Today we are excited to announce Villcaso – the first permissionless real estate protocol. Users buying Villcaso’s USH (US Housing) token earn returns from the US housing market.
The Problem
Investing in US real estate is close to impossible for the vast majority of investors worldwide. They’re restricted from accessing the asset class through some combination of geography, lack of sufficient investable capital, tax rules, and lack of access to investment channels.
The Solution
We’re creating a tokenized ETF of US real estate that everyone around the world can invest in permissionlessly. The token is fungible, composable, free of transfer restrictions, and is compliant with securities regulations. For a crypto investor who is looking to safely diversify their gains and earn non-crypto-correlated returns, it just works.
The token accumulates value as the underlying real estate assets grow in value, historically at approximately 13% per year. Because of the preferred equity nature of our assets, returns are highly stable. Our product is an easy and performant US real estate investment that’s delivered in a liquid, compliant, and hyper-tax-efficient manner.
The assets backing the token are called home equity investments (HEIs). HEIs are an exceptionally safe and performant asset class, but today are only accessible by large institutional investors (minimum commitment ~$25M). We uniquely have access to this asset through our past careers and partnerships we’ve developed. HEIs are a key financing solution for homeowners in the US – investors obtain an opportunity to share in the appreciation of homes in upper-income neighborhoods.
With the Fed preparing to cut rates and the housing market heating back up – it’s never been a better time to buy into US real estate.
Why It Matters
As the first permissionless real estate token, $USH allows tokenholders to lend, borrow, and transact in a P2P manner. We chose to build permissionless-ness into the core of our protocol because it accelerates the ability for our token to bring attractive and reliable returns from US real estate to investors around the world. Further, permissionless-ness is the underpinning of decentralized finance and investors in US real estate deserve access to these tools and opportunities – no more walled gardens.
Leadership
We are led by Nathan Sokoll-Ward, who co-founded Roostify, a mortgage tech startup (raised through Series C; exit to CoreLogic). Val Lee is our COO, an MIT MBA, and a former management consultant. Special thanks to all our advisors, partners, and investors, including Alliance.xyz and CV VC, who have helped make this journey possible.
Follow our account on X (@villcaso) for the latest updates as well as reach out at [email protected] to learn more.
– Nathan and Val
THIS IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL SECURITIES. Information contained in this post is not an offer to sell securities or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction.
