Manuel Gonzalez Alzuru, Chief Marketing Officer

Panama Crypto

May 6, 2018·9 min read

1. What is Brickblock?

Brickblock is a smart contract platform that allows you to invest cryptocurrency in tokenized real-world assets like real estate and investment funds. Each asset issues its own unique token — called a Proof-of-Asset (PoA) token — that legally entitles the owner to the profits of the underlying asset.

2. What is Brickblock’s mission?

Brickblock’s mission is to make the world of investing easier, cheaper, and more transparent. It is founded on the belief that investing through current financial institutions is too complex and expensive. Brickblock uses smart contracts and blockchain technology (tokenization) to eliminate the high fees, minimum amounts, geographic restrictions, and counterparty risk associated with traditional investment models.

3. How will I make money from Brickblock?

There are two ways:

Buying Brickblock tokens (BBK) during the ICO. BBK can be activated (with just one click on the platform) to generate Access tokens (ACT), which can be sold for ETH. BBK is also an ERC20 standard token that can be traded on exchanges.

Buying Proof-of-Asset (PoA) tokens by investing in tokenized assets on Brickblock’s smart contract platform. PoA tokens legally entitle you to the profits of the underlying asset. For example, the rents, dividends, and appreciation of a residential building.

4. What makes Brickblock superior to other real estate blockchain projects?

Brickblock is the only real estate blockchain project that has filed a legal prospectus for regulatory approval. This means Brickblock is far ahead of the competition in being able to legally launch a product. And that’s exactly what we’re doing in the coming weeks: offering the world’s first tokenized building.

We have also signed letters of intent with real estate firms around the world to tokenize more than $1 billion USD worth of assets. Our co-founder and Director have a combined 40+ years of experience in the real estate industry with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of managed assets.

5. What makes Brickblock superior to other tokenization blockchain projects?

To repeat the above, we have a regulatory compliant legal framework. We also have a working product running on the Ethereum blockchain. Furthermore, we have the necessary funding to fulfill our 2018 roadmap and are currently developing what we hope will be the world’s leading asset-backed token exchange. Finally, our smart contracts are audited by the industry’s best, ConsenSys Diligence.

6. Who is part of the core team? What are their backgrounds?

• Jakob Drzazga, co-founder — real estate developer with more than 10 years experience and a staff of 20.
• Martin Mischke, co-founder — co-founder of some of Europe’s top blockchain companies, including Bitwala, Bits & Coins, and Transistor Coworking.
• Jeff Woodward, Director — 25+ years in real estate, during which he has secured investments totalling more than $900 million USD.
• Colin Nimsz, Head of Organization and Finance — U.S. attorney, founder of UVEST, Counsel at Lionsgate.
• Philip Paetz, Chief Technology Officer — previously Digital Expert and External Advisor at McKinsey.
• Manuel Gonzalez Alzuru, Chief Marketing Officer — formerly Head of Mobile Marketing for Jumia (Orange, Rocket Internet, Goldman Sachs’ African unicorn) and CMO at Medlanes (Axa and Microsoft).

7. It is a token ultimately needed for Brickblock to exist?

Yes, the Proof-of-Asset (PoA) security token is at the core of Brickblock’s business. Ultimately, PoA tokens are the product; they are the the key to creating a cheaper, more efficient, and more inclusive world of investing.

Brickblock tokens (BBK), meanwhile, are necessary to generate the Access tokens (ACT) used to pay for all transaction fees. Each token in Brickblock’s ecosystem has a very specific purpose, whether technical or legal. You can find a full explanation of Brickblock’s token structure here.

8. I am concerned about ETH security. What is Brickblock doing to guarantee a hacker doesn’t steal my Brickblock tokens (BBK)?

Your BBK is located in our Brickblock token contract, which has been audited by two different parties where no serious vulnerabilities were found. One of the auditors was ConsenSys Diligence, a leader in the blockchain industry. We made fixes to the small issues that were found before deploying. Furthermore, the contract is based off of the ERC20 token contract from OpenZeppelin, which is regarded as having creating the most secure and well-audited contracts in the industry.

9. How funds of ICO will be invested? What is on your roadmap?

The funds raised during the ICO will be used to continue to grow our team. We have recognized that you must hire the best talent to build the best product. In the near future we will develop the world’s leading asset-backed token exchange, create a Brickblock Fund, tokenize more than a billion dollars worth of assets, expand into key markets (Asia and South America), and continue to build smart contracts at the forefront of the industry. These milestones are only possible by investing in people who are capable of bringing them to life. Of course, we also recognize the importance of marketing, which will direct a considerable portion of the ICO funds. As we are consistently keeping up with the most recent regulations, some of the funds will also be committed to legal expenses.

