Congratulations to @lofty_ai on launching its first international property in the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴 Lofty is a leading fractional real estate marketplace with 40K+ investors, 180+ properties tokenized on Algorand so far, and over $100M in TVL. And there's more to come.

We're excited to announce that our new liquidity pools for @lofty_ai are live for our users to beta test. There are only two available for now, but we'll be watching the metrics closely. Barring major changes, we'll release the new version for all properties by the end of next week. This is one of the biggest overhauls we've done on the platform. - if you lend property tokens, you'll receive your rewards in property tokens - if you lend USDC, you'll receive your rewards in USDC - rewards stay inside the pools to auto-compound and provide additional liquidity for the ecosystem - thanks to fractional property tokens, you can now withdraw fractional ownership, meaning a position like 16.789 tokens won't force you to only withdraw 16 whole tokens like before - there is now a 24 hour lock period, meaning if you deposit assets, you'll need to wait at least 24 hours to take them out Overall, these changes should allow the pools to stay more stable, less volatile long-term, and set us up for the infrastructure required launch our "not a mortgage" product later this year. If you're a Lofty user, please help us stress test these over the weekend!

We delayed this feature over at @lofty_ai for a few years, but I'm happy to announce that Governance 2.0 is finally live with the launch of the new community forums. One of the toughest problems to solve for what we're building has been to coordinate owners of the assets on the platform, the property managers they elect, and a way for high-trust discussions, all without Lofty sitting in the middle trying to scale a platform ops team. I think we've finally done it. Any investors on Lofty can now navigate to the "community" tab on the platform and gain access to property specifc forums, where any and all discussions can take place between owners. You can only post if you actually own at least 1 share of the asset. Your ownership percentage is displayed to everyone else when you post. Owners can directly propose a new governance vote in app now with Robert's rule in place. Once someone has seconded the motion, there is a timed discussion period before the vote goes live. Once the voting period is over, the results are automatically published and settled onchain. Early usage from our users is very promising and I'm sure there will be more improvements to make, but this launch completes one of the core pillars of what we set out to build. 1. Make real estate equity into a tradable digital asset. (We did this by tokenizing the equity at launch in 2021.) 2. Make the experience of buying and selling real estate more similar to buying and selling shares of stocks in your brokerage account. (We did this by introducing secondary markets in 2022 and then AMMs to real estate transactions in 2024.) 3. Provide a way for the various parties of a real estate holding to communicate and coordinate, make legally binding decisions, all without giving up privacy for users. (Launched now in 2026 with governance 2.0.) 4. Rebuild debt products for real estate from first principles now that real estate trades digitally and has good liquidity. (Upcoming lending products we plan to launch later this year in 2026). 5. Suite of fintech products in our ecosystem. Best in class bank accounts offering the higher than average interest rates, and credit cards that you can use to pay your mortgage/loan payments, while receiving cashback. (Coming in 2027). Funny how in 5 years our roadmap never changed. Things got shifted around, but the core pillars remained the same. Even with the advent of AI, we're fortunate that it's only a tailwind for our team to be more productive and lean, while knowing our moats are perfectly safe from it. We've always been building a new type of platform. Some people didn't realize it, and some people didn't believe us. But every day it's closer to reality.

We learned from our YC batch that startups usually don't die from competitors, they die from bad execution, so I usually don't talk about @lofty_ai competitors much. But it appears that one of our larger and oldest competitors is shutting down. I do want to take the time to address this, because I think it validates a lot of our learnings and assumptions at Lofty. 1. Nice expensive properties tend to have lower yield, while cheaper properties have higher yield. It's just how the math works. But this means if your users only want "high yield", you'll be forced to chase properties that aren't in the best locations, often with troubled tenants, and aren't in good condition. The operational cost often outweighs the yield in the long run. We learned this in late 2022 and have since pivoted away from those types of properties. The ones remaining either got ownership groups that know what they're doing or have since been sold off by their owners. I think this was right long term call. 2. Real estate operations is really hard to scale. If you manage assets for your investors, you can make more money per property by charging more fees, including a portion of returns, but you'll be liable and responsible for managing, essentially, hundreds of small businesses. It's really hard to scale this with technology, because it's fundamentally a real world operation. Someone has to drive to the property to look at issues and call people to fix them, and that's the easy part. Some of our users still have trouble accepting this, but we've never managed or will manage any properties on behalf of investors. If this means we're not the best fit for some investors, then so be it, but our bet is real estate investors who know what they're doing want to manage their own assets. I think if we figure out our model here and refine it in the right way, it'll be the right bet as well. 3. Liquidity is the most important thing for any market period. You need to do everything you can to build a system to grow this. The trading price is also the trading price. People don't care what you or some 3rd party think a property is worth, they'll trade at the prices that they want to and think is reasonable. It turns out, real estate prices are ONLY stable, because they're so illiquid. Make them trade like equities and they start to behave like it in price movements. Except the supply is so small that small trades and move price far easier than in the equities market. We're making most of our bets here this year. Time will tell if they pan out or not. In the end, I should celebrate the demise of a competitor intuitively, but I'm not sure if articles like this are a good thing. I think a rising tide can lift all boats in an industry, but if most of the news are about bad actors, then it makes new investors and users hesitant to try out products like this, including ours.