Unlocking Commercial Real Estate:

Earn Fixed Income with Blockchain

Robinland provides fixed passive income to retail investors by tokenizing institutional-grade commercial real estate in a legal and decentralized fashion.

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Name
Multi-family Condos Sunset Park, NY
Investment Type
First lien loan
Estimated APR
8.00%
Token Price
$1,000
Total Tokens
250
Loan Term
24 Months (max)
— testimonials

Don't take our word.

Robinland is trusted by some of the top advisors.

Testimonial Image

Robinland is trailblazing the opportunity for anyone to easily invest compliantly in institutional-grade commercial real estate. Blockchain and security tokens unlock the potential for real-world asset investments providing the transparency and protection for investors.

Vincent Kadar

CEO, Polymath
Testimonial Image

Robinland is a leader in the vertical of bringing real world asset on chain. It combines a set of unique technical and legal solutions to expand access of previously-gated high quality real estate debt to the general public, and presents a unique use case of blockchain technology.

Yubo Ruan

Founder, Parallel Finance and ParaSpace
Robinland is supported by Leading Venture Capital Firms.
— fixed income

From Commercial Real Estate

Robinland’s investment product, powered by real estate debt, differs from conventional focus on equity and hence protects our investors from price risks and fluctuations traditionally associated with rental payments. Furthermore, Robinland’s reach into fractional commercial real estate beyond residential homes opens up unique and new opportunities previously inaccessible to the masses.

— blockchain

Transparency & Decentralization

Robinland leverages Blockchain technology to equip investors with an improved experience. In terms of enhanced transparency, security tokens give issuers, investors, and agents access to the same source of truth, which is highly transparent, immutable, and helps the cap table stay up-to-date. In terms ofgreater decentralization, investors can now keep the digital certificates of their fractional ownership (i.e. security token) in their self-custody wallet, instead of in a private database of a centralized entity or institution. These are only a few of many innovations Robinland will build into its investment product thanks to Blockchain.

— legal and compliant

Right Protection, Right Time

Robinland is proud to highlight its complete legality as a key differentiator in the current market. Robinland issues tokens representing fractions of its underlying real estate assets in a strictly legal fashion in compliance with all current regulations under the SEC “Security Token Issuance” in the United States.

— fixed income

From Commercial Real Estate

Robinland’s investment product, powered by real estate debt, differs from conventional focus on equity and hence protects our investors from price risks and fluctuations traditionally associated with rental payments. Furthermore, Robinland’s reach into fractional commercial real estate beyond residential homes opens up unique and new opportunities previously inaccessible to the masses.

— blockchain

Transparency & Decentralization

Robinland leverages Blockchain technology to equip investors with an improved experience. In terms of enhanced transparency, security tokens give issuers, investors, and agents access to the same source of truth, which is highly transparent, immutable, and helps the cap table stay up-to-date. In terms ofgreater decentralization, investors can now keep the digital certificates of their fractional ownership (i.e. security token) in their self-custody wallet, instead of in a private database of a centralized entity or institution. These are only a few of many innovations Robinland will build into its investment product thanks to Blockchain.

— legal and compliant

Right Protection, Right Time

Robinland is proud to highlight its complete legality as a key differentiator in the current market. Robinland issues tokens representing fractions of its underlying real estate assets in a strictly legal fashion in compliance with all current regulations under the SEC “Security Token Issuance” in the United States.

— behind the scenes

After You've Invested,

real estate developer regularly pays you the interests of your investment
Real Estate Developer
Borrows from Robinland as a faster & cheaper source of financing.
Pays USD
Monthly interests of the real estate debt.
Robinland
Receives the paid interests and looks up the distributed ledger on the blockchain that safely stores the info on the Security Token owners in a decentralized fashion.
Sends USD
Monthly interests of the real estate debt, broken down into each Security Tokens owner's fair share.
Security Token Owners
Retail investors anywhere in the world that own the Security Tokens pegged to the real estate debt.
To Bank Account
Investors can withdraw USD from their account balances on the Robinland platform to their own bank accounts.
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Zain Jaffer
Entrepreneur
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Investing in DeFi lending for Real Estate Debt

01 MAY 2022
Robinland is a much needed bridge between traditional and decentralized financing (DeFi) for the real estate industry. Using crypto tokens which can be secured against the underlying real estate, property developers can raise debt more cost effectively and faster than traditional mortgages. DeFi lenders such as MakerDAO are also benefiting from the platform as the underlying tokens are very safe to lend against as they represent a senior position on the underlying real estate. Holding such real estate tokens in your treasury provides a level of stability and safety that hasn’t yet been experienced across Web 3.0 liquidity pools.

