh first of all is quite recent. Historically, uh, this didn't used to be the case, uh, but also it's really destroying a lot of um natural um needs that the humans have. And I know a lot of people that lived in the co-living space with me, and at some point I thought, okay, now I'm making a little bit more money, I can actually buy a house, or even people that say that I can now rent my own space as opposed to living with other people, thinking it's a natural step in um the property escalator. Uh all of a sudden they started feeling lonely. I remember people calling me and saying, Hey, yeah, I have my own space now, it's just mine. There's no one around. Great, it's my home, but now I'm lonely. Can I still hang out? And uh God, we had quite a few people actually that were occasionally come and visit the co-living space thinking, wow, I actually miss being with people around, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's right. Former residents, um, even if they left where they were unhappy with the way that the co-living was being managed, would often come back for for months on end, in fact, after they'd left, so they could hang out with friends again. Because a lot of them moved into either a flat share with maybe one or two other people, Max, and maybe they didn't get on so well with those other flatmates. Or they went into their own apartment, a nice like fancy apartment block in an apartment on your own, but there's no one to hang out with because it's not set up to be a social environment. So they used to come back and they would complain about the co-living space we were we were living in, but then they would come back and visit us, which is interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly, and uh therefore some people have already realized that, and um we are seeing people that are trying to uh change the game. We are seeing people, well, first of all, obviously co-living is something, uh, but it only exists on a rental basis. So we are seeing some people that are trying to find solutions to this problem and say, okay, so we want to live in a community, but we also want to own something and we want to have a voice heard. What can we do? So uh we constantly uh see people that are attempting to solve this. Um, at the same time, no one has really found a way to scale beyond a single community, and even single communities they usually struggle very much, right, Gareth?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so there's there's some really like inventive pioneers out there, and they're setting up eco-villages or quite radical communities where the rules are completely different, and they're trying to solve some of these community problems and and and residents of the community having a voice to actually shape the communities. And some of them are successful, some of them are they work very well, others have challenges. But one of the big things, uh one of the biggest challenges is even in a successful uh community, these radical sort of system change communities that people set up, eco-villages and so on, they then have to figure out a way to create another one. If they really truly want to solve some problems in the world using uh their new community living model, they need to build a second community, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh. And it's not always easy to replicate that, particularly if you're using quite a radically new way of organizing the community because these communities live sort of outside the system a little bit. You know, some of them are moneyless, for example, they don't use any money uh on the more radical end of the spectrum, or others are you know trading uh voluntary input for reduced uh rental payments or free rental payments. And these things. Things are very difficult to maintain because if you're completely outside of the system, you need to be very self-sufficient. But if you're completely outside the system, it makes it very difficult to scale and build additional communities. Because the same rules don't always apply in different countries or even different parts of the same country. So they they find it hard to go beyond that first community, even if they get the recipe right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely. And uh this is literally why we are envisioning something a little bit different. But before we explain exactly how we're doing it, the first thing we really realized is um why isn't a solution already out there? Why isn't this working right now? And uh this again is not just uh a very simplistic issue. Uh in fact, there's uh multiple problems that uh different uh types of people are facing right now, different actors. Uh and those are effectively the reasons why we're not living in a way that is more in line with human nature and uh is more beneficial, better for mental health, better for um uh social interactions, and uh better for the planet as well. We'll talk more about this later, but definitely uh the sharing economy has a lot of advantages for the planet as well, so I don't see why um people should aim to live alone and have a more significant, unfortunately, negative impact on the planet's resources as well. So we've identified effectively why this is happening, and the number one reason is uh the property market is based on outdated systems, and these systems are effectively dysfunctional uh in many, many ways. The actors that we see in a co-living um space type of arrangement is uh on one hand we have residents, people that live in a co-living space. Uh, and uh you could think the same way for single units, traditional property tenants. So we have people that live in a certain building, in a certain dwelling. Then there's uh operators, managers, so people that manage a community, people that manage a property, and then there's investors or lendlers, so people that provide financial capital and uh effectively end up owning the real estate. Right now, uh the power dynamics between these individuals and the system of incentives that society has is not really aligned between operators, investors, and residents. And this is uh why this is happening, right, Gareth?