Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute and John Reynolds, Founder and COO of Coadjute take us through the work they are doing to digitise the real estate industry using blockchain technology. They also explain to us the differences and advantages of using a SaaS (software as a service) blockchain model instead of a consortium one.

Coadjute from Coadjute Ltd on Vimeo.

Dan Salmons is the CEO of Coadjute. His background is a mix of large scale executive jobs in banks, head of innovation and head of strategy and CEO to a number of innovative fintech companies.

John Reynolds is the COO of Coadjute. John has spent the last 20 years working within organisations helping with their digital transformation from Dell, to Fujitsu and Lockheed Martin’s digital arm. What John has learned in 20 years is that digital transformation is partly about technology but it’s really about people’s hearts and minds and business change aspects.

John featured in an Insureblocks podcast on the 30th of November 2019 entitled: “Ep.86 – Real estate on the blockchain – insights from Coadjute”.

 

What is blockchain?

As John gave Insureblocks a definition of what is blockchain in our last podcast, Dan offered his definition of blockchain by using the analogy of the Glass Box Theory.

Dan invites us to imagine that you have a locker room at school amongst others who have their own locked lockers. Imagine you want to be sure that no one has stolen your favourite pair of trainers. The traditional central hub type solution is asking the teacher who has a set of keys that can open everyone’s locker, to go and check if the trainers are still there. As the teacher is trusted you trust that they won’t add or remove items from the locker.

The alternative solution is the blockchain one where you have glass doors on the lockers and you don’t need the teacher to check if anyone’s taken the trainers as everyone can see in everyone’s lockers and verify it. The trouble with that is that everyone can see everyone’s lockers. The alternative solution is a DLT one as the R3 Corda’s where you have two doors, one glass and one metal. In this scenario you can only let certain individuals within your class to open the metal door amongst themselves and you can give them permission to check if the trainers are still there. However, they still can’t access what’s in the locker.

 

Challenges of the real estate industry

Dan believes that the property industry as a whole, in comparison to other industries, is one that spends the least on technology and on innovation. It does have pockets of innovation and digitisation. For example, whilst sectors of the industry such as estate agents might be digitised, it is not digitised on an end to end basis. That’s where the main problem resides.

The challenge is that every player is using their own internal operational systems and their own CRM systems. What this means is that they’re using their core operational s...