How Web3 Makes it Possible to Build Decentralised Coliving Communities

Discover the riveting future that Web3 holds for us as Gareth and I embark on a profound discussion about the internet's evolution and its implications for community-centric living. Prepare to be enlightened about the seismic shift from the static, controlled Web1 to a dynamic, interactive Web2, and how it set the stage for a more engaging digital landscape. We then tackle the challenges of centralised platforms, from data exploitation to privacy breaches, paving the way for Web3's promise of a decentralised, fairer distribution of power and wealth. This conversation is an eye-opener for anyone interested in how technology can shape a more equitable future, especially within the context of innovative coliving spaces.

Join us as we dissect the monumental impact of blockchain technology on the democratization of ownership. We'll share our insights into how this revolutionary tech underpins the very essence of Web3, shifting the power balance from monolithic platforms to individual creators and users. Introducing the ColivingDAO model, we illustrate the tangible benefits of community-driven initiatives, where every member's contribution is truly valued. Get ready to be part of the discourse on the evolution of user interfaces, transactional efficiency, and the empowerment that token ownership brings to community governance. Don't miss this episode if you're eager to understand the intersection of technology, ownership, and community in the digital age.

Transcript

Daniel: 0:07

Welcome everyone to another episode of ColingDAO Insights. This is your co-host, daniel, and I'm joined today by my co-host, gareth. Hi Gareth, hey Dan, great to be back, awesome, great to have you here as well. And today we'll be talking about something quite important that a lot of people talk about, some people don't quite understand, and it's the concept of Web 3, which, for some, is a bit of a buzzword. For some, it's a new reality already, and we'll be talking about Web 3 specifically to explain why it's actually a key component to make the future more equitable and move forward and move towards a fairer society, which is literally what we're looking through here at ColivingDAO. So we'll discuss all that more in depth and tie that back with the way we are really designing the next generation way of living. So, Gareth, a pretty interesting episode, right.

Gareth: 1:09

Yeah, definitely so. Web 3 can be quite a confusing term and we're going to go into it and discuss exactly what it means, what the implications are, where the sort of interesting topics are and the debates of the day, and then we're going to show how that is relevant for building the future of communities and community living.

Daniel: 1:32

Yeah, and effectively. For the people that are not too familiar with the concept of Web 3 and what the evolution has been so far, let me give a little bit of background and context there. Originally, when the internet was invented, we refer now to that as Web 1, meaning the initial version of the web, which was completely static. So at that point, websites were very much like, let's say, something that was not something people could interact with. You could see that shops, businesses, website owners had something published online. However, you could not really interact with that. It was mostly one-way type of communication where, as an internet user, you could see what's on but you could not do anything about it. And it's useful for many ways. Of course, a lot of businesses use it as advertising, to make other people aware of their presence, and therefore there was certainly a big, big value in doing that. But a big web revolution was later on, when the internet became interactive. That's where we start talking about Web 2, meaning something where people are no longer just passive consumers of the content that is created by the website owners, but people effectively have the ability to interact with it and you want to think of social media, for example rather than just passively watching things. People can leave comments, people can repost and people can actually create their own content as well, which is critical. Even if you don't own any website, you can still post content on Facebook, post content on YouTube and so on, and this really completely changed the way people interact in general. So it was a massive shift. It started from a technology that allowed for that and then resulted into a different way of living where everyone is more connected to an extent, and it really allowed for a lot of things to happen later on, such as mobile apps, where people can literally meet each other through mobile apps and people can find like-minded individuals with similar interests, people can join events and so on. So this level of interaction became possible thanks to the technology that was created that shifted from this original static version of Web 1 to a more interactive version of Web called Web 2.

