People who focus on crypto love to talk about the importance of bringing “real-world,” hard-to-trade assets like real estate onto the blockchain. Why? The advantages go both ways.

For the crypto ecosystem, bringing physical assets (and their associated cash flows) on chain would unlock immense value and help end the reliance on fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and MoonPay as the only ways to bring those assets into the digital realm. It would also dramatically accelerate the adoption and immediate usefulness of digital currency and help solidify crypto’s place in the economic world.

Perhaps even more important, we should not, in 2022, live in a world where only things like the public stocks of big companies and U.S. dollars are liquid and tradeable. Crypto is the key to making physical assets easier to hold and trade.

Many have tried to build platforms for the digital trading of physical assets, but so far no one has succeeded at any meaningful scale. Now, my Slow Ventures colleagues and I think we have a good answer—a template that can be applied broadly. We call it the simple distributed autonomous organization, or sDAO.