Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: crypto

  • NFTs and real estate

    I have started using my NFT collection as a rotating face on my Apple Watch. The one you see below is a Cool Bean, but I have many others in the gallery. Lately, I have been gravitating towards NFTs on the Solana blockchain because of how fast and cheap it is to transact. Though I am still much longer with ETH.

    https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1453406293256024074?s=20

    This is all pretty geeky stuff, but it reminded me just how early we are when it comes to web3. NFT art has exploded over the last year, but the broader ecosystem is still getting built out. We are all going to want mediums in which to display and experience this new form of art. And as soon as that happens, I suspect they won’t be thought of as “just JPEGs” anymore.

    (One of the nicest digital art displays that I have seen is the MONO X7. It’s currently available for pre-order but I haven’t yet pulled the trigger.)

    On a related note, I follow a human on Twitter who goes by 6529, because that is the Cryptopunk number that she/he owns. 6529 is incredibly bullish on crypto and NFTs, and tends to write long and insightful threads about it. One of the most recent ones is about real estate and I think that many of you will find it a worthwhile read.

    https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1452797543478448129?s=20

    What I particularly like about it is that it reminds us that so much of what we consider to be normal and the status quo is actually just a construct that people before us created. Usually it’s not perfect and there are many inherent flaws, but it’s the best that could be done at the time. That or it just worked.

    And because it’s the way it’s been “always done”, it just recedes into the background and most of us don’t give it much thought. Of course, so much of entrepreneurship is about questioning the status quo and doing things differently. Why this way? Could it be better? And it’s precisely during these moments of change where lots of value is created.

  • Innovation in real estate development

    I am moderating a panel at the Toronto Real Estate Forum later this year (it’s on December 2 to be exact). The topic is innovation in development. There is a great panel of speakers (more info here) and the plan right now is to cover everything from new design and construction approaches to the rise of crypto and blockchains. Topics that are all near and dear to this blog.

    But we are still in the early stages of planning and I haven’t yet figured out what the questions to the panel will be. So I thought it would be interesting to hear from all of you: What would you say are the most important topics to cover when it comes to innovation in development? What’s next for our industry, or what should be next for our industry?

    If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment below. That way everyone can see them. Supposedly this is one of the most asked for topics at the real estate forum, and so it’s clearly top of mind for many people.

  • Offline and online

    I was out for dinner this week with a group of real estate developers. And as you might expect, we spent the majority of the time talking about real estate and complaining about how long things take. But a good chunk of time was also spent pontificating about the world of crypto. That’s what happens these days. In fact, one of my friends joked that my/this blog used to be a real estate and cities blog, but now it’s a crypto blog. It’s a joke, but I guess it’s becoming partially true.

    For as long as I can remember, I have always been interested in what’s new and what’s next. And I think this is next. So I’m reading, playing, thinking, and writing about it. And the more I do these things, the more my conviction grows. But what really did it for me was the hands-on playing around part. I’m not interested in owning a crypto ETF (the US is about to get its first bitcoin ETF based on futures contracts). I want to own the cryptocurrencies directly so I can see what they can do and how everything works. (Though I will say that this space is still not very user friendly.)

    One of the things that comes to mind as I continue to play is the future interrelationship between our offline and online worlds. Because already we are living in a world where people now buy and collect rent on virtual real estate in places like Decentraland (REITs are even starting to emerge). Where parties happen online instead of offline (but still attract big name DJs). Where people buy digital fashion instead of physical fashion, and pay just as much for it and sometimes even more. And where augmented reality is changing how we experience our cities in real life. A few weeks ago, I came across a park in Paris that had partnered with Snapchat to deliver an AR experience, to give just one example.

    These are meaningful shifts that are gaining traction (and this post is by no means an exhaustive list). And while I remain steadfast in my belief that cities are profoundly resilient and real-world experiences are irreplaceable, I do believe that our emerging digital worlds are going to have an impact on how we design and build our cities going forward. From art murals of NFTs to entire new virtual worlds, this is an exciting time for cities and technology.