Daniel: 4:10

Now, when we talk about Web 3, we're literally talking about the following step in the evolution, so not only having centralized platforms such as Facebook, youtube, twitter which is now called X and so on, but having the ability for people to actually become owners of their own content as well. Right now, if you post something on Instagram, if you post something on Facebook, effectively, you're no longer the owner of that. Effectively, you're giving away ownership to the platform and you're giving away control and you are subject to what the platform decides to do with that. So if you post something on Facebook and Facebook wants to shut it down, they can shut it down. If you post something on YouTube, that video is on YouTube, which of course has an advantage because a lot of people can see that and so on, but still YouTube can do with it whatever they please.

Daniel: 5:12

Pretty much, and we've already seen a lot of examples where big corporations, they have effectively exploited user data and, in the first place, monetize that. So even when they don't do anything, let's say that breaches anyone's privacy and so on. At the very least, we've seen a massive monetization of user-generated content. That, one could argue that is quite unfair, because if people are generating that content, they deserve to be rewarded for it. Why should one centralized platform make money of that? And the next step would be even breaching privacy, which is something that has been debated many, many times. Gareth, what would you like to add on this?

Gareth: 5:54

Yeah, just to recap on that, dan, it's really interesting, isn't it, how the evolution of Web 2 to Web 3, on the power and the wealth generated. So we went from Web 1, which is static, to Web 2, which is dynamic, two-way communication, which is great for the users, right? It opened up the whole exciting new worlds of social media and so on. People then became interactive, but it was very one-sided, just like you said there and outlined, it's a one-sided double interaction.

Gareth: 6:26

Whereas very heavily in favor of the platform owners and the users are creating amazing content and debates and intellectual thought and all kinds of intellectual property, in effect. And, yeah, they get paid and benefit from that in a lot of cases, there's a lot of people that do really well out of this, but by and large, the wealth that's generated is controlled by the platforms themselves, very centralized, and the data. There's an enormous value in the amount of data that's being generated just by casual users, even if they're not content creators, and those platforms are taking that data and monetizing that data as well. So it's a very one-sided interaction and this is why people started thinking how can we do this better? And this is where Web3 emerged.

Daniel: 7:23

Exactly. It's a very good point, gareth, and what we notice really is that this type of imbalance can really be measured in two ways, and one is the wealth distribution and the other one is the power distribution, and in both cases it becomes very, very centralized. So when literally billions of people are willing to pretty much give up ownership and a lot of the rights on their content and they give it to a centralized platform, what happens is a lot of the wealth becomes concentrated into this platform, and a lot of power as well. So when we talk about power, obviously censorship is one of the things that comes to mind, but it's not the only one. It's literally like who to show this content to, how often to show it, what to do with the content, and so on. So a lot of things that really are no longer in the hands of the people that generated the content in the first place.

Daniel: 8:24

And then the wealth distribution. Just because someone created a very convenient way for people to share their thoughts and their content in general, does that justify having such a massive wealth concentration and what are the implications of this wealth concentration and so on? So these are some of the questions that really led to the creation of Web 3, where people are owners of their own content, and right now we don't have very good examples of social media that have achieved something like that. There are a lot of companies trying to do that and there's already some things that are effectively working. Just nothing really that has caught up, just like this massive other platforms.

Daniel: 9:06

But music is a good example as well, because if you think about the Web 2 main platform to share music, which is Spotify, what's happening on Spotify? Effectively, a lot of people are realizing that artists, once they submit their music to Spotify, they lose control to an extent and they are paid royalties that some may argue that are not necessarily fair and therefore, looking at an example like that, we can mention music platforms that are built on Web 3 that effectively address that by allowing the artists to stay owners, so keep a lot more control and to get a fair monetization at the same time as well. Gareth.

Gareth: 9:55

Yeah, that's right. It's a great example, dan, and there are other great examples in gaming as well, where there's some early Web 3 video games, where Web 3 is a really good vehicle for that, because for in-game purchases like objects, swords, bonuses and role-playing games, you can, of course, buy them in regular video games. You can even sell them in some cases to other gamers, but Web 3 would enable those kinds of items to potentially go from one game to another. They're transportable and that changes the game, because you then have the ability to trade the items from one game to another. And also you can actually get paid as a player. You can get paid to play or you can earn as you play. And there's a bunch of other terms as well, dan, for that I can't remember the most in-vogue one Play as you Earn, is it.

