Unreal estate: ‘Terrabyte’ techies buy land in Wyoming
Parcel 0 is a 40-acre meta city owned by everyone, populated by no one
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — In a first-of-its kind real estate transaction a parcel of land in Park County was just purchased…by no one.
The recent purchase of 40 acres outside of Clark, Wyoming was noteworthy because the buyer is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO. In this case, CityDAO acquired the asset, the first case of a blockchain owning land or a real-world asset of any kind.
What makes CityDAO unique is it is an administrative cooperative collectively owned by its members with its bylaws and rules encoded in blockchain rather than digitally or on paper. The organization is also the first autonomous blockchain registered in the state as an LLC.
All this was made possible when the Wyoming Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Law was set into law on July 1, 2021. The law made Wyoming the first state to legally recognize decentralized autonomous organizations as limited liability companies.
The world is watching carefully as these DAOs are considered the infrastructure behind the burgeoning DeFi movement. ‘Decentralized Finance’ is a blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments. It instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum. These platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts.
Add to that: land ownership.
Parcel 0 proports to be an NFT (non-fungible token) owned by everyone but populated by no one.
In the case of CityDAO, the stated goal is to start the first of many cities around the world, beginning with this ‘Parcel 0,’ as it is referred to where individuals are invited to “join the Discord.”
According to CityDAO and its founder Scott Fitsimones, a San Francisco entrepreneur and so-called “First Citizen” of this new ‘town’ in Wyoming, the real estate transaction represents the first step toward creating a world of digitized physical assets or meta cities.
“Putting land on chain has several benefits including democratizing access, increasing transparency, removing gatekeepers, and reducing complexity,” states CityDAO. “Currently land is only available to large investors who can afford an entire parcel. [The CityDAO model] allows democratization of ownership through crowdfunding.”
Fitsimones told the Cody Enterprise he was initially looking to buy in the Jackson Hole area but was priced out of there, even using a crowdfunding approach to purchasing. He settled on Park County because of its proximity to an airport, Yellowstone National Park, and Shoshone National Forest.
‘Residents’ of the new Parcel 0 ‘cybercity’ can buy in for a $1,000 investment. Fitsimones says a couple thousand are already on board as owners of Parcel 0. It is unclear what type of development, if any, will be done on the 40 acres. For now, the asset serves as a real estate investment for an autonomous group of new age crypto shareholders.
