We delayed this feature over at @lofty_ai for a few years, but I'm happy to announce that Governance 2.0 is finally live with the launch of the new community forums. One of the toughest problems to solve for what we're building has been to coordinate owners of the assets on the platform, the property managers they elect, and a way for high-trust discussions, all without Lofty sitting in the middle trying to scale a platform ops team. I think we've finally done it. Any investors on Lofty can now navigate to the "community" tab on the platform and gain access to property specifc forums, where any and all discussions can take place between owners. You can only post if you actually own at least 1 share of the asset. Your ownership percentage is displayed to everyone else when you post. Owners can directly propose a new governance vote in app now with Robert's rule in place. Once someone has seconded the motion, there is a timed discussion period before the vote goes live. Once the voting period is over, the results are automatically published and settled onchain. Early usage from our users is very promising and I'm sure there will be more improvements to make, but this launch completes one of the core pillars of what we set out to build. 1. Make real estate equity into a tradable digital asset. (We did this by tokenizing the equity at launch in 2021.) 2. Make the experience of buying and selling real estate more similar to buying and selling shares of stocks in your brokerage account. (We did this by introducing secondary markets in 2022 and then AMMs to real estate transactions in 2024.) 3. Provide a way for the various parties of a real estate holding to communicate and coordinate, make legally binding decisions, all without giving up privacy for users. (Launched now in 2026 with governance 2.0.) 4. Rebuild debt products for real estate from first principles now that real estate trades digitally and has good liquidity. (Upcoming lending products we plan to launch later this year in 2026). 5. Suite of fintech products in our ecosystem. Best in class bank accounts offering the higher than average interest rates, and credit cards that you can use to pay your mortgage/loan payments, while receiving cashback. (Coming in 2027). Funny how in 5 years our roadmap never changed. Things got shifted around, but the core pillars remained the same. Even with the advent of AI, we're fortunate that it's only a tailwind for our team to be more productive and lean, while knowing our moats are perfectly safe from it. We've always been building a new type of platform. Some people didn't realize it, and some people didn't believe us. But every day it's closer to reality.

I really aspire to be able to provide this level of customer support should Lofty IPO one day. What a GOAT!

More rewards for users providing liquidity on markets 🤝 liquidity closer to the action We have concentrated our LP rewards on selected markets paying out $15 in USDC and another ~$30 in $alpha every DAY. You could earn hundreds of dollars PER DAY just for having open limit orders. We’re also introducing adaptive reward bands. On supported markets, four tiers tighten the reward band as the midpoint moves toward 0% or 100%. This means at extreme prices orders need to be closer to the midpoint to earn. Check each market’s max spread and minimum shares before placing orders. Opt in to ALPHA to earn ALPHA alongside USDC.

Congrats to all owners of 25 Rocky Ridge Rd on @lofty_ai! On one hand, I like seeing properties remain on the marketplace, because it leads to more trading volume and revenue for us. But, it's also great to see our users lock in good returns. The interesting thing is that the calculation in the announcement post is using the original launch price of the property shares, which was at $50/share. In reality, some investors bought in when the price on the secondary market was trading at ~$25/share. Factoring in rent, some people out there made more than 100% in < 1 year.

We're excited to announce that our new liquidity pools for @lofty_ai are live for our users to beta test. There are only two available for now, but we'll be watching the metrics closely. Barring major changes, we'll release the new version for all properties by the end of next week. This is one of the biggest overhauls we've done on the platform. - if you lend property tokens, you'll receive your rewards in property tokens - if you lend USDC, you'll receive your rewards in USDC - rewards stay inside the pools to auto-compound and provide additional liquidity for the ecosystem - thanks to fractional property tokens, you can now withdraw fractional ownership, meaning a position like 16.789 tokens won't force you to only withdraw 16 whole tokens like before - there is now a 24 hour lock period, meaning if you deposit assets, you'll need to wait at least 24 hours to take them out Overall, these changes should allow the pools to stay more stable, less volatile long-term, and set us up for the infrastructure required launch our "not a mortgage" product later this year. If you're a Lofty user, please help us stress test these over the weekend!

It’s very obvious that prediction markets are going to be regulated, not to mention that derivatives are already regulated with very little room for regulatory arbitrage. This means if we want @alphaarcade to reach more mainstream consumers to grow, we have to obtain the licenses needed. It will be expensive and it will take time, but we think it will pay a lot of dividends in the future. I’m especially excited about what this means for our perps product launch and expansion on Algorand I know folks are used to quick pump and dumps in crypto, but good durable businesses can take time to build and compound slowly initially

You will know if something is rage bait about YC because they won’t even bother to get the details right. You get a lot more than 125k these days

This is the second property launch since our one year hiatus! It’s also our first international property. Some folks that have followed me for a while might remember the property in Mexico, but that deal never closed and investors were refunded. Excited to see more international listings in the future to offer more diversification for our users. It’s located in Dominican Republic and has no debt on it, very attractive for halal investors and funds that target them. We are increasingly seeing more of these kinds of investors, since we are one of the only platforms that offer listings with no mortgages on them.