Daniel: 10:53

Yeah, that's a very good point because if you look at the gaming industry again, so far it's been extremely centralized, where players can really spend a lot of money buying skins, buying in-game items and they bought them but still they're not the true owners, because the moment the plaffer decides to shut things down, then they lose the items. Even if the plaffer decides to ban them, for example, they lose the items. And even if the plaffer just makes a mistake, accidentally removes the items, they just lose them. So again, they're not the true owners of the items. They just have bought the service that a centralized provider is giving to them, which is okay, you're going to use this for as long as you stay in this game, and so on. What becomes possible with a decentralized approach and with a Web3 approach is that people are effectively true owners of the items. And if game developers start to coordinate and allow the same people to use the same items in different games, this really allows people to be true owners and keep their items beyond the single game as well. Right, gareth?

Gareth: 12:08

Exactly, and you know that it's really exciting to be able to have control and ownership over the music you create on a Web3 streaming platform, or if you've bought skins or items in video games and you're the truly true owner of them on Web3. But some people listening are probably thinking, well, okay, that sounds cool. How do you actually do that? How do users become owners of their own data, their own video game items, their music that's been created, their content? What's the mechanism, what's the technology that underlies that? How do you go from Web2 to Web3, dan, what is the enabler of all of this?

Daniel: 12:51

Yeah, that's a great point because obviously we've been talking about the benefits, we've been talking about the advantages having such a setup and just to add to that, you just mentioned the play-to-earn games, which are now more commonly referred to as play-and-earn, just not to emphasize the monetary aspect. But yes, there's so many things become possible because, again, someone playing a video game for a long time is effectively adding value to the video game project, so they deserve to be rewarded for that, just like people that post a lot of social media content and they deserve a reward for that. Or artists that publish a lot of music they deserve a reward for that. So the ability for people to effectively earn for the value they contribute becomes easier and easier because Web3 is allowing that. So how does this happen? I mean, the first thing to understand is that this has been enabled by new technology. Just like Web2 was enabled by new technology, Web1 in the first place, of course, was enabled by new technology. Now we have the right technology to really allow for a decentralized or sovereign concept of ownership.

Daniel: 14:04

In the past, we needed a centralized authority to establish who's the owner of what, and this is true in many other domains as well. So if we need a third party to pretty much decide who owns, what then? Is that a true ownership, independent, free ownership? Or are we still subject to a centralized authority that is deciding who is the true owner of something? So before we had the technology that could allow ownership to be fully decentralized, it wasn't really straightforward, or something like that.

Daniel: 14:42

The other big thing that technology does is creating digital scarcity. So in the past, every digital item, by definition, was not really scarce, was simply too easy to reproduce. For example, if you think about music, there was a moment in time, before Spotify, where people would actually just listen to music completely for free by downloading it, and it was probably legal and they maybe shouldn't have done that. But the reality is people found an arrangement where they realized, great, they can just reproduce music rather than buying a CD or a cassette or a physical support, which has a little element of scarcity in there, because there's a physical counterpart, a physical object that needs to be created. When it comes to music, you could just have one track, multiply the number times, create nearly unlimited copies of that by MP3, and everyone can have that and they all exactly the same and there is no scarcity anymore. So this really took a lot of value away from content in general the creation of content because it made content to ease to reproduce and therefore not scarce anymore. And when something is scarce, it's automatically more valuable because people are willing to pay money for it. Because it's scarce, something that is available without scarcity, then people are hardly willing to pay any money for it at all.

