DOMA is a distributed housing platform that will bring renters towards ownership structures, through the digital token economy by creating a network of properties across several cities in Europe. DOMA is a blockchain-based, shared ownership platform for equitable real estate. Bridging the great divide between renting and owning a home, DOMA leverages the principles of the new token economy to support a model of networked home ownership and enables a more fair distribution of value for urban living.
For Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks DOMA travels to Vancouver to meet with the research cluster, host a Multi-Stakeholder Workshop on June 8 in Partnerships with Emily Carr University, as well as take part in the Blockchain@UBC Annual Conference on June 10, and participates in a Researchers Roundtable with a forthcoming publication (Springer).
Alternative Financial Architecture for Housing
DOMA aims to redistribute the economic profits in a fairer way, resulting from the processes of urban regeneration – so that both the original and the new population of a given neighborhood can benefit from it. In this sense, DOMA can also serve as a strategic tool for the conservation of social, ethnic, and architectural diversity within a given neighbourhood: that diversity, which often constitutes the very trigger of the renewed attention and subsequent urban changes that the area is undergoing, being itself recognized and treated as an urban value.
Operating as a non-profit community development corporation, DOMA continually accumulates existing housing in city centers that provide a positive correlation between the purchase price and rental rate. The network is able to accrue value by capitalizing on this relationship and through the absorbing of costs such as mortgage interest, insurance, and transfer fees.
The platform’s users are token holders, like shareholders, they increase their stock in a housing co-op and pay monthly dues equivalent to market rate for ownership in the network rather than in a stationary inhabited unit. This allows for movement between network-owned units, providing flexibility with stability. In addition to rights of occupancy contingent on dues, users maintain voting rights, a data co-op and developer status in a peer-to-peer marketplace, through which they can provide and receive in-home services and goods, utilizing positive equity balance as credit.
Maksym Rokmaniko is an architect, designer, and entrepreneur. His research and design work explores new forms of urban living enabled by emerging technologies. He is the founder of the architectural practice Anarchitects (Kiev), a partner at The Center for Spatial Technologies (Kiev) and the project lead at DOMA (Berlin/Kiev), a blockchain-based, networked-ownership housing platform for the token economy.
Francesco Sebregondi is a partner of DOMA, an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. Since 2011 he is a Research Fellow at the award-winning practice Forensic Architecture, former Research Coordinator of the project (2013-2015), and co-editor of its first collective publication “Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth” (Sternberg Press, 2014). Since 2015, he’s a CHASE-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, where his research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. In 2017, he was a participant in The New Normal speculative design programme at Strelka Institute in Moscow. Since 2017, he is also a Research Fellow at UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technology. Francesco’s writings have been published in journals such as the Architectural Review, Volume, Footprint, the Avery Review, or City. He has taught a design studio at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art (2013-2015). He lives and works between Paris and London.
Francis Tseng is a designer and software engineer working in simulation, machine learning, and games. In the past he was a designer at IDEO, an OpenNews fellow at the Coral Project (New York Times/Washington Post), a Researcher-in-Residence at NEW INC, adjunct professor at the New School, and was the co-publisher of The New Inquiry. While at The New Inquiry, Francis developed projects such as White Collar Crime Risk Zones and Bail Bloc, a well-known cryptocurrency scheme that raises funds against immigrant detention in the U.S. Presently he is working on economic and transit demand simulations for the Institute of Applied Economic Research, and developing a multiplayer game with DOMA.
