Mint Home Equity as NFT

Approximately 7 million homeowners in the United States own crypto and have at least $50,000 in home equity. Other countries with stable property values have similar metrics. But, unfortunately, their ability to access home equity through traditional means is broken, leaving it locked and no investable value. 

Our goal is to unlock the full potential of home equity by converting the equity to an NFT on the blockchain.

Brief Overview of Our Process:

We aim for this to be self-sovereign home equity as a service. Our solution would provide the framework to conduct an automated property valuation, title search, and KYC. After successfully meeting all criteria, an NFT is minted with an "actual value" based on the real-world asset and home equity amount. 

The NFT can then be used in DeFi on Cardano and other interoperable chains to benefit from passive yield by staking the NFT or actively used to borrow money/crypto or earn yield by lending it to others. 

New Cardano projects like Paribus (https://paribus.io) would be a perfect example of a platform/marketplace offering DeFi opportunities for NFT holders.

Challenges:

We don't want to be a lender or categorized as one. Instead, we aim to provide the framework for homeowners to mint home equity as an NFT following acceptable DeFi and lending quality standards (ex. AAA rating), so the "actual value" is recognized and fully utilized in Defi protocols.

As of now, there's only one similar project doing this. It's called Bacon Protocol (https://www.baconcoin.com), and it's in the US. The project was started by a Mortgage Lender (Loansnap), and they are acting as a lender, issuing loans as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.

We need a strong focus on data validation, KYC, and fraud protection. 

Automated Property Values: Obtaining automated and accurate property values is already an acceptable method for determining value. There are plenty of good tools and oracle solutions for this. And by only minting NFTs for single-family homes that meet specific criteria of age, a minimum of 20% equity, and at least $50,000 in total equity, this makes the valuation process even more predictable.

KYC: This can be completed with current market solutions. Additional value-add opportunities are available by partnering with a self-sovereign identity service like PhotoChromic (https://photochromic.io).

Fraud protection / AAA rating: For proper fraud protection and AAA rating, the homeowner would authorize a lien in the amount of the NFT to be recorded in the corresponding government records. In addition, an NFT "Burn Clause" would be added to the smart contract as an additional mechanism that can trigger based on oracle monitoring data of public records and For Sale databases. For example, if the property is listed For Sale or new liens are recorded, the burn clause would be triggered.

We are evaluating alternatives to recording a lien against the NFT (if we can still accommodate AAA quality DeFi standards.) In this case, the NFT would be more like a synthetic/ derivative. The smart contract and oracle data monitoring would effectively do all the heavy lifting to ensure compliance and anti-fraud protection.

Casada Economics / Tokenomics / Incentives:

The native token $CASA will be utilized for all transactions and fees on the protocol.

- NFT minting and burning fees are paid in $CASA
- $CASA holders share in NFT royalties and DeFi fees from staking, farming, lending, borrowing
- $CASA holders share in protocol and community governance
- Real estate and mortgage professionals earn a portion of $CASA fees and royalties for referring clients and facilitating property details, if needed, for successful NFT processing (broker price opinion, property inspection, title report, etc.)

How this Project is Boosting Cardano's Defi Success:

We all know DeFi is a crucial driver to Cardano's growth and mainstream adoption because it is the onramp for liquidity, and liquidity is the heartbeat of the blockchain.

Because home equity is at an all-time high and the minimum value minted as an NFT would be $50,000, Casada Finance has the potential to have more than a billion dollars total value locked in a short amount of time. But, of course, this is assuming market conditions remain stable, and we can successfully attract users, add value, and increase the network effect.

Requested Funds:

The requested funds would be utilized for a portion of expenses related to platform development, integrating automated home evaluation tools, KYC, oracle data services, NFT minting smart contracts, and legal counsel.