Daniel: 16:12

So the new technology that allows for, a the creation of digital scarcity and, b the decentralization of the concept of ownership, is effectively blockchain. So some of you will obviously be familiar with the concept of crypto, crypto assets, originally called cryptocurrencies. Obviously, one of the main usages in the early days of blockchain was the attempt to create a new type of currency, hence the word cryptocurrency. But a better word is crypto assets, because we're not just talking about currencies there the vast majority of crypto projects, they're not really aiming to be currencies at all. So the emergence of blockchain and the crypto assets really allowed the decentralization of ownership and digital scarcity. Because what effectively blockchain is and we're not going to go too technical today, because there's no need just like people can drive a car without knowing how the engine works, there's no need for anyone to know how blockchain works. It's all about understanding what it does, and what it does effectively is creating a decentralized ledger, a distributed ledger.

Daniel: 17:28

So, rather than having a central institution and again we can make an example with currencies, because it's just easy to visualize if everyone is transacting and sending money to each other we have now banks that keep a ledger. It's a centralized ledger because the banks have that ledger and they can pretty much do whatever they want with that. If you have a bank account with a balance on it, in some countries you're not really the true owner of that money. The bank becomes the owner and they have an agreement with you that they have to give it back to you under certain circumstances. But there's many cases where people just never get access anymore and they decide if you get access or not to that money that you put in there in the first place. So having a centralized ledger again creates some potential issues that we discuss.

Daniel: 18:19

The ability to decentralize this ledger means that people can all of a sudden transact and send to each other assets, whether it's currency, whether it's content, whether it's something else, without the need for centralized authority. The main thing that really blockchain solved is the so-called problem with the double spend. If we think about Web 2, let's say I have an MP3, for example, I can duplicate the MP3 and give it to someone, and then I can give it to someone else as well and I can tell you hey, this is the only copy that will ever exist. But then I can literally duplicate that and give it to someone else and get away with that, and probably no one will find out. And even if they do, I just did it anyway.

Daniel: 19:01

But with blockchain, this becomes impossible. So with blockchain, the system is designed in a way that if I send an asset to someone, I'm just not able to send the same asset to someone else, and this allows for, effectively, a real constant of scarcity. All of a sudden, it becomes applied to digital assets. Again, I don't think we want to go in detail on how this is done from a technological point of view, because it's not the point of this conversation. What truly matters is that we now have this ability. We can create scarce digital assets, which makes them unique, which makes them valuable, and we can prove ownership in a way that is decentralized, so we no longer need essential authority effectively establishing who owns what. Gareth.

Gareth: 19:51

Brilliant, dan, really good explanation, and I'm even learning from what you're describing there as well, so that's great. So what you're saying is, effectively, we're building some new foundations for the internet, right? So to go from that Web 2 foundation to Web 3, blockchain is the enabling technology to do that. That enables the decentralization and enables the power and the wealth to be shared amongst users and not just on those centralized platforms. So blockchain is kind of like what you're saying is, like a new pipe work for the internet, almost, and some people have described Web 3 as exactly that. They've described it as the internet owned by the builders and users and then orchestrated with tokens on the blockchain. How do we go then tie that back to?

Gareth: 20:42

Okay, this sounds cool. You've got video games. You can own your own skins. You've got your own in-game objects. You can trade them on a market. With music streaming, if you're the creator of the music, you really retain that ownership. How does that relate back to communities? And if we look back to what is Web 3 enable for communities such as Coal Living Dial?

Daniel: 21:10

Yeah. So this is very, very important because when we realize the power of these instruments, the power of these tools that we have, all of a sudden we understand that we can create a future that is very different from the past and, more specifically, we no longer need to be subject to the constraints and limitations that the Web 2, or, in general, centralized ownership and centralized power have inflicted on our society. So when we talk about communities again before talking about Coal Living Dial specifically, but just talking about communities all of a sudden a community is now owned by its actual members for real. So if you think of a club, if you think of groups of people that gather, this usually, again, is a centralized owner. If you think of a Facebook page, if you think of a meetup group, if you think of even just a group of people that decide to do something together, this usually one centralized point of failure maybe one person that is in charge, or maybe one website that owns the whole thing, one company and therefore people don't really get true benefits for being part of the group. Yes, they get to meet other people and so on, but the value they provide they don't really get rewarded.

