What if a building becomes a bank?

The blockchain technology will influence the way we look at architecture. We will move from looking at building as final product to a liveable ever-changing value storage.

The blockchain technology makes it possible to put your value in any kind of material/ building material by putting all of the ledger information in a validating system that is immutable. This means that in the future the value you get for the work you do, will no longer be paid in money but paid in registered materials like steel, stone, wood, or plastics.

Because there is no centralized third party that will keep your value stable and hold it for you, like the money system we know today, your value in raw materials is persistently changing. The raw material is constantly in a manufacturing chain of any kind of product. This means that every change made to material in the manufacturing chain is costing you money.

But every change made to this material: transformation, re-owning and transportation is added to the ledger. And therefore, the owner of the material can always track where his value is. This decentralized information material bank will be visible and useable for everybody in the world.

Owning value that only costs you, is not a functioning system. An example of a way to save up the value and let this value grow bigger, is to steer your raw material into manufacturing chain where the final product is a circular building element.

So, on the one hand this platform stores all of the information of the value you earned by working, but it is lowering in value to keep the material in the chain. Therefor the platform will both function as a registration system as well as a material crowd-collecting platform.

On this open source crowd-collecting platform anybody can collect all of the building elements necessary for building their own house. These collected building elements all have an owner. By giving their building element to the person that wants to build a house, the value of their materials will no longer cost them. The person who is building the house will pay rent for this product as long a he uses it. Every owner for every building element is payed through smart contracts, so that the house builder just sees how much he has to pay in total.

This system will demand architecture to be built in a extreme circular way, whereas houses have to be designed in a way that at any given time, any given element of the building has to be able to disassembled and changed. This is because all the materials in your crowdfunded house, all have different owners. Does an owner of a crowd collected steel beam decides he wants to spend the value of his steel beam and therefor the steel beam has to be relocated. Then the house has to be able to lose and replace this steel beam without falling apart.

This way buildings will no longer be built by a single big investor that has all the money to build. Tomorrow any person that has the plan to build a house can go onto this platform, crowd-collect every element the person needs for their house and build it.