First new property launch since last summer! Completely new launch process. This is the first property that’s onboarded and launched entirely by volunteers in the Lofty ecosystem. These volunteers are Lofty users that have underwriting or real estate experience, and they can make money or earn property shares by volunteering for these tasks. This means we’re now completely hands off from onboarding properties and stepping into the role of building the best real estate platform investment platform in the world. New supply of properties are being added to the pipeline. I think this format will allow the inventory to scale far better and faster than what our team can manage. Excited to see more launches again!

This is insane. Imagine if our ancestors did this when cars, sewing machines, fork lifts, or cars were invented…

I occasionally check youtube for some crypto/blockchain grifters. The latest videos show that they've all pivoted to AI lol. They've all seemingly become datacenter experts overnight

I'm happy to announce that we've completed share migrations on @lofty_ai. This means all investors received new versions of their existing shares 1:1. The new shares are fractional by nature, which means you can purchase 0.01 shares if you want now. But the best part is that we can now update the order interface, so that your default order method is based on the dollar amount you want to invest versus number of shares in the property. As I've said before, this opens up the door to so many opportunities. Starting now, you can make reoccurring investments on Lofty. It's on by default. No matter what the share price is for a property, you can always index a specific amount successfully into it each month. You can also change this frequency settings to weekly. Let the great DCA begin! PSA: for those users that have previously lost access to their wallet or shares from the MyAlgo hack, you will now be able to use these new versions of your shares freely!

This is always nice to see hear :) I've personally been making some big updates to how our support is handled at @lofty_ai the last month or so. Soon, we'll get to a 24/7 support cadence for our users with the help of LLMs. Let me know if you've noticed a difference in how quickly bugs are resolved and our response time. Lots to improve still!

You can now filter and query properties on @lofty_ai through our SDK by the property managers. Data shows that a good property manager makes a huge amount of difference in an investment. As more of our users use the SDK to monitor and balance their portfolios, it only makes sense to add this ability to the SDK. Check it out at github.com/foresightanalytic…

Don’t even use ACH if you can avoid it! Turns out, you can charge back ACH too if it’s fraud. The burden of proof is a bit higher, but if it’s met, you lose the entire amount. You can’t even dispute it like with a credit card chargeback. What’s worse is that if you already refunded the customer, they still have 6 months to do an ACH chargeback. And if they do, the bank and your payment processor don’t care if you already issued a refund. They will just take your money again, causing you to double refund in effect. Unless the customer cooperates, you will never get the money back. Wires can be recalled. Everything you’ve been told about fiat rail payments has been a lie. Everything can be reversed. It’s just a hassle and a matter of whether the banks and payment processors cooperate with you or not. People can dunk on crypto all they want. It is by far the most superior form of payments from a merchant’s perspective. No 3% credit card fees and 0% fraudulent chargebacks. Sadly, it’s just not practical to expect everyone to have USDC on hand yet. There should definitely be a shared registry among businesses where customers with bad behavior can be recorded and blacklisted. Eventually, they just won’t be able to buy anything. It’s the only way to enforce consequences. But it’s probably illegal or will be one day, when someone goes crying to some consumer protection department…

I think founders should be very upfront about the risks and rewards to early employees at a startup. If you’re looking for a ton of mentorship, well defined roles, and work life balance, startups aren’t it. Most are going to zero even if the thesis seam to make sense. The ones who aren’t doing this are definitely bad actors. But, I do also want to stress that even in the event of the company going to zero, it’s not like you’ve wasted your life as an early employee. Having some of these experiences and startups on your resume can be very desirable to bigger companies. For example, very early in when we didn’t know what the hell we’re doing at Lofty, we had a bunch of interns with very low pay (we genuinely couldn’t afford more). But because we had such a small team, we couldn’t afford to give our interns structured vanity projects. You had to build and deploy real production features period. That taught our interns a lot of valuable practical skills, which really made them standout. If I remember correctly, one went on to NASA, while 2 went to AWS, and one to Zillow. They also required visa sponsorships, so it’s likely they would have had an easier time and got even better offers if they had US status. So, work with people that are honest and upfront about things, but it can definitely be worth it to work at a startup, even if they don’t end up being huge and successful.