Daniel: 22:28

So right now, if you live in a Coal Living Space, for example, a traditional Coal Living Space one of the biggest value propositions of a Coal Living Space is community is to live with like-minded people, to live with people that potentially they're there to support you or, if nothing else, they're nice to hang out with and you're not alone anymore. You've got people around. So simply by being part of a community, you're adding a lot of value to that community by being a nice member and being open to talking to other people, share value experiences and so on. Why are you not getting rewarded for that? And again, the reason is centralization. So right now, there's a massive power imbalance where the creator of the community or the facilitator of that community is keeping all the benefits. So a Coal Living Operator right now is effectively pocketing all this value that is really created by the community. Now, if you're an operator, you may be thinking wait a minute, isn't that good? For me, the reality is, this is very short-term thinking, because the problem is, when people are not rewarded for what they provide, they will soon stop providing it or they will now be incentivized to provide it so effectively. If you're wondering why a community is not as vibrant as it could be, or maybe a community used to be more vibrant but all of a sudden is now losing its appeal. This may be a reason.

Daniel: 23:54

A good example in this case is a platform called Couchsurfing. Some of you may be familiar with that. It used to be a as decentralized as something could be on Web 2, let's say, if we think of things like Wikipedia, for example, technically it's centralized because it's a Web 2 project, but there's a good element of decentralization within that because the intention of people is to just make it as accessible as possible. Couchsurfing used to be pretty much like that. So it was a project where people had the ability to create content and there wasn't really a centralized organization monetizing the content. Now, because Web 2 was limited, people could still not monetize the content. So obviously we're not trying to go back to a system that wasn't working too well in the first place because there were structural limitations in there. But it's interesting to see the natural progression for a system like this, because we're still on Web 2, we're still in a technically centralized setting.

Daniel: 25:03

Even a community that has very good intention of being decentralized and so on, eventually in a very large part just left the Couchsurfing platform and the reason being Couchsurfing became a corporation and they started making profit off the content the community created, and it's not just a monetary profit, it's the governance as well.

Daniel: 25:26

They deleted a lot of content that a community had created. They changed a lot of things to the platform without really consulting the community, and what happened is a lot of people left. A lot of people were upset, and this is interesting because even a very low price point that Couchsurfing wanted to charge, people just refused because of their principles. So people that had contributed a lot of value, they refused to pay a very small monetary value to be on the platform, because they really felt that they were abused in a number of ways. So this is a good example of what happened. So again, we're talking about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. So if you're an operator, here again the whole point is not that you are giving away value, but giving away control. The whole point is you're making something sustainable and more valuable and therefore being part of something that is more valuable for everyone, including the operator themselves. Thank you.

Gareth: 26:22

Exactly, yeah, and I love your example of the value that's added by the community, the residents and the co-living, and that's huge. You know the community atmosphere and the vibe and the buzz and how people make friends. It's hugely valuable. But none of that appears on the balance sheet in a traditional co-living company, right, and that's only one aspect of it. But the governance side is really interesting too, and with blockchain as the enabler of Web3 for co-living communities, in co-living DAO, you have the tokenization element. Blockchain enables tokenization, right, and this tokenization means that the residents become owners or part owners in the co-living community and this not only means that they have a share in the value created by the community that they're creating, but they also have a say in the governance, a real say in the governance. To contrast it with some of the examples you gave done. Now the residents or the users in Web3 and co-living DAO communities, they have a say over some of the major decisions, the minor decisions, all of the decisions that are made, in fact, in these co-living communities, and that governance element really changes the game. It kind of goes back to the utopian dream that was Web2, with the double interaction, the ability for people to interact over platforms and enable amazing things to happen. Right, because we're taking away some of that power imbalance in the Web3 model. That is enabled by blockchain and tokenization. So, in a sense, we're going back to reopen what people were dreaming about when Web2 became a possibility. It's an enhancement of that Web2 dream democratization, better decision-making, better governance and, of course, it benefits everyone.