Robinland’s Impact
Robinland came to me through another VC firm, Agya Ventures; Kunal is someone I highly respect and have worked with in the past, which got me interested in this opportunity. His experience at Blackstone gives him a really deep view of what the ecosystem needs. I’ve also co-invested with thier VC fund before and consider Agya to be top-tier PropTech investors. I’ve also co-invested with their VC fund before and consider them to be top-tier PropTech investors.

Robinland is unique as an investment platform, because there’s a huge market for all aspects of what they’re doing, both with the traditional real estate sector and the new emerging DeFi industry. The way Robinland sits at the intersection of these two markets is what makes the investment interesting.

They’re innovating in 3 areas I find particularly interesting:
1. Leveling The Playing Field
Traditionally, buying real estate has been for those who have access to lots of capital through their own savings or getting approved by a lender (you need a track record). Typically a bit of both are needed, although neither are easy for most people to get, hence the saying “you need money to make money.” Robinland is shifting this dynamic in favor of anyone who is willing to jump in by lowering the barrier to entry. They’re effectively democratizing real estate investing.
2. High Liquidity & Low Costs
By tokenizing real estate debt, Robinland is creating a new type of legal security coupled with a small ticket size. This allows for high liquidity and negligible transaction costs. Investors are able to purchase tokens that pay regular dividends, meaning their earnings will be more stable and frequent, without the expenses associated with real world assets.
3. New Type or Crypto Asset
Robinland is introducing a new “crypto bond” asset class that diversifies/hedges crypto portfolios. It’s unique in that it’s backed by RWA (real world assets), meaning it’s farless risky and volatile than other types of cryptos as the tokens are in the treasury and have real, tangible value. Despite being a completely new concept, it’s been deemed legally complaiant (SEC approved)

Why I invested in Robinland
Robin’s core model is the first use case I’ve seen for DeFi lending in real estate that I feel has potential. Aside from the strong founding team and market potential, I’m drawn to the company’s abilitiy to offer something unique. Solving problems is everything, but Scarlet and her team are doing it in a way that hasn’t been done before, and they’re doing it well. As someone who was only able to invest in real estate after I sold my company, I’m intrigued by the low barrier to entry Robinland is creating for driven individuals who may not have the capital to invest in high quality real estate deals, or even at all.
I’m thrilled to announce a pre-seed investment into Robinland via our family office.
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Scarlet
CEO of Robinland
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The Robinland Way of Real Estate

12 NOV 2021
DeFi in 2021
The field of finance has not been this interesting since 08.

Traditionally, banks are the ‘heart’ of finance: absorbing deposits and reallocating such liquidity throughout the economy to facilitate funds to get to its most productive use. However, in the most recent 2 years, DeFi (decentralized finance) has completely changed the landscape. The emergence of Smart Contracts and DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) enabled the reallocation of liquidity to be provisioned in a completely decentralized, peer-to-peer manner, bringing the cost down and the speed up in a way the world has never seen before.

So far, DeFi lending facilities mostly accept on-chain native assets (such as utility tokens or stablecoins) as collateral to extend loans. But the field of DeFi now has gradually arrived at the realization that, in order for DeFi to really revolutionize the world of finance, it has to embrace applications in the real world, i.e. financing RWA as collateral.