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's right. And in a simple sense, it's you know, it comes back to our experience in a co-living, but it could equally apply with a flat share and a traditional landlord where the residents don't own anything and they have very minimal governance rights, you know, or uh or a voice to change things. You know, if you if you want to put up even a picture in your apartment, in your room, you sometimes need to ask the landlord, hey, is it okay if I put a picture up? Because the landlord has ownership and control. And then on the investor side, if you want to be a property investor and become a landlord, you need a lot of money. You um you know you don't have access to necessarily other types of different opportunities in the property market. The property market is very similar in lots of respects in different places. Either you build a flat and or buy a flat and rent it out, or if you have a lot of money as a big property investment company, you might buy a building and then run it. Um, and that requires you know a lot of money and access to those opportunities. And then on the on the community side or the resident side, this is a very new space of the market where people want to set up their own communities or their own living spaces. This is a quite a new phenomenon. And again, if you want to do that, if you want to buy a building or rent a building to build a community of some sort, whether it's a co-living community or another community, you need a lot of money, you need you need uh access to startup capital, and then you need systems, you need some sort of system. If you are lucky enough to access a big pot of money, buy a building, say, and you want to run a radical new community. How are you gonna set it up and manage that community? How are you gonna run it? What systems are you gonna use if you want to use a different system to the ones that are in place today? And I think that gives a flavor of the problems on all three sides. It's all old-fashioned. If you want to do something new, you have to really go against the system almost.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I noticed that a lot of people they uh effectively can only see one perspective at a time. So I really like what you're doing here, Gareth, analyzing the challenges that each actor is facing in uh this particular case. It's easy for tenants to say, oh, property investors or landlords, uh, we don't need them. We don't need landlords. Uh they only um speculating, they only really taking advantage of our need for shelter, and they are making money off my work because I pay rent, I work to pay rent, and they're not working, and and so on. So uh a lot of tenants have this uh um way of seeing that. Uh and then this property investors, landlords, uh, that think the other way say, Oh, the tenants they're trashing my property, um, my margins are shrinking more and more, and also I actually had to commit a lot of capital to make this happen. What if it wasn't a good decision? Maybe I should have used my capital for something else. Uh, what if I want to sell it and then I cannot sell it, which the tenant can pretty much leave at any time. So there's um different perspectives, of course, uh on on all this. Uh, and then you got the clearing communities, as you mentioned as well. But what we realize is that everyone has challenges and it's normal. And uh what if there was a way to actually align the incentives so that when one of them solves a challenge, the other people are also better off as well. This is critical and it's what is missing right now. Right now, there is an adversarial relationship between a landler and a tenant. Whereas in the system we're envisioning effectively, landlords and tenants can uh have their incentives aligned so that when one is better off, the other one is better off as well. So, as a resident, certainly people want to have uh enough voice, enough governance, enough ownership. Does it mean that the investors should be worse off? Not really, because a lot of people living in the specific space, they might know very well what the space needs as well. So it doesn't mean that the fact that the resident has more ownership and control, it doesn't really take much away from an investor. At the same time, the fact that the residents have ownership and control also means that they will treat the property better because it's their own partially as well. So what this means is that uh the value of the property might not be affected by the so to speak tenant trashing the property and and so on. So certainly these are just examples, but certainly a lot of advantages for both as well. Uh, just to um streamline this a little bit. As a resident, um definitely as a resident, um, owning something is an advantage because it's choice. I mean, if someone doesn't want to own, fair, but what if they want to own it? Right now, there isn't such a solution for uh residents that want to live in a co-living. Um, having more governance makes a lot of sense, um, and uh uh being able to really be flexible with uh with location. Uh, if people want to stay for long, great. If people want to stay for a short period of time, why would they have to be completely left out from this um uh property game? If people want to live for a couple of years in each country, or even less, maybe digital nomads, they want to live for a few months in each country or sometimes even weeks. Why should they not own anything? It it doesn't have to be that way. So, this is definitely um something that can be changed. And for property investors, uh I know a lot of people that are really struggling. When I say property investors, I'm also thinking of homeowners. So people could invest in their own property where they actually live, or people could invest in someone else's um dwelling, meaning they buy property and they rent it out. There's a lot of issues as well, and uh, it's really not always easy to quickly uh dispose of an asset, sell it on the open market, uh, because not every market is uh is very liquid, and even then they have to find a buyer that is buying the whole property. So the fact that property cannot be fractionalized is already an issue for investors. Uh, and uh yes, right now we're using this system mortgages that is very, very limiting for many ways. We spoke about that very often. Um, and communities are also um struggling as well. So the solution we're envisioning is um a launch pad or a marketplace, so to speak, where we can really connect operators, investors, and residents in a way that there can be a lot of synergy between these three. Uh, and we're building a web3 hub that enables the shared ownership and governance we're talking about. So, Gareth, you want to expand on this a little bit?