Brett:

I'm excited about our next guest and she has an amazing background. She's out of the Great, great country of Israel. She's live from Hungary today traveling a bit and she is on a mission to help people make property investing accessible, transparent, and streamlined with Solid Block where she is the Co-CEO and Co-founder. Prior to founding this company, she spent almost two decades in the financial markets at a wall street broker-dealer as an analysis analyst moving to m&a and private equity, as well as financial engineering structuring products and indices for pension funds and family offices. She also worked on the largest IPO of Israel, a real estate company on AIM, and served as an executive the largest MVNO in Israel that was listed on the NASDAQ and so much more, and please welcome to the show with me, Yael Tamar. How are you?

Yael:

Amazing. How are you, Brett? Thanks for having me.

Brett:

Doing great better than I deserve and excited to have you here with our with myself and the guests that are gonna be listening or watching it live right now on YouTube or Facebook, and our listeners get to know you for the first time. Would you give us a little bit more about your background and your current focus?

Yael:

Brett. My background, you've summed it up perfectly. I come from a traditional financial background, I jumped into the world of blockchain after doing a startup in the FinTech sector, and it was when everybody in the Silicon Valley was crazy about blockchain, and I jumped into the rabbit hole and never regretted it. Somebody from my background was in high demand when you needed this concept explained to a bank or a financial institution or government. I had a fantastic two years consulting all of these regulated bodies when blockchain was at its high, and I jumped back into real estate with Solid Block in 2018, when the regulator's started really cracking down on unregulated fundraises for practically speaking securities that the companies were doing under the premise of what's called initial coin offerings. So I jumped back into the game because I understood the regulation is coming, and I really understand the regulation, compliance from having a long career, in the financial markets. So, and real estate was always kind of the backstory throughout my career working on IPO’s for real estate companies, structuring real estate funds, and so on. So for me, I realized that this industry specifically really needs transformation, he's the revolution, and what can be better than blockchain to deliver this transformation.

Brett:

I can't wait to glean some wisdom from you in such a unique background, with Wall Street with cryptocurrency with real estate. Then we're going to dive into that we're talking about transforming real estate into fractional investments, basically, how to get real estate more liquid, right using blockchain technology. We're gonna dive into that. But before we go there, I want to take one other step back, I want to give our listeners a chance and myself to get a little bit more. See, I believe we've all been given certain gifts in this life, and these gifts have been given to us to be a blessing and help to others. Some people call them superpowers. Some people call them strengths. I want you to go back to the earlier years, maybe high school years name his university years maybe it was the time where someone spoke into your life about hey Yael I think you have these certain gifts or these strengths. I'm curious about one of the maybe those strengths or gifts that you believe you were given, and how does that help how you help and bless people today.

Yael:

I was born in the former Soviet Union country of Ukraine, and my Jewish parents had injected in me this theory that I have to get out of Ukraine at all costs. That's something indoctrination that you get from an early age. When I was 15 years old, I entered a contest that all Ukrainian teenagers go through us to go through, and then a handful of them gets to go to the United States to get kind of indoctrinated with capitalism, and they come back and injected back into the Post-Soviet economy, and I happen to win. Be, one of the winners of the contest, and I went to America to learn all the ways of the American economy, and I really fell in love with economics. I don't know whether when I was younger I used to do math and physics, that was kind of my thing. But when I got to America, I just fell in love with the freedoms because being from the former Soviet Union, I remember like, my, one of my earliest memories, is actually standing in line for butter, and having shortages of everything, and buying ice cream with this money that would every day have more zeros added to it. We hadn't crazy inflation back in the day. We were buying stuff with millions and billions of local currency. When I got to the US, and actually there was an economics class in high school, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with my economics professor, I think his name was Dr. Stone, and so that was kind of like what I wanted to do. I ended up going to college in America, getting a bunch of scholarships, and I wanted to study economics, specifically, why people make decisions that they make behavioral economics, why people buy things, why people save how people invest, all of that was super interesting to me.

Brett:

Someone shatters some of that out. You fell in love with economics, but more so you also fell in love with the drive to freedom and your parents instill that into you to whatever you do, you're going to be somewhere else than Ukraine and the circumstances that we're in from very, very scarce humble beginnings, two ways to help even I would even maybe put this together, correct me if I'm wrong, but how to create or give economics to people to get more freedom? Is that a fair summary?