However, the application towards RWA (real world asset) is hard for obvious reasons: the regulatory and operational burdens. Whenever you’re dealing with off-chain assets, the first question is, how can we legally link assets in the real world onto assets on the chain? Furthermore, even after we’ve figured out how to do that, actually doing the work can be another nightmare: taking real estate as an example, the applications for loan licenses at different states, sourcing deals and due diligence, evaluation of projects and actually servicing the loans or project operation. This can be another nightmare for someone who does not have industry specific expertise.

Real Estate in 2021
One of the biggest problems with the US housing market is the affordability crisis, which can largely be traced back to restrictions on construction, including not only land use regulations, but also problems in the space of financing for developers. Traditionally, real estate developers can seek financing from three sources: banks, real estate PE firms, or crowdfunding platforms. However, each source has its drawbacks:
- Banks have rigid requirements for extending financing to construction since the 2008 financial crisis, and as a result, many projects that have good fundamentals, such as generating a steady flow of rental income, do not get financed or suffer from a very restrictive LTV ratio.
- Real estate PE firms, however, do not always act in the best interest of the developer or the community, but rather its LPs: when a private equity fund invests in a project, it typically holds a super-majority of the equity and therefore the governance rights. Ultimately, the investment fund can take over the property and kick out the developer.
- Crowdfunding platforms are an innovation over the past five to ten years, but they are fundamentally (“legally” speaking) no different from any real estate PE fund. After all, it’s an innovation more for real estate retail investors than for real estate developers.

What is Robinland
And that’s where Robinland comes in: we serve as a bridge between the traditional world of finance and DeFi, providing a new financing solution to the real estate industry. By digitization and tokenization, Robinland turns real estate project-backed debt assets (e.g., CRE Loans) into on-chain crypto tokens that can be used as collateral to access liquidity from DeFi-lenders (e.g., MakerDAO).

This innovation benefits both parties: for real estate developers, this is a much faster, cheaper, and hassle-free way of accessing liquidity; for DeFi-lenders, this is a scalable technology allowing them to include high-quality interest-bearing stable real world assets into their collateral pool, enhancing the stability and credibility of their lending facility. Robinland’s ultimate goal is to build a fintech ecosystem for tokenized real estate projects, which will provide the full spectrum of blockchain-based financial services worldwide.

Robinland is formed by a team of real estate financing & fund-raising, blockchain/crypto/DeFi, and legal experts who are native to both the on-chain and off-chain part of the process. We are here to provide financial services that turn high quality off-chain real estate assets into on-chain native collaterals, such that DeFi lenders can expand their collateral pool to include RWA and real estate developers can access DeFi liquidity in a hassle free fashion.

For DeFi Lenders
- High quality collateral: Robinland integrates one of the highest quality collateral — real estate — into the DeFi lending ecosystem
- Hassle free RWA: with Robinland turning RWA into crypto-native tokens, DeFi lender can enjoy the stability brought by real world asset without real world hassle
- Risks, managed: with our proprietary project evaluation system, Robinland serves as the risk controller and also buffers the DeFi lender from defaults of underlying asset

For Real Estate Developers
- Lower cost: DeFi lenders provide much lower cost of financing compared to traditional sources like banks, real estate PE or crowdfunding platform
- Faster turnaround: thanks to the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) system, approvals for credit are much faster than traditional sources of financing
- Stable financing: unlike bank financing that can be retracted for arbitrary reasons, the revolving credit lines from DeFi lenders ensures stability of financing for borrowers

Robinland | MakerDAO Announcement

25 JAN 2022
Robinland achieved a very important milestone on Jan 24, passing the Greenlight Poll on MakerDAO’s governance forum for its MIP6 collateral onboarding application. After lots of revisions and hard work, the team was able to overcome the concerns Maker delegates had brought forward. This article will give readers an inside look into the MakerDAO process and the steps we took to achieve a “yes”.

The Maker Application ProcessMakerDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that can receive applications from any entity around the world to access its DeFi liquidity pool contingent on approval based on a pre-defined governance procedure.