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure. So, this is our co-living dial solution, effectively. And what we're doing is we're bringing those those three previously adversarial uh bits of the property market together, or actors. So you've got people who want to set up communities, particularly co-living communities in this case. They then you have the property investors and the co-living residents, and we're building a way to bring them all together and align their interests, as you said before, Dan, and you explained that really well. And the way we're doing that is we're building a system that enables, first of all, residents who are renting to actually get co-ownership, and they get co-ownership because they get shares in their co-living community company every single time they pay rent. So every month you pay rent, you get slightly more shares in your co-living community company. And that automatically, of course, gives you governance rights and a voice to shape your community because now you're a shareholder, you're not just somebody paying the landlord rent. And that completely changes the dynamic between the uh you know the property investor or the community operator in the co-living sense and in the co-living residence. And this gives significant flexibility for the co-living residents as well, because uh if they want to move out, they can keep some of those shares in the co-living community, or maybe they want to sell them, they could sell them, take the money and use that as a deposit to buy a house, for example, if they want to go back to the traditional property ladder. And for property investors, this really changes the game because our launch pad or marketplace, co-living DAO, enables a property investor to come in with a small amount of money. You can come in with a very small amount of money, in fact, and uh buy some shares in a co-living community, or you could buy some shares in a co-living DAO as a company. And we'll talk about how the co-living communities and co-living DAO the company are connected later on. But effectively you can come in for a much smaller amount of money, and also because this is a launch pad for multiple communities that gives you easy access to multiple investment opportunities as a property investor. You join one uh launch pad or marketplace, and you have access to all of these different uh property investment opportunities in new co-living communities. And then for the for the people, the pioneers who want to set up a co-living community, they now have a fundraising launch pad because uh you have investors uh on the marketplace or the platform putting money in. And uh so the co co-living community founders uh have already made fundraising, they don't need to go out and spend a lot of time and money to find the property investors. They also have a system because the co-living Dow launchpad is also a management system for co-living communities that enables, you know, uh so the residents paying rental and getting shares is part of the system, but it also includes things like running a co-living community, how do you run it, how do you train your staff, how do you give your staff systems to run a co-living community building. And it also gives you a pool of potential residents because there are lots of people in the co-living Dow launch pad who have applied because they want to become residents of a co-living community in the future. So we're connecting all three and giving all three benefits and aligning the interests of all three, the co-living community starters, the property investors, and the co-living residents. That's it in a nutshell, Dan. Does that are there any areas they need to we need to go into to explain a bit better?
SPEAKER_01:That's great. It's a fantastic picture of uh what we're doing and why we're doing it. And I'd like to emphasize really the fact that we are lowering the entry barriers as much as possible. I hear very, very often about people that really would love to be on the property ladder, but they're not because they're literally priced out. And uh a lot of people would love to buy a house or to buy a home or simply just to invest in real estate, uh, but they just can't because they either don't have enough uh initial capital to pay a deposit or they have a back credit score, they can't get a good mortgage and so on. So there's a lot of things that can really get in the way, but that doesn't happen with the other forms of investment because they can be fractionalized. If people want to invest in the stock market, they can buy shares or they can even fractionalize shares right now, it's quite common. If you want to buy gold, they don't need to buy uh an entire huge piece of gold, they can buy a small piece of gold, and that's true for many other asset classes. But with property, uh there just isn't a simple way to own uh a fraction of property, uh, and even when um some new projects are looking to fractionalize property ownership, which is something that we're we're seeing in the world, so it confirms that the world needs that. Uh effectively, there's no such way to do that uh seamlessly, especially with living communities. So, again, if we want to go back to the individualistic living situation where people uh very often feel lonely and uh detached from society and community living, uh that is um uh something that may or may not happen anytime soon. But when it comes to co-living communities, we haven't seen anything out there, and uh I think it's it's crucial because uh by combining those things uh we can really create uh that setup that enables uh win in um many many uh aspects. We'll talk more about this in a in a few moments as well. So, yes, having the ability uh to just uh fractionalize property and invest even with minimal capital is something that is uh a big big game changer. Uh and the launch pad we're building uh is really something that co-living communities can use to uh easily start a community. It's really not that simple. If I uh want to um invest in a buy-to-let, traditional buy-to-let, quite simple, and just go and buy one and that's it. But to create a co-living community, uh, there isn't really uh a winning ready-made recipe to do so. Uh, how do you attract capital? Because if it's a larger community, uh quite some capital might be needed uh to uh build or uh retrofit uh a property or buy property, uh, and how effectively to to find the residence and how to manage that. So there's a lot of challenges in there. So we really uh found a way to combine uh all this and uh make sure that co-living residents as well as property investors as well as co-living communities can get the best possible solution. And uh we are combining this uh launchpad with um our um uh web3 hub as well. So this is something that we're doing, and uh, once co-living communities are on the launch pad, uh they can find the residents, so the residents will join the calib communities, they can find investors, so the investors can fund the calib communities. Uh, and the residents, again, they get the choice. Do I want to have a big stake in this community? Do I want to effectively uh