    Enjoy the weekend.

  • Optimistic and excited

    With seemingly so much happening in the world these days — everything from COVID to climate change — it is perhaps easy to feel a little discouraged about the current state of affairs. But I am an optimist. And as I mentioned on Twitter a few weeks ago, I haven’t been this excited about the future of tech and the internet in a long time.

    We are seeing the auto industry quickly transition to electric vehicles (though, in my opinion, not driving at all is still better for our cities than driving something that is electric). Norway has created the world’s first ever zero emission, autonomous cargo ship. And LIDAR vision systems are looking pretty promising as one of the technologies that will ultimately power fully autonomous vehicles.

    I believe in the resiliency of cities and, as I have been arguing on this blog all throughout COVID, I think the claims about the demise of our cities have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I think this pandemic has forced us rethink a lot of things about our urban environments, including how we allocate and use our public spaces (think patios). Some of these changes have been for the better and they’re not going to go away.

    I think the benefits of working in close proximity to others are too great to have everyone working remotely. Yes, we have learned that decentralization is possible. But there’s an overwhelming amount of research telling us that we’re all more innovative and productive when we cluster together in cities and in offices.

    I have been back in the office almost 100% of the time since it has been possible to do that. And I am much happier and more productive as a result. There’s also research suggesting that there are psychological benefits to a reasonable commute. It creates a break in our day, allows us to detach from our work, and gives us time to process stuff in our mind.

    I think things like digital fashion and augmented reality are going to have profound impact on the way we consume things. You could also argue that there’s a sustainability angle to more digital and less physical. And of course, I am excited about the transformations that I believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will continue to bring to many different industries (if not most).

    This morning I was reading a Financial Times article about cryptocurrencies in the developing world. It it perhaps no surprise that many of these countries are providing to be early adopters. People are leapfrogging over to cryptocurrencies because their existing currencies and financial systems aren’t effective enough. That has lead to adoption and penetration that looks something like this according to FT:

    There is, of course, many other things to be optimistic and excited about. But I’ll leave that for the comment section below. What are you excited about these days?

  • 8 years of writing every day

    This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It’s hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.

    I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.

    I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I’m not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That’s not what this blog is for or about.

    In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There’s more flexibility.

    Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT — a CryptoBabyPunk. I’m not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what’s happening in this space and I’ve committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.

    Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I’m not in the mood or I’m exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It’s a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I’ve questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.

    They say that the definition of a habit is that you don’t feel normal until you’ve done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.

  • Meatspace vs. metaverse — what is the best way to flex?

    With every passing year, the Matrix feels less and less like science fiction. With the continued rise of the metaverse — Zuckerberg is betting all of Facebook on it — we are increasingly living our lives between two worlds: one is offline and one is online. What this will ultimately mean (for us and for our cities) is of course up for debate. But what is clear is that the traditional trappings of real life have quickly made their way online into the metaverse. Arthur Hayes recently penned this fantastic article about the future of the world (it’s the metaverse) and the role of art (including NFT art). In it, he makes the argument that to “flex” is integral to the human experience. Here’s what he means by that:

    As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.

    People go to clubs to flex. In the words of the late Clayton Christensen, that is the “job” to be done.

    Why this matters is that many of us are now doing the same kind of things online. Buying a CryptoPunk (an OG NFT) for a large sum of money and posting it as your social media profile pic is a flex. Is this rational or irrational behaviour? Whatever your answer, it is akin to paying several hundred dollars for a t-shirt from some cool streetwear brand. The real job to be done is not that you desperately need a t-shirt to cover your upper torso. It is the signalling that goes along with owning something scarce and valuable. One of the things that is so special about NFT-permissioned stuff is that there’s now a simple way to prove and enforce all of these things: ownership, scarcity, and so on.

