Jerry Chu 🍊

Co-founder @lofty_ai, the real estate exchange. $100M+ traded, $5.2M+ rent paid out. Also @alphaarcade, @keebsforall. I share what building fintech takes.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

I co-founded Lofty in 2021. On Lofty, people buy and sell fractional ownership of real homes, 24/7.

So far:

- $5.7M+ in rent paid out to owners
- $100M+ in trading volume

I post what building a fintech marketplace really looks like. The wins, the bugs, the lawyers.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

If you owned half a share of a property on @lofty_ai, you couldn't vote on it.
That was our bug, and it's fixed now.

When shares went fractional on Sep 1, we kept the old governance rule that you needed at least 1 full share. So an owner with 0.5 shares got no vote emails, couldn't open that property's community forum, and couldn't vote.

In the 61 votes that have closed on the new governance system, about 3% of owner holdings were under 1 share.

The rules now:
1. Any amount of ownership counts. Your vote is weighted by your exact fractional shares.
2. You still need to finish ID verification to vote, second a motion, or file a proposal. Before, we showed unverified owners a ballot that failed when they submitted it. Now we tell them why up front.

We fixed ranked-choice votes too. They used to end in "no consensus" at the first tie for last place. Now we cut all the choices tied for last at once, but only when that can't change the result, and you can see every runoff round. We recounted all 19 closed ranked-choice votes with the new rule, and no outcome changed.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@AndrewMKotulak @Jimii369 @lofty_ai Yes, it’s not a main focus but if the legal structure works, there is no reason why we can’t do it!

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

Anyone that wants to list real estate in these regions on @lofty_ai DM me!

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

once ASI is here and living somewhere because of "work" becomes pointless, people with money will just move to the nicest places on earth

Mediterranean climate, ocean, mountains, good food, beautiful isolated towns

places like this are going to become insanely valuable
probably worth buying real estate there now

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@Hunger4Crypto Far too kind sir

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

I co-founded Lofty in 2021. On Lofty, people buy and sell fractional ownership of real homes, 24/7.

So far:

- $5.7M+ in rent paid out to owners
- $100M+ in trading volume

I post what building a fintech marketplace really looks like. The wins, the bugs, the lawyers.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

Yep, heard about that. The issue with all these other platforms is that they’re structured like a private investment fund.

For example, they can’t raise 40M dollars to buy a commercial building outright, so they raise 2M from investors like yourself and invest that on your behalf into another real estate deal managed by someone else.

On paper, you gain real estate exposure, but in practice you’re a limited partner in a real estate fund that is itself a small limited partner in a bigger fund that actually owns the property.

And then this is all managed by another 3rd party.

As a result, when the platform goes under, an investor like yourself has a hard time to claim anything, because you have no management power and the investment is very illiquid.

The GPs in the actual large fund has no legal requirement to cash you out.

On Lofty, every property is directly owned by the investors, who all have legal management rights.

We own nothing and manage nothing. We just handle secondary market trading, so owners can easily buy in or out on the secondary market.

The premise may seem similar, but the implementation is very different, which I hope benefits our users a lot more

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@ThreeworldHQ @lofty_ai Thank you! It’s been very difficult to roll it out, but can’t wait to show everyone our lending ecosystem when it’s deployed

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@Xyroak @EldarDRM Thanks! Algorand definitely needs more builders. Ideally building for general products, not just things for other Algorand folks

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

Ughhh, my house has this weird artistic French style layout. There are a lot of small stairs (1-2 steps) that separate the kitchen, dinning room, and living room areas.

I’m sure I’m not the only customer asking for this, but please teach it to climb up and down stairs.

I’d buy one so fast

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@CryptoMgnm @alphaarcade To be honest, we haven’t worked on distribution nearly as much as we should.

But it is funny when I see people talking about what we’ve already built in a theoretical way and I’m like, you’re not going to believe this haha

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@AlgoRoulette @alphaarcade Thanks! So much more to come!

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@AndrewMKotulak @AnthropicAI @claudeai Apparently that’s not that weird. Their site requires email submission to get certain info and that’s why some agents will do it on their own.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@WFCanaris1 Appreciate the kind words! The good thing about every property having different owners and governance is that every property will be different. I’m sure you can find one with owners more likeminded

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@imchrismurray Appreciated, just updating my pinned post for new visitors :)

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@levelsio At least make some beef ribs, pretty much the same amount of work

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

The problem with that is it’s supposedly pay to win. So there is just a price tag for integration. I don’t think Algorand can pay for it and unless you have the funds yourself, you’ll just be stuck on this.

Users don’t care about how you integrate something, just the result. As long as it’s legal, the result is what matters. This is how I usually think about these types of things

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@AndrewMKotulak @porycq639478h @jerallaire Email me!

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

That’s interesting. You might want to get a second legal opinion on that.

When we were dealing with MSB and money transfer laws, our lawyer specifically said that as long as you can prove the transfer is instant, meaning the moment funds are released to your account, the equivalent funds are released and sent to the user, then it doesn’t count as custody, which means a lot of pretty painful regs didn’t apply to us.

We have a no action letter from the state of MA using this argument and had a discussion with Texas too, so this seems to hold up in practice.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

Tough to say honestly. In the beginning, I wanted to integrated a lot of existing DEFI stuff into Lofty.

But over time I’ve realized there is significant friction where other platforms don’t know how to price or handle the data feeds coming from our markets and our users find using these solutions to be cumbersome too.

This has naturally led us to integrating and building capabilities internally for our own ecosystem.

Customers seem to like it more

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

There is a new type of orders on @lofty_ai called “optimized” order.

You can only trigger it with USDC already in your wallet and you can’t use your rental credit or gift certificates.

What does it do?

It lets you set up a large order one time, then route that order in an optimized way over some period of time to get you the best price by getting you the lowest slippage.

Great for whale users and enterprise clients!

Go check it out and let me know if you have feedback.

[Jerry Chu 🍊 @PMDBT]

@AndrewMKotulak @porycq639478h @jerallaire Why can’t you use a circle business account specifically?