Gareth: 28:24

As you said, it adds long-term value, value that would be very difficult to generate and retain in the old model. That value that the residents had in a co-living DAO community is also shared by the operator, and so everyone wins. The pie is bigger and if you have a piece of a pie, you want the pie to be bigger. Right, and this is amazing. It unlocks so many benefits and that's what blockchain enables. It's like extra functionality. Just by tokenizing, you open up all the possibilities of these extra functionalities for co-living communities that didn't actually exist before because you couldn't do it on Web2 technology. It wasn't possible to do some of these things on Web2 technology, and blockchain and Web3 enabled new functionalities. Can you tell us a bit about some of those new functionalities that are enabled, dan?

Daniel: 29:23

Absolutely, and I'll tell you more about what the functionalities are. In fact, most of them really relate to the ability to have a fairer distribution of wealth and power, because when we talk about ownership and governance, it reflects on the concept of wealth and power, which is effectively what went out of control with the direction Web2 originally took. Just before I do that, gareth, I just wanted to address one of the usual objections that people have when it comes to new technologies, and I understand that this is not specific to blockchain or Web3, or anything of that nature. It's really just about new technologies in general. A lot of people are worried, okay, but this is something that is difficult to do. It's something that not everyone can do. How do you expect to see mass adoption if people need to be able to understand cryptography? Do they really? If people need to use these tools that are not familiar with, and so on? So, gareth, what can we say to address that?

Gareth: 30:28

Yeah, that's a really good point Before we go into those extra functionalities. One of the biggest critiques of any new technology in Web3 is, no exception. Early users are saying things like this is really complicated, right, it's really hard to the on-ramping process to become a user on a Web3 platform At the moment. It's often quite complicated and not quite as easy as it is on this more established Web2 platforms. So the user interface of Web3 and the on-ramping processes at the moment for users, just what that means is joining a platform and becoming a member or a user or a person that's in that community and wants to use those services. It is complicated right now but, as we see with a lot of new technologies, it becomes much easier with time as the technologies improve. So when we first started using email, that was pretty complicated. That was a whole new skill set that people had to learn and the platforms for email initially were quite complicated to use, right?

Daniel: 31:44

Exactly, and I'm sure that people were feeling exactly the same way when the first emails came about and pretty much every new technology. In the beginning it looked so hard to adopt and it was. I mean, if you look at the first computers, there were these massive machines that only expert technicians could operate, and then it became something that everyone has in their household, even in their pocket. If you consider a smartphone, like the smartphone functionalities Remember first cameras?

Daniel: 32:14

Obviously not, because they were introduced quite a long time ago and the first cameras could only be operated by professionals. Now we have a camera in our pocket pretty much every day and it's the same Like the first email. I think it took three days to be sent from one computer to another and certainly wasn't that easy to send it and so on, whereas now it's just second nature for most people. So the same thing is going to happen and it's part of the natural progress of technology. New user interface solutions will be introduced, new on ramp solutions, so eventually it will be quite simple for everyone to use that. And again, remember, you don't need to know how the engine of your car works to drive a car, so it's not about knowing all the ins and outs of the technology, it's just understanding how to utilize it.

Gareth: 33:07

Exactly, dan, and for Cool Living DAO. In the design of the platform, we're placing the user experience at the forefront to make it easier to evolve the web. Three user interfaces ourselves, and that is one of our priorities, right, dan?

Daniel: 33:24

Yes, in fact, what we're really doing at Cool Living DAO, we're aiming to create the most user friendly platform you'll see, including web two platforms. I've seen a lot of web two platforms that are not user friendly at all and, despite being a web three platform, we are definitely creating something that is much, much easier to use than the most solutions out there, the reason being yes, we are talking about people that want to live in a community. Obviously, you don't want to spend time trying to understand new systems and figure out how to use a certain app or desktop platform or something. You want to spend your time living life, meeting people the way you love. So that's literally what we are allowing. So the functionalities are there in the backhand and they're extremely powerful. The way to use this particular platform is extremely simple in comparison, and I'm just going to give you a quick understanding of some of the functionalities that are enabled thanks to the existence of web three.