Typically, the application process involves:
- The applicant submitting applications to the governance forum according to Maker’s pre-specified format for the application.
- The community engages with it during a cooling off period (usually 2–4 weeks) by posting questions
- Community Greenlight Poll to determine which applications to prioritize
- Maker’s ‘Core Units’ to conduct assessment/verification of the application along 3 dimensions: commercial, legal and technology
- Onboarding call where the applicants present to the community, the community asks questions, and finalizes with an onboarding poll to decide whether funds will be dispersed

It was not the easiest time to navigate the Maker process, for various reasons Robinland still decided to apply.

Despite our confidence, Robinland has been preparing for Maker’s MIP6 application since Q4 2021. Even though we know of cases where the applicant failed the first time but went back, revised and succeeded the second or third time, we wanted to make sure that the first version of our application is top quality.

As a result, we
- Studied all of the applications on Maker’s forum that are relevant to our case
- Talked to 10+ security/real estate/financial lawyers about our legal structure and any/all regulations related to the process
- Talked to Matthew Rabinowitz, the architect behind the 6s capital structure to understand its rationale and what Maker is mainly looking for

After a long period of preparation & revision, we finally submitted our proposal to Maker’s forum on Nov 21. What’s next was a 2-week cool down period in which the community engages with the proposal and asks questions. Over the next few days, we indeed received a few questions from the community, and have addressed their concerns about liquidity of security tokens, Maker’s position as ‘Senior Secured’, reserve fund, the use of Polymath jurisdiction accordingly.

Usually, the greenlight poll happens on each 1st and 3rd Monday of the month, so ours should be scheduled for 12/20. However, due to the holiday season, ours was pushed to 1/10 instead.

After an anxious holiday season, our team got back and fully prepared for the greenlight. To our surprise, during the first 3 days, the ‘leading option’ was actually a ‘No’ on our proposal. Among the voters, 2 delegates voted no, and the other 4 voted abstain.

Seeing that, we quickly responded by messaging MakerDAO asking for feedback, as we’re sure that (1) we’ve drafted it with all the knowledge collected from other approved proposals (2) meaning there must have been some misunderstanding going on about key elements of our proposal (3) or there are certain reason out of our control that’s leading delegates to vote no, such as long backlog or being in the transition period to a new collateral onboarding model.

At the same time, we received an extremely valuable piece of feedback from @MakerMan, a major delegate, on his own delegate forum. It provided clarity over what the concerns are, and a chance for us to address them openly to the entire community. Upon receiving it, the entire team paused all other engagements and jumped onto the case and quickly came up with a very detailed rebuttal, addressing all of the concerns, with the key points being:
- RBL represents fractions of a *portfolio* of loans. This brings 2 benefits (1) mutual insurance among the loans minimizes risk of default of the overall portfolio (2) rather than issuing heterogeneous tokens mapping to each underlying projects which suffer from poor liquidity, we’re issuing a form of homogeneous tokens that represent the senior lien commercial real estate asset class, which brings about much better liquidity.
- The underlying collaterals are full-recourse right senior lien debt, which is more secure than any asset we’ve seen in other real estate MIP6 applications. The senior lien debt itself is equivalent to the ‘senior tranche’ in a capital stack MakerMan suggested. (See illustration for details) The full-recourse right (again not present in other real estate MIP6 proposals) is the highest level of protection for real estate debt projects, as it means the entirety of the value of the loan can be traced back in the case of default. If we were to adopt the tranching method MakerMan suggested, defaults on the ‘first loss’ tranche can still affect the senior lien.

