NFT Utility At Last: Real Estate Sold On OpenSea Attracts Attention

“Where is the utility?” they asked. It’s been a core component of the NFT discussion since the earliest days, and increasing amounts of NFT use cases unfold each week. Look no further than the real estate market this week, as the internet has been brewing on a specific South Carolina home that had it’s deed tokenized and sold on OpenSea over the past weekend.

Let’s look into some of the details surrounding the sale of the house, as well as how this can impact the NFT and housing markets.

Utility, At Last

Art has been the starting point for NFT growth, and utility will take that growth to the next level. That doesn’t diminish or lessen art-driven NFTs by any means, but rather speaks to the momentum that NFTs need to break into even more mainstream applications. While utility-driven NFTs are not brand new, we’re still in the hourly hours where increasingly unique use cases of NFTs are emerging.

The latest example of this lies in real estate, as a Columbia, South Carolina home closed through a listing on OpenSea. The NFT was listed by a web3 property operated by real estate fintech firm Roofstock, and the three-bedroom home sold for $175,000. The transaction utilized OpenSea and even had property features – such as the square footage and year built – displayed through OpenSea’s NFT trait display. Additionally, the firm also has a native Origin Protocol-powered marketplace dashboard. It’s a series of new tools introduced to the real estate market.

The real estate transaction in South Carolina took place via stablecoins on Ethereums ERC-20 network. | Source: ETH-USD on TradingView.com

The Takeaway

The owned website listing from the Roofstock subsidiary, Roofstock Onchain, provides a clean UI overlay over the whole thing – while still even clearly and immediately presenting the Etherscan transaction. The transaction took place via USDC on ERC-20, and represents another unique use case for NFTs.

There’s been a variety of real estate endeavors rooted in web3 and NFTs, including projects that mirror real life real estate assets and projects that positions properties as micro investments on-chain, among others. Be on the lookout as more make a splash, and as utility continues to be a focal point for new NFT market participants.