Daniel: 34:26

Now the first thing we're doing is in order to decentralize governance. We are having some governance systems on the platform. Now we're not going to be talking about how actual governance takes place, because we discussed that in our episodes and I suggest you refer to those episodes if you want to understand more in depth how governance can work in a community. And again, it's not a rigid structure, it's a framework that each community can implement. But how does that happen? So having the ability to be the true owner of a token allows people to effectively easily demonstrate their status as having a particular role. So it could be a resident, it could be a building manager, it could be an employee at a building, it could be an investor, it could be the operator itself, it could be a partner, it could be pretty much anyone who's involved with a project and a stakeholder Having a token. Being the owner of a token is a very easy way to prove, first of all, that you're the actual person that is going to interact with the rest of the community, and we don't really need a third party to verify that, because the ownership can already be verified in a decentralized way utilizing the power of blockchain. So, again, you probably won't see a massive difference compared to simply logging into a platform, but this already has a huge backend difference because we're talking about a system that doesn't need a third party to verify ownership, which is so powerful, and so that's the first thing that's going to happen, and then governance rights will depend on the nature of your relationship with the community, so whether you're an investor, whether you're a resident, and so on, and also how many investors there are in total, how many residents and a number of other factors. All these factors can easily be checked on the blockchain and they can be utilized on the blockchain as well. So what this means is that if you want to vote, you can just easily vote from an application. It could be from your computer, it could be from your phone, without having to understand anything that is behind that. But what the platform is doing is making sure that everyone has a vote that is taken into account in a fair way, so based on the actual voting power that someone has at any given time.

Daniel: 37:01

Similarly for actual tokens, normally having shares in a certain company means you have effectively a certain ownership of that company, and it's exactly the same in Kulivindau. However, if you want to sell paper shares, or even digital shares, normally it's a pretty complicated process. It's not something you can do just by tapping your phone or by sending an email. I mean, sometimes email can work, but again you've got to find a buyer or a seller Like. There's a lot of things that are involved with blockchain. Shares can become very liquid because shares can be tokenized. So all of a sudden, we have a token, meaning an asset, on the blockchain that can be transacted very easily, very seamlessly. So if you decide that you want to buy more shares in Kulivindau or in your community, or if you want to sell shares, or if you want to transfer shares, that is something that can be done very, very easily again, just with a very simple user interface, and the blockchain will do the work on the back end without really the need of a third party being there to verify every transaction. Of course, there's layers of security. Security is also given by the algorithm itself and the math itself, which is one of the benefits of blockchain. So these are advantages. Now, another advantage of blockchain is that there's additional ways to really transact with shares.

Daniel: 38:32

Now, a big objection that I hear very often is what if I want to sell my shares and there's no buyer? No one wants to buy my shares. Now, obviously, if your shares are not desirable, then there's a problem there, but that happens if the community is not valuable. Now, if you're creating a valuable community with valuable services provided and valuable experience for people to live there, then there is an appetite. So the question is not really there's no demand at all. It's more like today I want to sell my shares and there's no one right here today that wants to buy the same amount of shares for me, just because that person, maybe they want to buy it earlier or later, and so on. So it's just about matching demand and supply at any given time. So some people are worried about this.

Daniel: 39:20

In traditional companies, we blockchain does multiple ways to bypass the problem and create solutions for it, and an example of that is the creation of a liquidity pool.