10. Why a $50 million USD hard cap?

Real estate is capital-intensive. Brickblock wants to establish a fund to pre-purchase projects to offer them on the platform. This reduces middlemen even further and creates a better product for our clients. A larger raise allows us to buy the properties and reduce the risk for investors while creating a stable pipeline for Brickblock.

11. What is/will be Brickblock marketing plan?

Brickblock is a service provider, we tokenize real world assets and we will have an exchange that will provide liquidity to assets. Therefore, there are 2 types of clients as in a marketplace.

The first client is the asset provider, we will get them by assisting to large conferences as MIPIM (the biggest real estate conference in the world) or other large conferences where asset managers assist.

The second client is the one that buys the PoA tokens, this second client is harder to get as facebook, google, twitter and other Silicon Valley corporations are banning cryptocurrency related ads. We will focus on creating a community around our project. This community is represented by ambassadors or influencers, content writers, video and image animators, and of course the ones that are spreading the word by sharing our content.

12. What will Brickblock do to improve usability of crypto in real estate?

Our mission is to make investing in real estate as easy as possible. Through our smart contract platform, investors can invest Ethereum in tokenized assets with fast settlement times, improved liquidity, and low fees. There is no need to exchange into fiat currency first — or ever. Being able to invest cryptocurrency in tokenized real estate hedges against the risk of holding a highly volatile asset. Investors have a seamless way to diversify their crypto portfolio with tokens backed by one of the world’s most stable assets. All of this is possible in just a few easy steps.

13. If I were to have my property tokenized through Brickblock how will that work if its mortgaged?

No problem! So long as the mortgage is only linked to the property/SPV, there is no issue.
Brick Block deals in investment-grade properties, not personal homes. These properties are housed inside of SPVs and the mortgage stays on the property/SPV not on any individual, so tokenizing is not an issue. We tokenize the equity and pay out the profits.

14. If a government were to seize a property tokenized through Brickblock, how will the smart contract know it’s seized, or how will it trigger the property to not be sold by the owner from whom it was seized?

If a government seizes a property, there is no legal way to prevent that from happening. The government can sell the property, just like if it was your personal house, and the owner has no power to stop this process. This is true no matter if the property is tokenized or not. In that case, any remaining profits from the sale are distributed to token holders. Token holder’s claims are actually in front of the owners. Token holders come first.

On the other hand, these are investment-grade properties housed inside an SPV, which limits liability for token holders. If you owned a property without an SPV, the government can come after every token holder for more than they invested as there is no limit on the liability without an SPV. This is why Brickblock uses the safest structures available — structures utilized by the largest financial institutions in the world — to protect token holders.

I was approached by Manuel to be part of the ambassador team, initially I was skeptical, as I am not very fond of ICO’s, but that skepticism vanished very fast.

This is why:

Brickblock is on the brink to make YOU crypto people, able to purchase real estate with a click of a button, in other words as per White Paper:

2.4.1. Legal Enforceability of Claims
Brickblock enters a legally binding contract with
every fund manager and every broker-dealer. In contrast
to direct and trust-based investments in fund
managers, this adds an additional layer of security
for investors. On the Brickblock platform, every fund
manager has a direct liability to the investor, which
is enforceable through legal action.

So yes, you will be able to OWN a piece of property with your crypto, from a place you never been to, or never heard of.

But this is not the best part, Brickblock will tackle the BIGGEST asset class around, REAL ESTATE, ehem, $217 TRILLION USD in value (as of 2016). To give some context:

• Value of all the gold ever mined is approx. $6 trillion USD.
• The world economy, outputs a GDP of about $80 trillion/year.

Is my opinion that Brickblock ICO hard carp of $50 million USD will be reached way before the end of the 7 days, and post ICO price of a single BBK will be worth plenty more than the ICO price. Why?

• Most of us are looking to diversify our crypto assets. What better way to have exposure to the biggest asset class that is real estate, than with Brickblock. Yes, there will be plenty demand of BBK.
• Brickblock team is solid, not a single doubt they will accomplish what they have aimed themselves to do.
• Imagine if Brickblock could tap 0.1% of that global real estate valuation, we are talking of exposure to 217 billion USD. Yes, there will be an absurd demand, every real estate promoter would want to have their projects available in Brickblock, due to the demand of crypto millionaires to diversify their wealth.

I am now an ambassador at Brickblock, I have done my research and due diligence on the project, I am convinced of the project will be a crushing success; but you should not trust what I am writing here as I am convinced already.

This is not a financial advise and you should do your own research on Brickblock before investing on it, and understand if you are willing to lose this investment, as there is always risk in innovative markets as, technology, fintech, and cryptocurrencies, due to regulations, geopolitical issues, and what not.

If you enjoy the read, follow me on Twitter, is good for Karma.