    What’s equally fascinating to me is how offline and online will end up interacting with each other. (Arthur refers to our offline world as the meatspace. I don’t know if he coined the term, but I’m going to rolling with it for the purposes of this post.) If people end up preferring to flex online instead of offline (and I’m sure many already do), what does that do to our meatspace(s)? And what does it do to our cities and how we build? I have no doubt that these questions are coming.

    Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash

  • Making sense of public ledgers

    One of the things about crypto and blockchains is that they are mostly public. Every transaction gets logged in a public ledger, which means that if you know the address of a particular wallet, you can see its balance, all the in and out $/crypto flows, any NFTs that it may own, as well as probably many other things that I am still working to get my head around. In all likelihood you won’t know who the wallet belongs to, but you’ll be able see what’s going on at that particular address.

    This is a pretty radical feature if you compare it to the way things generally work today. And what it signals to me is that we are headed towards a world with a lot more transparency and real-time data. Today I learned of a company called Dune Analytics. It is an analytics company built around open blockchain data (there’s no proprietary data). At the same time, it’s also a community. And it is this community (think of them almost as analysts) that helps to make sense of the open data.

    To give you an example, here is a chart from Dune showing monthly volume by NFT marketplace. OpenSea looks to be running away with things right now. And there’s no guessing. Here is all of the data.

    But, of course, this is just one example. Blockchain data could also be used to generate something like a real-time profit and loss statement for a company, which again, is pretty radical when you compare it to the way (and how slowly) that things are done today. It’s hard to not to see all of this and think about the far reaching implications of what’s unfolding right now. Everything from healthcare to real estate will almost certainly be transformed by this next iteration of the internet.

  • The next wave of computing innovation

    Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has just launched a new site called Future. It is a site for “understanding the future, how tech shapes it, and how we build it.” I just subscribed to it and, if you’d like to do the same, click here. At the same time, the company also just announced their latest crypto fund (a $2.2 billion fund). Here’s an excerpt from the release:

    We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto. We are radically optimistic about crypto’s potential to restore trust and enable new kinds of governance where communities collectively make important decisions about how networks evolve, what behaviors are permitted, and how economic benefits are distributed. 

    I’ve been reading a lot more about crypto over the last few months (which is something that I mentioned I was doing here.) I am not in this world day-to-day, but I am now fully convinced that we are in the very early innings of a profound shift. So pretty soon this is going to become my day-to-day, whether I like it or not.

  • What happened (in tech) in 2017

    I am still catching up on reading after being mostly offline last week, minus short windows where I would go online to upload these daily blog posts.

    Here is a post that Fred Wilson wrote on new year’s eve about “what happened in 2017.” It has become a tradition of his to write a “what happened” post on the last day of the year and a “what is going to happen” post on the first day of the new year. He then uses these posts to keep track of how well he does on his predictions for the year.

    His three headlines for 2017 were: (1) crypto; (2) the beginning of the end of white male dominance; and (3) the tech backlash (i.e. tech is the new Wall Street). It is worth a read. Crypto was an obvious one, but he has been writing about it – and investing in the space – for years. Of particular interest in this post is how he positions it as the basis for Internet 3.0 (the decentralized internet).

    What is also clear from the post is just how ingrained tech has become in our everyday lives and how much it reaches beyond simply the tech industry. I have been saying this for years, which is why I spend a lot of time writing about it on this blog.

  • Beware of scam ICOs

    There’s certainly lots of buzz these days around the Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. 

    Some of it is negative. 

    Here is a recent New York Times article talking about how celebrity-endorsed “initial coin offerings” have created a new gold rush. Most of these ICOs are scams.

    But some of it is quite promising. 

    Here is a brief summary of how the Blockchain is being leveraged for the real estate industry. Many jurisdictions are already using it, or experimenting with it, for their land registries.

    I’ve been writing about Bitcoin sporadically since about 2013. But I really should spend more time getting deeper into this world. Many believe it will underpin the next wave of innovation in the tech space.