Let me introduce our project for booking and renting Real Estate properties on the blockchain. We are looking into disrupting such a booming market as short term Vacation Rentals. This market segment is considered as an alternative to hotel industry, it has been experiencing strong period of growth during the last few years and is expected to reach $170 billion by 2019.
Currently this segment is dominated by several well-known platforms as booking.com, airbnb.com, flipkey.com, etc. who match landlords and tenants (hosts and guests) and take their cut from every transaction. Despite their popularity, all today's players have some significant disadvantages: transaction cost may reach up to 20% of the total amount and involved parties suffer from centralized regulation. Platforms, which unlike airbnb.com, do not handle payments just suggest that involved parties settle payments themselves. Cross border payments may easily get blocked by financial institutions, not all means of payment are accepted, and there are still opportunities for bad behavior and fraud (chargebacks, bounced checks, misrepresentation etc.).
Now it is a good time to change all of this! We strongly believe that by decentralizing this market segment and by moving transactions from fiat currencies to crypto currency and introducing flexible escrow contracts executing within a blockchain we can 1) Reduce transaction cost two or even three times of what it is now 2) Give users more ability to decide what is right and what is wrong 3) Make cross border payments easy.
We are looking into building a platform which will ultimately hide all intricacies of owning alternative crypto currency (StayBit token), executing smart contracts, gas prices, etc from the end user. By doing this we will make it appealing to prospective customers who are unfamiliar with crypto and we will be encouraging them to become active crypto users.
StayBit ecosystem will be built on public Ethereum network with some functionality still implemented with traditional off-chain technologies (SQL DB, etc.). All transactions will be done with ERC20 compliant StayBit tokens. Token will have unique features necessary for interaction with smart contracts representing escrow accounts. Token is not a security, not a commodity, is not a right to own company's equity and is not backed by any hard asset. Token will just provide an opportunity to rent your dream house in the future via StayBit platform.
The project's whitepaper is available here: http://www.itmindsconsulting.com/staybit-whitepaper.pdf. We have recorded a "proof-of-existence" of our whitepaper on the bitcoin network in order to protect our intellectual rights such as: suggested ideas, designs, trademarks, diagrams, solutions, etc.
SHA256 hash of the initial version of our whitepaper is f0755b015ff36e3620e02cade506924063f58023506edebc48cd146d36ad972b and proof of existence can be verified here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/7963d82f5ed293d9a46f15c96b6f4caaa3b45503c8ddde5b4a71c8cbe61c3729#tx_messagesToken Generation Event (TGE) will be held in order to cover expenses required to develop the project, rollout to production and to promote it to the end users. We are planning to launch TGE in Q1 2018 and the exact date will be announced later.
Team: We are a small software consulting company, incorporated in California, USA. Project founders have decades of IT experience in Banking, Internet, Entertainment, Equipment Manufacturing and other industries. We developed our track record by helping such high-profile companies as Apple, AT&T, DirecTV and others to build their world class products. Our identities and contacts are fully disclosed in the whitepaper.
At this stage we are looking for early project supporters who could help us with the following tasks: Technical Writing, Translations and Bounty Campaigns in Social Media. Whomever is interested in token pre-distribution event, please do not hesitate to contact us, we offer early bird incentives.
Please feel free to ask anything, suggest and criticize the project in this thread.
Thank you,
StayBit Team
P.S. Meet us in person on the BlockCon 2017 in Santa Monica, CA next week!