pay a lump sum to own more in this community, or do I just want to pay rent monthly? Uh, what this means is that I will still earn a little bit of shares, so I'm always gonna be a co-owner. But as a resident, people can really decide how much do I want to own. And uh this makes a big difference because as a resident, some people they might want to stay for longer, some people want to stay for shorter, some people want to have uh more skin in the game, some people want to have less skin in the game. So, again, this system really caters for everyone. Uh, and uh, we're building uh a Web3 Hub as well. So, Gareth, do you want to add something on all this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure, Dan. And just to bring it back to basics, you know, we talk about fractionalized properties. For anyone that's new to this space, that just means a part of. Fractionalizes, of course, means a part of. So if you want to buy a part of a property, it's very difficult to do that in the traditional system. And and so what we're saying here is that co-living residents are able to buy a part of a property, in effect, or a part of the community or company that that owns that community. And and we're talking about Web3 technology and using a web three hub to do that. And quite simply the reason for that is that web 3 enables the purchase of shares or parts of shares, and it can do it very fast, smoothly, at low cost, and it can track it, track those transactions. That's you know, the simple reason why we're using a web 3 hub and why we're using blockchain technology. You don't really need to know all the small details about web 3 or blockchain, but just to understand the concept, it enables us to buy part of a property or part of a company. And so it's just simply a technology that enables Co Living Dow to offer these functions and bring residents together with property investors and co living community starters. And so in that Web3 hub, this is a management system powered by what we call tokenized shares. Which simply means that shares on Web3 are represented by tokens on the system. And the tokens are tracked and and stored on the blockchain. And in a simple way, this functions in the in the same way that you would interact with any other digital service on the internet or on your phone. So there's going to be a desktop version, there's going to be a mobile app version. If you're a resident, you can have a look at how many shares do I own in my community? How much is it worth? If you want to sell some shares, you can. You can go in one-click buy and sell shares function. You may even want to pay using crypto rather than standard fiat money or dollars, pounds, and euros. You can go in and pay your rent, possibly using uh cryptocurrencies because being on web 3 makes that easy. And for the operators, you can see all the tenancy contracts which are stored as smart contracts, which is just an again another way to use web 3 technology to make the whole process of the paperwork much easier for tenants. You know, why have a whole bunch of bureaucratic systems and processes where you scan a bit of paper and then you email it to somebody? We've all been through the no nobody loves the life admin side of these things. But you can start to create what we call tenancy smart contracts where you can go on your app and you instantly sign your contract or have a look at your contract to see what rights it gives you as a resident. And on the on the management side again, the this system, this web 3 hub, gives a full management system for the co-living community operator. So if you have some employees, you can store uh systems on there that enable you to run events, maybe book spaces in the building, um collect maybe put out a poll to collect opinions from the residents on a new development, and a whole bunch of other functions that you would expect just to run a community on the Web3 Hub. Web3 is just an enabler to make that happen.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And uh the advantages, so Web3 in this case are undeniable. Obviously, I don't want to make this uh too technical, but having smart contracts is a major game changer. It really allows for a lot of things to be possible. I mean, imagine having something that uh it's there again. Uh, people can't really cheat on a smart contract, uh, like they could potentially cheat on a traditional contract. Having rent potentially paid automatically could be that, having uh even access to the community uh could be regulated by the smart contract. So for a landlord, the risk of having a tenant that just stops paying rent and keeps living in a building, uh, this is something that potentially, if the community wishes to do so, uh, can be circumvented by having a smart contract that if uh the person stops making rental payments, uh then they actually lose access, their key just uh doesn't unlock the door anymore, and so on. That's just an example. But there's definitely a lot of things that can be automated and uh interconnected, uh, which make things better for everyone involved. And uh something that is really interesting once we're using tokens is that so many different things can be done. Uh, by the way, when we talk about tokens, tokenized shares, now you mentioned this, Garth. Um, it's really the idea of having this um uh crypto token uh that effectively represents the shares in the community as well. So when people have shares in the community, the more shares they have, the more tokens they have. Uh it means they can do things with these tokens. Now, if people decide to do so, why not even uh paying for their coffee using tokens? Why not? Maybe some people want to keep them hoping for capital appreciation, that's fine. Or maybe some people they want to use it as a currency uh to buy things, and effectively what they're doing, they're trading shares for other forms or goods or services. There can be even discounts for people that decide to keep tokens. Uh, some people may be worried what if a lot of people sell these tokens and uh the value goes down. I mean, first of all, these tokens are effectively shares, so they're tied to real assets. Uh, so if people want to sell it, uh, there's a good chance there'll be other people wanting to buy that and get uh part of the profit, part of the uh capital appreciation of the underlying real estate as well as the value of the community company and so on. But also, there can be a lot of use cases for these tokens, and uh something that can be implemented, for example, is a feature where people can lock their token and get benefits. There isn't really a simple way to do this with uh paper shares. In fact, if I own shares in a