Yesterday, Hong Kong real estate developer Stan Group announced the launch of a tokenized profit-sharing system for its employees. Using a private blockchain, the company is tokenizing real estate for employee incentives and recognition. The group as a whole has more than HK$ 60 billion in assets under management ($7.8 billion).
A “Brick” is a blockchain token for a specific building. It’s associated with a smart contract that entitles the brick owner to a share of the capital gain when the building is sold. For now, it has started with just one building but plans to add others as the program grows.
The Buy-a-Brick program integrates with Stan Group’s existing incentive scheme, where employees earn points for business pitches, business referral, attending design thinking and other talent development workshops. While previously these points could be converted to vouchers, hotel stays and other perks, now they can be used to buy a Brick, or a token representing a property. This facility is available without any cash investment from the employees.
“We are thrilled to launch Buy-a-Brick for internal staff as it redefines staff appreciation. I believe every one of our staff members plays an integral role in the Group’s success and should be able to reap the reward and share the value created,” said Stan Tang, Chairman of Stan Group.
Most companies are exploring the technology for either real estate or rewards and loyalty programs. But Stan Group has combined the two use cases for a private blockchain network based on Quorum, JP Morgan’s enterprise version of Ethereum.
A few months ago, Stan Group partnered with Liquefy to explore real estate tokenization.
Numerous real estate tokenization projects have launched recently. Last week, Liquefy partnered with a consortium of Gulf families on a tokenization project for $1 billion of real estate assets. In Germany, real estate developer Bauwens opened up its €6.7 billion ($9.46 billion) worth of business portfolio to Fundament Group.
Meanwhile, Dubai property developer Emaar is running a project similar to Stan Group. The Burj Khalifa owner plans to launch a blockchain referral and loyalty platform later this year. But this is for clients not purely staff.
