Gary Woodhead is the founder of CurveBlock.io, a London Founder Institute portfolio company that is applying blockchain technology toward allowing its users to invest in energy-conscious real estate development projects. The vision behind CurveBlock is to democratize construction, and return its benefits to everyday investors, while prioritizing only green ‘net-zero’ new construction projects. CurveBlock CEO Woodhead explains,
[Blockchain] allows us to digitize and fractionalize all the future revenues of new construction, basically meaning that the working-class pubic can own part of the future revenues, in an evergreen sense, for as little as ￡10.
Watch below to see the full-length interview with CurveBlock founder Gary Woodhead:
Why Net-Zero Matters Now (Especially in New Housing)
The term Net-Zero implies that over the lifetime of a building or installation that produces its own energy, such as via rooftop solar, the structure will actually reduce more CO2 than its ‘cost’ in CO2 at construction or ongoing energy needs. This type of energy-embedded new construction therefore has no negative impacts, in terms of emissions that contribute to climate change; and as soon as their carbon footprints flip into net-negative, can actually create an overall benefit to the environment in CO2 pollution terms.
Based in London, CurveBlock’s first projects are focused on UK residential new construction, including in Wallington, Kent, and Croydon. As Curveblock founder Gary Woodhead notes upfront,
The problem with conventional construction is that it is the among the biggest polluters of carbon, globally.
Green Real Estate Investments on the Blockchain
But CurveBlock’s vision for ‘energy-positive housing’ provides a more hopeful vision for the future, prioritizing the types of projects that the world needs to transition towards rapidly in order to meet emissions reduction targets.
CurveBlock is a bit different than other crypto or blockchain-based investment platforms, in that the digital ledger is not one that is entirely decentralized. Instead, the CurveBlock Centralised Exchange ensures careful control over investors’ capital allocations, while taking care of all the property due diligence, and preserving investors’ liquidity. In differentiating CurveBlock’s approach to the tech, founder Gary Woodhead offers some critique of other tokenized asset exchanges, noting,
The [first] problem with decentralization is that it creates an issue with anti-money-laundering. Secondly, they pair themselves to bitcoin - so if you pair business to bitcoin, which is manipulated and highly volatile - you have no stability for the business, so that can’t be used in real-world use cases. And thirdly, none of them are embracing jurisdictional compliance, whether that be FCA in the UK, the SEC in America, and other regulatory bodies around the world. So there’s a major failing there with how many very early businesses in blockchain have effectively got an Achilles heel that will never see them get mass market adoption. However, we’re the opposite.
CurveBlock hopes to go public around year 6 on its current development roadmap, and is currently accepting new investors to the platform. To learn more, read the recent highlight piece published in The Tokenist and visit their website at https://CurveBlock.io
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