company, I might get some benefits, but it's not really as simple to actually implement that because I have to demonstrate that I own those shares, and then things cannot happen automatically, they have to be done manually. But if I own tokenized shares, I can easily demonstrate that. It can be a matter of literally a few seconds having that on my app, on my phone, for example. And uh, this could, for example, just generate a code uh that contains the information of how much um token I have and uh how many shares I have, and uh um how long have I locked this for, so that I can get benefits such as uh a rent reduction, for example. So based on how much equity I own, I can receive a rent reduction, or I can get discounts in the restaurant in the shop, I can get deals and so on. And the deals can be extended to the surrounding community as well. It doesn't have to be only within the same premises, it's also possible to establish partnerships with the local shops, local businesses, and uh get even more advantages by simply locking the tokens. So, so many uh different things that are possible. And a very big one, of course, is uh the shared governance voting function. So, Gareth, you want to expand a little bit more um on the concept of uh uh shared governance and how to use tokens to exercise this right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure, I'd love to, Dan. So, again, we're going into this and we're explaining all the component parts of co-living DAO. So we explained what co-living is. Now we're gonna look at the DAO part. So, what is a DAO for those of you who might not be familiar with this? Well, it's quite another technical concept, and it DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. And again, it's a bit like Web3. You know, why are we using Web3? What's Web3? Web3 is just a tool that enables us to build what we want to build here, and the DAO is another one of those tools. And the DAO is simply a way of organizing co-living community residents that enables them to vote on issues that matter to them in a very easy way using that technology. And I'm gonna explain a more down-to-earth way of thinking about this. So imagine you're a resident in a co-living community, and people on who are maybe not so into the technology side might be put off by the all the talk about the tech and the technology and using the app. Um but you would not have to use the technology of the DAO to make every single micro decision, right? You could still make a lot of decisions in the community based on just simple human-to-human contact. You can go and talk to your neighbors, you can go and resolve very small issues by talking to people like we do in the normal way. But what the DAO enables is when there's something that is a bit more important, for example, we want to run some events next month and we're thinking about doing a big program on yoga or nutrition. Which one are we going to do? The residents can go into the DAO, and the DAO makes it very easy to allocate funds to either yoga or nutrition for a program of events, and it does this using very simple voting mechanisms. And so you can go online and you can very quickly vote if you want to vote on it, or if it's something you don't really care about and you're not going to go to yoga or nutrition, you don't need to vote. It's okay. The system will handle that. It won't require you to go online all the time and vote on every single thing. You just but it does give you the power in real time to vote where it matters. And then there's the really big votes where you might need to exercise your power as a shareholder or use a shareholder vote. This is a big legal step. And this would happen not very often. And so the DAO would enable most decisions to be made in a quick and easy way for most things in the community. And then when there's a really big vote, a really important thing that needs to be decided on, maybe something like should we move the building that we live in? Should we actually move to another building? That might involve a shareholder vote at the highest level to get that full legal power. And so the DAO it just really is think of it as like an advanced kind of social media platform where where you as a resident or a partial owner can go on and make decisions using decision-making tools. And we talk about this as being a decentralized community, and again, what that really means is that the residents have power and the investors also, the investors can be part of this DAO, and the people running the co-living community are also part of the DAO, remember, they're part of the wider community, and so they can all make decisions together, and that's what decentralized means. It means there's lots of stakeholders. Um, well, there can be one stakeholder that's decentralized, but you can also have lots of stakeholders in a decentralized format, and what that means is that power and decision making is spread through everyone that's involved and everyone that needs to be involved, and that this can be legally protected as well. Does that give a good overview, Dan? Have I missed anything there or made it too complicated at the end?
SPEAKER_01:That's a great overview, and I think it's a great thing to have the ability to really have legally protected rights. That makes such a huge difference. We're not talking about um quote unquote uh benevolent landlord that listens to the community and acts accordingly. Uh, first of all, because that is uh something that it's not really a stable system. What if the landlord changes their mind, for example? But what can also happen is that sometimes, and actually very often, um landlords and tenants actually want different things because they have a very, very different type of skin in the game. So if the residents don't own anything, uh they're gonna look at certain uh benefits, and they probably don't care about the long-term appreciation of the asset, they don't care about the health of the um the let's say the financial health of the company as a whole, uh, and a number of things, at least in the in the short term. If someone plans to live for a long time, maybe they care a little bit, but can always leave and and nothing happens. Once residents are also shareholders, all of a sudden everyone is on the same boat, everyone uh is um literally working together towards prosperity, towards a better future. And uh having such a strong level of alignment makes a massive difference when making decisions together. So, again, it's not gonna be like the town hall where residents want this, and there's literally a fight, a conflict, landlords say no, this is too expensive, we don't want to do it. Uh, this is not in line with