We provide 3 layers of protection for Maker:
(1) A put option for the RBL tokens. (We will keep trying to execute until Maker’s needs are fully satisfied)
(2) Full-recourse right provided by the underlying asset.
(3) Robinland’s industry connections with a robust secondary market for senior lien commercial real estate debt buyers, meaning we can easily sell a loan in our portfolio in 1–2 weeks.
- We are taking on most of the labor-intensive steps in the process because we have the right skillset, experience, and industry connections in our team to do so. We are alleviating Maker from touching the dirty work and we are achieving our mission of serving as a bridge between Trad-Fi and DeFi — as the financial service provider. We let all the transformation happen within, such that our partners — real estate developer & DeFi lenders can stay within their comfort zone.
- There isn’t a concern over ‘conflict of interest’ as (1) all the valuation and audit of the loan portfolio is conducted by industry-standard third party consultancies such as CBRE, BakerTilly, JLL, and Cushman & Wakefield (2) Role of the liquidator is purely to execute steps according to judicial process and state laws and all documentations and data involved in the process is out in the public (3) which we are more than happy to let Maker appoint a third party to take on and/or let Maker appoint a third party to supervise such process.
- In fact, Robinland’s role is similar to an Arranger: we’ve set up a structure that is robust enough to include a large number of commercial real estate debt assets, mitigating Maker’s risk as outlined above, and also saving Maker from labor-intensive work by taking on that in-house. This means we are a financial service provider that can serve as the bridge between Trad-Fi and DeFi specialized in the real estate industry for the benefit of both parties. (Project suppliers and liquidity suppliers)

The rebuttal was a turning point in the Greenlight voting process, as it:
- Clarified to the community that what Robinland is proposing is much in line with what Maker is looking for, both under the current framework and where it’s headed.
- Showcased Robinland’s professionalism & flexibility in adapting to major partners’ needs such as Maker, which is the key in a healthy long-term partnership in a changing environment such as RWA X DeFi

From then onwards, we received positive feedback from many delegates, and received public support from the forum. A few days later, we noticed that our voting result had turned to a ‘Yes’ for its leading option, with 55k MKR yes, 18k MKR abstain, and 17k MKR no according to the vote breakdown. This is the best result among all other applications who are going through the greenlight poll in the same batch.

We’re really proud to have passed Maker’s greenlight poll especially during such a turbulent time. This really gave us confidence that we’re a team who not only possess the right expertise to produce a top-level framework that satisfies specifications of the industry leader (i.e. Maker), but also the flexibility and resilience to adapt to challenges and resolve point by point, the latter of which being the key to success in such a changing environment.

We also know that this is not the end, not even the beginning to the end, but just the end of the beginning. After the greenlight poll, we’ll be coordinating with Maker’s Core Units under the RWF division to conduct all necessary due diligence and assessments. In that process, if there is anything that does not satisfy Maker’s needs, we’ll again change and adapt. Even so and after passing of the onboarding poll, we’ll also keep engaging with Maker to adapt to its needs and the overall regulatory environment.
Scarlet
CEO of Robinland
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Robinland | a Closer Look

25 JAN 2022
Robinland’s mission is to bridge the gap between Trad-Fi and DeFi for the real estate industry. Through tokenizing high-quality, dividend generating, commercial real estate assets, we create security tokens that can be used to access liquidity in DeFi from retail investors or institutional lenders such as MakerDAO.

Status of DeFi
DeFi has been one of the most successful use cases of smart contracts, which itself is a turning point of the validity and applicability of the blockchain technology. Currently, the financial ecosystem of DeFi includes lending protocols, DEX, insurance protocols and stablecoin protocols. Despite the diversity, all such use cases have been limited within the DeFi ecosystem, based on endogenous tokens/protocols, with no connections to the real world, forming 2 important problems: (1) Stability of the DeFi ecosystem and (2) Long-term prospect of the adoption and dominance of DeFi.

Current Landscape
As a result, leading DeFi lenders such as Maker have been trying very hard to incorporate more RWAs (real world assets) into their system to increase stability & expand use cases:
- Most RWAs exhibit much lower volatility (commercial loans, real estate, government bonds, etc.)
- Its volatility is orthogonal to those assets in DeFi, providing the benefit of diversification
- The low rates and fast turnaround of liquidity from DeFi is superior to many traditional financing sources in Trad-Fi, thus addressing real problems for borrowers in the real world

However, it is not easy for DeFi lenders to navigate RWAs:
- Every collateral type is fundamentally different
- Much of them are privately placed and opaque and thus it requires domain expertise to onboard high-quality projects
- The legal, logistics, operational aspect is heavy and again industry specific

Thus, having intermediaries bridging the gap between DeFi sources of financing and high-quality assets in Trad-Fi is becoming a main direction in the development of DeFi over the foreseeable future. In the past, the money supply denominated in USD and in stablecoins used to be two completely disjoint pools. Now through the transformation provided by Cytus, they are linked together.