Our team at @lofty_ai has been hard at work with one of the largest architecture changes to the exchange, which will enable a ton of unique and powerful features on Lofty, including lending later this year. Since inception, property shares could only be owned and traded in whole units (at least 1 share). Adapting blockchain based trading algorithms around this limitation has generally been a huge headache for our team. No more, we just deployed native fractional shares to a property in production. Users don't need to do anything on their end, but they can now do the following: - Trade fractional shares for the first time - Trade based on dollar amount instead of share number - Automated re-purchases (coming soon) Check it out live now on this property - lofty.ai/property_deal/8848-…

Automatic re-lending is live on @lofty_ai now. Turn it on to auto-compound your returns. We're actually going to migrate to a completely new market making architecture soon. When the migration is done, rewards won't actually be distributed separately. Instead, they'll stay inside the pool, automatically compounding. So, this feature is only going to be live and necessary for maybe a month. Normally, we wouldn't have wasted time to build it, but our team is moving so fast these days, it was actually worth it to do this for now :)

In theory after this launch, the ecosystem will be complete. Algorand should have everything that any other chain has in terms of products and then some. The rest is up other folks, usage and liquidity.

Here is why I think it's not taking off yet. The authentication required to get all of your personal life's context synced to an agent is too technical and cumbersome right now. The underlying models are too conservative and just absolutely refuse to do certain useful tasks, and people target the wrong markets initially. I'm probably one of the most "agent" pilled person out there. I spent a ton of time playing around with @openclaw and @NousResearch's Hermes agent and ultimately went with Hermes. I've started to automate as many aspects of my life and businesses as possible and then offloading them to Hermes over time. It's already doing the following: 1. Automatically giving me a summary of my personal email inbox on which emails are likely important and require me to respond. 2. unsubscribing and deleting marketing/junk emails for me every 24 hours. 3. Planning trips (child friendly destinations and activities for my kids) and dates (for my wife). My wife was initially hesitant to follow it's recommendations, but it's done so well that she just kind of blindly accepts the itinerary now. 4. Find me authentic restaurants that aren't tourist traps when I travel. It has literally never failed once here. Even texts them in whatsapp to book reservations for me in the local language. 5. Running two of my businesses nearly on full autopilot -> @keebsforall and kfamarketplace.com 6. Make feature launch/brand videos for @lofty_ai Hermes is open source, so it's free, and I just use my existing subscriptions and API keys for it, so the net cost to me is really close to $0. But the one thing that I've seen it does with hints of consumer virality has been something almost trivial. Any man can relate to this. Sometimes our wives tell us important things such as play dates for kids, events, payment for specific bills, but we forget, and bad things ensue. Well, I built my agent so that my wife can text it whenever she wants with ANY tasks for me and it automatically extracts the important details (0 errors) and puts it on my calendar, either as an event or a google task. When my wife was hanging out with her friends at a play date, they saw her texting the agent tasks for me to do. All the wives thought it was hilarious and then immediately asked how they can get the same "app" and do it for their husbands too. Here's what I found interesting: 1. They immediately thought it was some app they could download and pay for and not something I've custom built for my wife. 2. They were 100% willing to pay for it immediately. Large sums/subscription too. These women were either lawyers themselves (big law in LA) or married to a pretty wealthy guy. Household pulling in at least 1-2M/year gross, ignoring assets and inherited wealth. I bet I could convince them to pay $500/month for something like this. 3. It was completely organic. My wife naturally had to use the "product" out in the world in front of her friends. They naturally saw what she was doing and asked about it. This can easily spread if her friends downloaded an app and then used it in front of their other friend groups. They also loved talking about this too as a topic in their group. Huge viral factor. Funny aside, they pronounced Hermes (as the luxury bag brand) and thought it was an app from them 😂 The only reason why I haven't taken advantage of this is because of the reasons I listed initially. Authentication sucks. The process that I went through to give Hermes access to my google account was very tedious and while not technically challenging for me, there was no way these moms were going to be able to do. It involved turning on API access for google services under your personal account, then getting a browser redirect that says page not found, then copying the URL back to your agent. Now imagine doing this for every piece of your life and having to re-auth the same way every few days. The underlying models refuse reasonable tasks and are too conservative. I always use frontier models with my agent, because I want the highest level of intelligence at my command. Codex and Claude models will just flat out to book a restaurant reservation that requires your credit card for a deposit, because they deem it unsafe, no matter how many times you tell it, it's your credit card, you're giving it permission to use, and you won't be mad if it messes up, nor will you sue it's creator for its mistakes. This means it often goes 90% of the task, then force you to do the remaining portion and defeats the point of having a luxury assistant. The market probably isn't productivity seeking people or even tech forward people. It's probably moms with kids that constantly need to remind their husband about something, which is literally most married couples. Extend that further and the initial market is probably a concierge/assistant for busy and wealthier families. Not so wealthy that they have human personal assistants already, but wealthy enough that they'd be happy to get the same level of service for $500-$1,000 per month. If most of the issues I ran into were fixed and I can spin this up as a product for my wife's friends, I'd probably immediately go out and sell it to them. I think I could get to $10k MRR with very low churn within 2 weeks. 0 paid acquisition cost. The only reason why I'm not doing it now is because the limitations of onboarding would require more of a "service/agency" type of business and I don't have the bandwidth for that while running Lofty full time.