what we want to do. Uh, something that can cause a lot of stress. I remember even when we were living in the co-living space, um, we would see a lot of um uh surveyors just uh checking things and uh they were thinking about changing some appliances or maybe just um completely retrofit the building uh to change the um purpose of some spaces and so on, and we had no idea what was going on. Some people even speculating they're gonna kick everyone out and they're gonna repurpose the building for something else. Some people speculating no, they're gonna do this, they're gonna do that, and then at some point they changed some things that we really uh did not need, and they did not change things that the community actually wanted. So um, this stress for people living there um it doesn't need to be there once their rights are legally recognized, and uh being shareholders really really means making decisions together. Tenants, landlords uh where um many tenants will own effectively shares, but even besides that, just being a resident means the resident effectively has a voice. So even residents that decide to sell the shares, uh they still get a voice because they're residents. And obviously, residents that want to keep the shares they get a lot of benefits. We spoke about that before with uh uh the token locking opportunity and and and so on. So effectively, uh this system really allows for better decisions and better relationships uh between uh the parties. Garth, do you want to talk a little bit more about the actual legal structure that we have in place to make this possible? Because uh, this is a little bit of a secret sauce that we're using here, not something anyone else is uh using at the moment. And uh we believe it's gonna make a massive difference. So, Garth.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure, Dan. So I I have a particular interest in this aspect here, and again, this is quite a complex concept, but we're gonna explain it in a very simple way. So we spoke about the DAO, and the DAO quite simply is being a way to coordinate decisions very easily, right? For the residents, for the investors, for the co-living community managers. They're all part of the DAO, and the DAO enables them to make decisions. And that the DAO is decentralized, as in that power to make decisions and the wealth that's generated is also shared across all these different stakeholders. And this is great because uh it makes things fair, it makes things much fairer if everyone has a voice and a and a way to make decisions and a way to contribute to decisions. But the problem is if you then take a DAO or any decentralized group or community, and then you want to legally uh incorporate as a company, when you incorporate a company, the way that the traditional companies are designed, the investors and the founders have the control, right? If you own the shares and you incorporate that company, you have control, you have the ultimate say in the law. And so when when you take the co-living DAO community and you incorporate it as a normal company, the DAO can make lots of amazing decisions, it's all balanced, it's nice and fair. But then if the investors really want to overturn some of those decisions, they can. They can go to the company legal document and say, Look, I actually have the power here, I can just overturn everything the DAO says. And so you reverse that decentralized power and decision making, and you all of a sudden make it centralized, which just simply means a small number of powerful people can call the shots, right? They can overturn the decisions, and that's not ideal in a community in a co-living community where we want residents to have a voice and shape their community. Of course, that's not going to work. It's gonna completely take away the whole point of it. And so we have a very unique secret sauce in that a different way of incorporating a company, and it's called the Fair Shares Commons. And the Fair Shares Commons just takes simply what we have in the Dow and creates a mirror image in the company legal incorporation, so that exactly the same legal protections are embedded in the company incorporation for the residents, for the investors, for the co-living community operators and managers, as there are in the DAO. So it's like a mirror image of the DAO and it's legally uh recognized. And so each co-living community becomes a fair shares commons company. And the words actually say it, it's fair, it's a fair distribution of shares because everyone has power, everyone has decision making. And it's partly a commons because uh it's managed by everyone together. It's a resource that is managed by everyone in the community or part of the community, or who even provide services to the community. And so, quite simply uh our secret sauce is the Fair Shares Commons Company and Corporation matches the DAO, gives it a legal identity and helps the whole system be seamless. So there's no flaws, there's no one that can overturn decisions that are made. It's also legally recognized in multiple jurisdictions around the world. And yeah, that's it in a nutshell, Dan. Is there any other areas I can make clearer there?
SPEAKER_01:That's very clear, and in fact, it is uh something that effectively is uh gonna give a legal identity to a DAO, which uh we haven't seen much around. We've seen a lot of DAOs that uh they had maybe very good intentions sometimes, uh, but the implementation was lacking that legal infrastructure that eventually made uh could have made things sustainable. Uh, in fact, a lot of DAOs didn't really uh manage to survive for that reason, and uh we really see how having this type of company structure is gonna change the game completely. And uh something that this also allows effectively, we're gonna talk about this a little bit, is the formation of a federation of communities. Now, I know that right now, a lot of people that live in a co-living, maybe a fraction of them plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Some communities certainly are for the very, very long term, but there's a huge, huge amount of people uh that are either completely nomadic, such as digital nomads, they just want to stay for a few months in every place, or maybe a year or two, and so on, uh, and they're not really looking to settle, or there's people that they just want to stay flexible. So uh just like me, uh being in a line that I ended up staying at that co-living space for six years, uh, but I probably would have not wanted to commit six years on day one. So, right now, buying a home, meaning long-term commitment, uh, certainly can be solved, but we already explained lack of liquidity, not always easy to do it um