Yael:

I was always interested in how to create this effect. What you need to give to an individual is kind of a step on which that they can stand so they can create their own economic freedom so they can invest in a portfolio of assets and create a good future for themselves.

Brett:

Now, let's like a laser. Let’s talk about transforming real estate into fractional investments, with your wall street background. REATs (Real Estate Asset Token) are typically liquid investment-grade securities. type of traditional stocks, bonds, mutual funds, versus commercial real estate or investment, real estate. Now you're bringing these two together via blockchain. I don't know, where would you start, except forgive us the moment where the vision connects, give us that story of, Okay, I've got this background, I've got this love for real estate, and how can we connect it to and transform this fractional ownership of an investment, real estate.

Yael:

I have an interesting story from my time in Wall Street, my kind of my company, and my boss was visionary in a way. I had a dream to create a new asset class, right to basically, at that time, I believe it was a marketplace for expired options, and we went to the SEC asking them for basically applying to do and to make the vision a reality. I think at that time, it didn't go through. But for me, it was eye-opening that we can actually communicate with the regulator, and create a whole new asset class that didn't exist before. I started kind of researching even through my college and masters and, and then doctorate like, which I didn't, didn't end up finishing, but I started researching this whole evolution of asset classes and financial products, and I realized that every decade had its own kind of asset class that was raining at the time like hedge funds weren't known until a certain time mutual funds, many have index funds, you have funds of funds, you have all of that, and I actually use that later in my career when I was putting funds together.

Again, when we were putting funds together these extremely liquid products that we would throw in, who are selling them to banks to resell to rich people, right to accredited investors, and then my idea and kind of my vision was always to make things accessible to everybody to make good access investments accessible to everybody. That was kind of like always in the back of my mind. So and you know, what we're doing essentially what we want to do with our technology is to create an asset class that's accessible for everyone for different reasons. Number one, because you don't have as an individual investor, you frequently don't have access to investing in an amazing hotel, or a commercial project or, or a skyscraper, and number two is a regular people don't have the possibility to have their money stuck in some investments for many, many years. Those are kind of two things that I really wanted to change with this new asset class that is now possible.

Brett:

The vision and being in Wall Street and seeing that you can create new asset classes, and, in fact, it's what the history is, you can hedge funds weren't always around, now they're around, and the ability to work with regulators and understand that process, and then seeing how the wealthy are making their wealth with the products that you're working with insane. Is there a way to connect that to the everyday person and also give them liquidity, but also get amazing commercial real estate and that's my background? That's my love, and that's where a lot of people are at. But you're right, it's so daunting unless you're an accredited investor. We'll talk about how your system works in a second here, and or you have a ton of money, and no, it's of these all these people to get into these big amazing commercial real estate yet, in fact, the top 3% of all wealth in the US and even maybe pincher, the world owns commercial real estate. How are you breaking that old pattern of having to be or have as much to get there? Is that a fair summary so far?

Yael:

Brett, that's a fantastic assessment. I would only add that you mentioned the top 3% on commercial real estate? Well, I'm almost anybody, any new investor starts with a more basic asset class, a more secure asset class. a lot of people are looking, let's say, to join, and to start investing in cryptocurrencies. I'm not an investment advisor, but what I usually say is that that's fantastic, and it's great to learn how that works. But let's make sure that first, we hit cut, we cover the basics with investment. So there, there is a best of both worlds out there is where you have access to what's called the digital asset, and by the way, everybody, I think, I feel like, in the last few days, or a month, people started learning what digital assets are with this new infrastructure bill that's coming to a vote. This new asset class, the school digital assets, is coming on TV screens of an average American out there. With this asset class, you can actually have those assets backed by a seek more secure asset class that shows real estate.

Brett:

By the way, you can learn more about Yael Tamar at solidblock.co. That's solidblock.co. Now let's dive into exactly how you're doing that. What's the practical application? Might you, kind of give us a case study of the old way. Then versus the new way with your service? What solid blocked SEO is doing.

