Update on blockchain neighborhood self-governance platform

Hello Steemit!

It has been a year and a half since posting my first proposal of Neighborhoods on the Blockchain, and not much development has happened. I spend most my time doing/avoiding school work.

I presented my concept at the annual Texas student symposium for American Society of Civil Engineers in April 2019 and won third place out of seven or eight research posters. I find this promising considering I had no prototype or work done, just an early concept. The prospect of decentralized municipal governance was very appealing to many at the conference, but I did not make any lasting connections that will push this project further.

In the meantime, I have been looking at existing competition such as Neighborly and Liquid Feedback for voting and investor/community relationships, Unison and Point Co-investing for home equity liquidity, and Harbor and Polymath for securitized real estate token sales.

I also contacted a professor at my school who specializes in blockchain tech, and I was able to audit a few of his blockchain course lectures this summer. He invited me to pitch my idea to his students, and one guy was interested in working on it, but us students don’t have much time to put into side projects. The professor’s opinion is that this project will be strongly opposed, if executed in the US. He says there are many people in power who do not want this to happen. He may be right, but that won’t stop me from building a proof-of-concept product. Perhaps my project will be more beneficial in less regulated, crypto-friendly jurisdictions.

My main hurdle right now is building a prototype API and token app which has separate UI for investors and residents.

I have no experience programming outside of MATLAB exercises in school. Finding people to work on the nitty gritty programming has been hard. If anyone on Steemit is willing to help with advisement or programming, please contact me at [email protected]

I did find some relevant data sources that could be used to peg price for a given neighborhood’s token. These are either the Zillow Home Price Index, or the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. The next job is gaining access to these data feeds and applying them to a given geographic area for creating the neighborhood token’s value.

I also talked to several investment bankers who deal in home price futures, and they seemed resistant to the idea of a neighborhood-value-backed security token. This kind of opposition is what fuels me. As my fortune cookie once said: “A great joy in life is doing what others say you can’t.”

This project may have to wait till after I graduate, but I may be able to get funded for research and development during my master’s program. Many people at my school are very interested and informed about block chain technology.

I will also be attending regular networking events in the Dallas blockchain community, and hopefully gettin some good video content for my 3speak channel.

Thanks for all your support

-Nikolai

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