seamlessly and uh fast enough. Uh, and in uh this particular case with co-living, uh, we don't want to have this issue, we want to create something that is very flexible. Now, having the flexibility of coming in and out, great, but what if we could uh take one more step and uh actually create a federation of communities as opposed to just uh a single community so that when people become a resident in one co living DAO community, uh effectively they get access to a broader federation with a lot of advantages, uh be it if they decide to move out. So if people move from one co living DAO community to a different co living DAO community, uh they get benefits for. For example, they could easily convert shares from one community to the other, or they can simply uh do it fast enough. The application process can be faster because the person is already effective living in a in a community inside the same federation. But also for people that are not looking to move out, but they just want to travel, uh just because they live in one community, they might get benefits in other communities as well. So, Garth, do you want to expand a little bit on the concept of federation and why the Fair Shares Commons enables this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure, Dan. And that this is where it gets really exciting because as we said right at the beginning, there are lots of pioneers who are looking to create a new way of creating communities where people could have a voice to shape their communities and quite radical ideas around governance and how to coordinate and make decisions. And these communities, some of them are successful, but they live a little bit outside of the system. And so they find it really hard to go from that first community to the second, third, fourth, fifth community. In other words, they find it hard to scale past the first community. But what we have here with Co-Living DAO is with our Web3 Hub, which offers, you know, the entire software package for a co-living community to run, combined with the FairShares Commons company, Legal Incorporation. Um, it this is the secret sauce that enables a federation, a scalable blueprint for a federation of co-living communities. And what does that mean? Well, you can imagine if you have 10 different community uh starters who want to create co-living communities, they can take our web 3 hub and the Fair Shares Commons and they can join the co-living DAO network, and they still have control using their own company. They each community is uh its own independent company, a FairShares Commons company, and they then use our systems and they connect into the federation, and lots of other co-living community companies can be in around the world in different places and different cities, but using the same system and plugged into the federation of co-living DAO communities. Each one can maintain its own identity, they can have a completely different name, they can call themselves whatever they want. So you can imagine a co-living DAO in Rio de Janeiro, which is called you know the surfers community or the surfers co-living, or you can imagine one in London where it might be a community of fintech entrepreneurs, and they could have their own name based on what they do and who they are with their own identity because they are a separate company effectively, but they will be connected to Co-Living Dow using the Fair Shares Commons uh company incorporation, and quite simply we own shares in them and they would own shares in us, us being co-living DAO as the enabler company. And so what this means is that the federation is all connected together, and the federation is also able to share resources, quite simply money. Money can be shared around that federation. So if some co-living communities are having a tough time, there could be a way for money to be diverted to come and support that co-living community. And equally, in terms of people, as you mentioned, Dan, you could imagine having a resident federation passport of some kind, which would enable you to easily move from one co-living community to another. You could move around the world and yet be in a familiar place because the systems are similar. They're different, but they're also similar. Each community has its own identity, but as part of a federation, you really feel part of something much bigger than that one community.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. And I really see how this can benefit a lot of people because sometimes it's very difficult to move from one place to the other, or sometimes a community can uh uh be struggling. So having all this uh not only network effects, but effectively advantages in literally um all wanting uh to prosper together, it's really gonna make a massive, massive difference. So definitely this um uh fair shares commons type of incorporation is uh enabling this, and the web3 element makes it a lot simpler to implement it in practice. So that's uh why we designed, we we we decided to um do things this way. And last but not least, uh we want to share a little bit more about the advantages for the planet as well. A lot of people that decide to live in a community uh they do that uh not only to be surrounded by like-minded people, uh, but also uh because they uh potentially share the same desire uh to not only live in a more sustainable way, but potentially even uh living in a regenerative way. And uh we hear this word regen regeneration quite a lot. Again, it's the idea of not just minimizing the negative impact on the planet, but why not have a positive impact as well and improve nature? And again, the fair shares comments uh can really play a big role in this. So, Garth, do you want to talk a little bit more about uh why the planet can also benefit a lot from all this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'd love to, Dan. And sustainability and both sustainability and regeneration are very close to my heart, and I've done a lot of work in the sustainability arena uh through my career to date. And you know, first of all, living in a co-living is more environmentally sustainable because it's efficient, it's more efficient, right? If you have a gym, a shop, a bar, a restaurant, events, and other facilities right on your doorstep, it means you don't need to jump in a car and drive somewhere, you don't need to drive to the supermarket, or in London, you don't need to jump on a train to go somewhere, or a bus. And so it's a much more efficient use of resources. And there are some um big initiatives in this arena where the concept of the 15-minute city is a kind of new way of thinking about how to design cities and towns for urban planners to make them more