Yael:

A little bit of history. Before 2012 what happened 2012? It was the JOBS Act. The JOBS Act was the American initiative, that legislative initiative that enabled individual investors to invest in private securities, and then trade these securities. How does that change our investment world before then you when you invest in any sort of project so you could invest in a read, you could invest in real estate investment trusts, or you could invest in, let's say, somehow he came upon the project, you're an accredited investor, you put money in, you didn't have a way to trade that investment. Now from 2012 because of the JOBS Act, any company raising funding in the private offering can actually facilitate trading for investors. If you put money in a project, you can actually trade that investment, trade that investment with other investors. So that's what that what that's what the job is that did. Now I’m coining together with that development in the EU and US history.

We also had Bitcoin coming into the market Bitcoin. That's the first cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology enables the transfer of assets, including financial assets and currencies, through a decentralized system of computers that does not involve does not about banks or any other payment apps like PayPal or Venmo. Bitcoin I was the first application of blockchain, and now, after a few years of bitcoins existence, a lot of the software developers and businesses realize that they can use this technology, this hyper-secure way to transfer funds without a centralized entity, we can use it for other things, and namely, for creating digital securities. Instead of Bitcoin, or basically as some sort of a crypto asset, we can actually create an asset that's backed by real assets but backed by hotels backed by maybe a portfolio of real estate, and now this new crypto asset, we can people can treat it freely and not and I think the best way for us to actually look at it is by looking at a use case.

Our first asset was done what's called Aspen Coin, which was a digitized project called Aspen, St. Regis Aspen ski resort. It's a famous resort in Aspen, Colorado, and they issued with our, with our technology, they issued the Aspen Coin and the value of $18 million, and it's backed by the hotel it's backed by the real estate in the hotel, and as opposed to Bitcoin Etherium and other cryptocurrencies which are highly volatile, and are basically based on their value is based on different market forces and opinion of people that hold it. In this case, it's actually backed by an asset by a real-world asset, the investors just like in investing in any security, get dividends from the hotel management, and if they want to, they can go and exit from their investments, they can go on an exchange called t zero, and actually, sell their investment back. Right, not sell it that but sell it to somebody else, sell it to another investor.

Brett:

I'm thinking a little bit like a REAT (Real Estate Asset Token). But maybe you can dispel a little bit of the differences between a REAT versus the Aspen Coin.

Yael:

REAT is more or less a financial, our attack structure. In fact, we created a REAT for the Aspen Coin so that it facilitates a better benefit for investors. But when you invest in a traditional multi-asset REAT, you have an asset manager that decides on how to allocate, right every manager that decides how to allocate this investment, you are entitled to certain interest or, or dividends from your investment, and if it's a Private REAT, then you if anytime you want out of the read, you have to approach the manager, and then there is some sort of a procedure most reads have some sort of a process for you to get out of reach, it's not straightforward, you don't know exactly what the value of your investment is at that time, and what you're going to get, right so and if it's a Public REAT, then it's a public company, and the costs are much, much higher, and of course, you're not expecting to get such a high payout as when investing in a private company. That's basically the difference is with tokenized real estate, you can actually invest in a single project that you like that you believe in that you identify with, which is very close for to you know, for very very important for millennial investors, for example, and you can also exit by selling this to others, there is a secondary market for this right there there is trading on the secondary market.

Brett:

Case, I'm gonna try to encapsulate that for our listeners and for myself here as well. REAT is going to be let's say bigger more properties, more deals, versus let's say, a single project that you'd like, that you can actually get your mind around in the grass. It's going to be also more expensive, with more cost, more overhead, less flexibility, less, you're giving up more control here, it's gonna be less expensive, easier to exit and sell on the open market. Is that a fair general summary so far?

Yael:

Very much so, and just one more thing to add with the single projects for you to invest in. There are many other considerations than just income. Sometimes it's ESG, Environmental Social Governance, aspects like sustainability, or anything related to causes. We have a product. We have some projects on the platform that have, detox medical facilities, for example. We have you know, an app, we're looking at an acid with a PTSD clinic for veterans we're looking at, we actually are working with affordable housing. Anything that you really, really like and identify with, you can actually participate in that specific one.