Real Estate is The Next Round in DeFi vs. TradFi

It felt like forever since the ConstitutionDAO lost a bidding war for the US Constitution to none other than Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel. In a sign of the credibility and professionalism of the ConstitutionDAO team, the funds raised for this endeavor are being returned to the original contributors, a move that may come as a shock to hedge funds like Citadel which are accustomed to retaining fees even if their investments underperform the market.

Ken Griffin’s winning bid of $43.2 million dollars barely surpasses the $40 million raised by the over 17,000 crypto enthusiasts who joined forces to form ConstitutionDAO. The subtext is obvious: a Wall Street maven from the Citadel hedge fund steps in to outbid a scrappy ragtag group of Blockchain fans, at the same moment Decentralized Finance poses an increasing threat to the world of Traditional Finance.

Call it Round 1 of the DeFi versus TradFi “culture war”, with TradFi (represented here by Citadel and their CEO Ken Griffin) landing the first punch. After all, why else would an astute fund manager like Griffin bid over $40 million dollars, more than double the $20 million dollar estimate of the Constitution’s value? It certainly seems like he is trying to send a message to the “barbarians at the gate” of the crypto world.

Why would Ken Griffin specifically target the ConstitutionDAO project? There’s the significance of the Constitution itself as a rare and unique collector’s item in an era of increasingly valuable unique digital assets like NFTs and there is the general public interest in this project with the publicity generated by the ConstitutionDAO.

More importantly, there is the fact that a unique artifact like the Constitution will only increase in value in an era of runaway inflation and unlimited money printing. By purchasing the Constitution, Ken Griffin may have been trying to show the crypto world that certain key artefacts are still beyond our decentralized reach, and are only within the grasp of powerful men like himself.

Given that real estate is the asset most heavily financed by Wall Street, it wouldn’t be surprising if DeFi’s move into real estate would garner even more attention from Wall Street bigwigs like Ken Griffin.

They might react by trying to buy out tokenized properties on DeFi real estate platforms outright to defeat and undermine the access that real estate tokenization brings to the decentralized community. In this case, the ideal response from Team Decentralization would be for many people to participate in acquiring real estate tokens, and then holding on to those tokens and staking them in liquidity pools and other primitives in the DeFi space.

This would not only keep TradFi and Wall Street from controlling the real estate on DeFi platforms, it would also show the world how a decentralized alternative to TradFi can function effectively and even offer better capital efficiency than TradFi.

If real estate becomes round 2 in the boxing match between DeFi and TradFi, highly decentralized token ownership and heavy participation in liquidity pools would be like DeFi slipping through a jab from TradFi and knocking them against the ropes with a well-placed counterpunch.

It would be a weighty response to the mild disappointment of losing the first round to the representatives of TradFi.

To get involved with making sure Team DeFi gets the upper hand in this next round of real estate contention, learn more about CitaDAO’s upcoming process to Introduce Real Estate Onchain (IRO).

Intrigued and want to learn more?

Follow us on Twitter @citadao_io, join our community on Discord, or check out our website citadao.io where you can join our waitlist. We run a weekly introduction and Q&A call on our Discord server on Tuesdays, 10AM EST/3PM UTC.

About CitaDAO
CitaDAO.io is a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform for Real Estate to be tokenized on-chain, built on the Ethereum ecosystem. CitaDAO aims to solve the lack of liquidity, access limitation, and lack of composability in existing real estate ecosystem by creating interoperability with other DeFi applications/primitives that operate on the Ethereum protocol. Real estate token allows the community to diversify their portfolio on-chain to generate stable yield through real-world assets that have constant liquidity through AMM.

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Disclaimer: The information contained in this communication is based on sources considered to be reliable, but not guaranteed, to be accurate or complete. This communication should not be relied upon or the basis for making any investment decision or be construed as a recommendation to engage in any transaction or be construed as a recommendation of any investment strategy