environmentally sustainable, and the idea is that you want to have most of the things that you need within a 15-minute um transport hop, ideally walking or cycling or public transport. So simply living in a co-living is a more efficient model anyway. But then we we really have something beyond sustainability in this concept of regeneration. So sustainability really means you know efficiency in using resources, energy, and materials more cleanly, doing less harm. But regeneration takes that next step, as you said, Dan. How can we actually maybe improve the natural world, make cleaner air, cleaner water, more greenery, more blue spaces? Is that possible? And it actually is. And the reasons are quite complicated, but the Fair Shares Commons model combined with the Dow does unlock this kind of concept of regeneration. And regeneration means making things better for people, so not taking away from people, the way that workers are sometimes you know um taken advantage of, living in big companies, for example, where the company extracts the wealth from the hardworking workers, um, and and benefiting people first. Then we can actually restore and regenerate the planet, restore and regenerate nature and make it stronger and more resilient. But also the third part of regeneration is making a financial return, making this financially viable. So you need to get all three. You need an increase in financial wealth, an increase in natural or planetary wealth, and an increase in personal wealth for people, and wealth of all kinds in this case, which really means human well-being. How do we increase human well-being on every metric? And the Fair Shares Commons as a company legal structure for a co-living DAO actually enables this. It enables this in different ways. First of all, as we said before, people have a share in the wealth that's generated here. They have shares in the in the co-living communities that they live in. So if the value of those shares goes up and they accrue more shares over time in that community, they become wealthier just by living there, just by paying rent, you become wealthier. And obviously, having more financial wealth can help with your well-being. You can use that wealth to buy yourself time, you can use that wealth to buy things to take care of your own health, better foods, um, better social experiences, and so on. And the planet benefits because you can actually have nature as a stakeholder in the Fair Shares Commons, you can build a way for a representative of nature to be one of the stakeholders who has a voice and a legal vote to protect the planet, and you can take this a step further by embedding it into the Fair Shares Commons legal uh structure or the rules for the way that the company operates. So, for example, we could set rules in the company and corporation to generate more clean energy than we use by putting solar cells or windmills around the co-living communities and maybe feeding that excess energy back into the local community. We can also embed in the legal incorporation that co-living communities must enhance the blue and green spaces around their community by allocating some funds every year towards improving those spaces. And then last but not least, you know, you really this is a business, like co-Living DAO is going to be a business. Each of these co-living communities is a business, and by using this uh uh secret sauce structure that we have, these are scalable businesses, they can make money for the investors, for the co-living community starters, and for the residents that enables things to scale and to generate financial wealth. So you get that triple win using the fair shares commons structure here, and you get into the realm of regeneration, not just sustainability, not just doing no harm to the environment, but actually restoring the environment, restoring people's well-being and restoring and enhancing financial profit. And that's where things get really exciting because things can then start to change in the in these co-living communities, change throughout the federation, and the federation will could then influence the local communities where it is located. So, yeah, I'm super excited by the regenerative aspect of this, and this is a big part of the motivation for building and designing co-living dial the way we did, Dan.
SPEAKER_01:I absolutely love the triple win. I'm a big fan of non-dualistic solutions, and I've always wondered why we should sacrifice one thing to get another. Can't we align everything and uh uh get actually a good result in each area? And uh that's exactly what we're doing here. So we're playing a non-zero sum game. We've realized that everyone could be better off, every stakeholder uh could be uh better off, uh, and that's uh literally how we're designing the system. So people, planet, and profit, uh big, big reason why we are uh doing this equilibrium. Uh and for everyone who resonates, certainly there's an opportunity right now to uh support the project as well. So do not hesitate to get in touch if you want to support the project right now. And just before we wrap things up, Gareth, any final thoughts?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that was an overview of all the component parts of co-living DAO, and we hope that makes things a bit clearer. Some of these foundations are quite complicated, you know, the web 3, the blockchain, fractionalization, some of these other buzzwords. But really, it's about human well-being. It's about how do we live in communities that really support us? How do we protect the planet? How do we make money? How do we protect people's mental well-being and physical well-being? How do we build a society that is better and stronger just by changing the way that we live? And that's what this is all about. It's about bringing it back to human experiences, the need for shelter, the need for well-being, the need to have fun experiences and connect with other human beings, build a community, live in a community you want to live in, move around to different places without causing damage. That's what it's all about. And we hope this has become you know a bit clearer and that the co-living dial concept is now very clear to you as a result of listening to this extended podcast. So, yeah, thanks for listening. And if as Dan says, if you want to support our project, um please do get in touch and have a conversation with us.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, Gareth, thank you so much again uh for your insights today, and thanks uh everyone else for listening and tuning in. And we will be back as usual next week. So make sure you stay subscribed to the podcast, and uh we will be with you then.