Daniel: 39:31

So it's not really something doable with traditional shares that you cannot just put them in a pool. But with blockchain it's possible to create a pool with shares and with currency in the same pool, and then every time someone wants to buy shares or sell shares, they can actually do it directly interacting with their pool, because the blockchain and the algorithms behind that are really verifying the nature of the transactions, making sure that everything is genuine and secure. So there's not even any need to find a buyer for your shares if you want to sell them or find a seller if you want to buy shares. You can just go to the pool and buy on, sell shares to the pool or from the pool, and that's how transactions become a lot easier. So, again, you don't need to understand how pools work. What you want to know is that there is an opportunity to transact, buy, sell, transfer shares in a much, much easier way that you cannot intrinsically have if you are facing a Web 2 platform, right, gareth?

Gareth: 40:42

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for going into the detail there. That's really cool and you know there's all kinds of functionalities Buying, selling shares, as you've mentioned, can also. Users can easily get paid dividends. You can have liquidity pools, something we call granular rent reduction, which means you can use your tokens and stake them and do all sorts of other fancy things potentially to reduce your rental payments. So there's a huge number of functions we can go into there, and the key thing is that blockchain enables all this and a lot of it can be automated with smart contracts, which enables all of these things to happen quickly and be at users fingertips. So if you're a resident in a co-living DAO community, you have all this functionality at your fingertips, and we're going to design it in a way that the user interface is going to be easy and intuitive to use, so it's a smooth process and you can get on with living your life in the co-living community and doing fun stuff.

Daniel: 41:43

Exactly, and if you want to see more about the functionalities that are available, I suggest you. You had to call livingdowio and you can check out our pitch deck, where you will see some of the functionalities that we're implementing in the platform and effectively. Again, it's all very, very simple and straightforward when it comes to utilizing them, and some things are really cool, like, imagine you can walk into a restaurant nearby and their restaurant has a partnership agreement with with your community and all you need to do is just show that you're the owner of some shares into the community or simply your resident. You can do it very easily with the platform and you might get a discount or you might get a special treatment, you might get some other form of benefits, maybe some bonuses, some free items. So this is possible thanks to this technology. So it's really exciting.

Daniel: 42:39

And the other thing that is really exciting is just like video games, where, if the game developers agree that someone can share the same in-game items over multiple games.

Daniel: 42:51

Remember, in co-livingdow, once you're part of one community, you're automatically part of a federation. So if you have items, for example, shares in a co-livingdow company or some other collectibles that might be created by one company or another, you can effectively have that recognized in other communities in the federation as well. So imagine having shares in one community. You walk into another community. You're not a stranger, you're part of a same community. So there can be either an easy way to transfer shares from from one community to another so let's say, convert shares from shares of one community to shares of another community or simply the shares that you already have they can actually have some value in the other community as well. You might be able to get some discounts, you might be able to get some special services just by being owner of that. So again, it's a little bit like having this in-game item so you can use across multiple games. So that makes the experience so much better, doesn't it.

Gareth: 43:59

Yeah, absolutely, and being a part of that federation is a huge benefit and we talk about that in other podcasts and you know we advise you to go and have a listen to them. But the benefits of being part of a federation of co-living communities go far beyond living in a single co-living community and really web3 and blockchain is the enabling technology in this aspect of these benefits as well. So imagine a federation of co-living communities around the world and by being a member of one, that enabling technology the web3 backbone to the whole thing enables you to move around and gain benefits and make connections with other co-living communities in that federation, which is just amazing and you know, can't wait to see it become a physical reality and expanding bigger.

Daniel: 44:52

Absolutely so. I really hope this episode today helped you understand a little bit more about how web3 can really benefit us in real life, and whether you had never heard of the word web3 before, whether you're already web3 enthusiasts, maybe even a web3 professional. I hope you realize that there is a very strong connection between the in-person everyday real life and real world assets and blockchain and web3, and what we're doing at co-living now is really making sure that we can all benefit from that. So thanks, garret, for being here with us today. Thanks everyone for listening again to find out more about how we are effectively using blockchain to get a better community life. Make sure you check out co-livingio, make sure you subscribe to this podcast, and we'll be back with you next week.