Robinland’s Offering
Robinland’s offering is twofold: (1) transformation of asset class as a technology (and legal) offering and (2) selection, onboarding and maintenance of high quality RWAs specifically in the Real Estate industry as a financial service offering.

Bringing RWA onto the chain is as much a technological process as a legal one. When a crypto token is expected to generate returns for the holder, they are “security tokens” as defined by the SEC and are subject to SEC regulations. In order to legally issue security tokens in the US, one either has to “register” it, i.e. go through an IPO, or go through one of the exemption clauses (e.g. Reg D, Reg S, Reg A, etc.), which is the approach Robinland is taking to legally issue tokens that represent RWAs in the US. With in-house lawyers who have completed the exact same process before, Robinland is able to provide legal service to both the project supplier and liquidity supplier such that they engage in a transaction without any legal concern. The part on token issuance is actually simple: security token is a mature space with a full range of service providers who can take care of each of the steps in the process: For example, Polymath token studio for issuing security tokens under ERC 1400 contracts; Digishares, CrowdEngine, SeriesOne, LenderKit for token sales; INX.com and tzero for secondary market trading. We have an in-house CTO who has issued his own tokens before and runs an active SocialFi community, leading a team with expertise that utilize different pieces to create an integrated system that smoothly transforms a RWA into crypto tokens.
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— robinland

Our Team

Our top notch family currently includes these incredible persons.

Marketing

Adina Zhu

social media

Austin Lavender

marketing VP

Fred Yen

social media

Grayson Alto

ui/ux

Jonathan Castillo

research

Olabiyi Olatunde

finance

Vera Zhang

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much can I invest?

You can invest anything from $1,000 in each offering project. You may also spread your investments through several projects and build a diversified portfolio.

When do I get investment returns?

The typical investment term ranges from 6 -24 months, and the investment returns are paid every month. The original investment is repaid at the end of the term. More in this video.

What are security tokens?

Security tokens are tokenized securities that are fully compliant with the security laws. They are the digital form of traditional securities that live on the blockchain. These tokens could represent ownership of a fraction of any valuable asset, like a car, real estate, or corporate stock. More in this video.

Are Robinland’s tokens legally compliant?

Yes absolutely! Robinland tokenizes commercial real estate debts via security tokens, which are heavily regulated by security laws. Token investors can have the peace of mind that their investments are safe, legal, and secured by blockchain technology.

What are commercial real estate debts?

Borrowing money for construction or acquisition of commercial real estate is considered commercial real estate debt. Commercial real estate is those where businesses reside, but also includes rental apartments and multi-families with five or more units. Providing workspace or projects under construction for the purpose of sale are categorized as commercial real estate, including office space, industrial space, multifamily complexes, retail spaces, hotels, etc. More in this video.

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Effortless Real Estate Investment

For Retail Investors.

We allow retail investors anywhere in the world to trade real estate like they trade stocks on Robinhood - small ticket size + large liquidity.

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Lower entry barrier

With tokenization, retail investors can now gain access to high-quality commercial real estate which are usually only accessible to large institutional investors.

Instant liquidity

With technical innovations in DeFi such as AMM (automated market making), investors can trade these tokens anytime even when there is no counter-party.

Passive income

Without having to actively manage a property, investors can gain interest or rental dividends deposited into their wallet in a hassle-free fashion.

Crypto Bond

For DeFi Investors.

We offer a way to park cash for investors to gain yields higher than the risk-free rate currently in DeFi and offer volatility that is orthogonal to the rest of the crypto market.

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High Yield

With our underlying real estate project generating steady rental/interest dividends, our tokens offer buyers yields higher than what is currently available in DeFi.

Orthogonal Volatility

While other lending protocols are based on crypto-native asset, we offer volatility based on real world asset, providing investors natural diversification.

Flexible Interest

The longer one locks their cash in our tokens, the higher the return one can expect, providing a complete menu of liquidity-return trade-off choices.