Netspaces · 2022–2024
A real estate wallet that pivoted from B2C to B2B
Brazil's first digital real-estate wallet reached 30,000 people and earned nothing. I drew the screens of the bet and architected the pivot that followed.
Market context
The biggest asset in the world barely moves.
Real estate outweighs gold, equities and debt securities combined, and it is the hardest of them to move. A single sale runs thirty to sixty days on paper, filed against a registry drawn up 160 years ago. Prices shut most people out, credit reaches few, and a foreigner who wants in meets a wall. The largest store of value on earth, and almost none of it is liquid.
Market cap by asset class, 2022 trillions USD
The bet
Bond the deed to the token.
Netspaces tokenizes real estate at the source of trust: the property's title deed is locked at the registry and linked to an NFT, so the paper record and the token cannot drift apart. Before anything launched publicly, that model had to survive real people.
She was 82, and banks refused her financing because of her age. She bought a 20% fraction of a property for R$140,000, and she receives rent in proportion to her share, with no debt attached. The first real-estate NFT sale in Brazil.
A second pilot followed close behind: Brazil's first NFT-collateralized real-estate mortgage, where the token stood as the guarantee behind the loan. Covered by G1 →
Only after both pilots held up did the first digital real-estate wallet open to the public.
GTM #1 · the hypothesis
A subscription that compounds.
The bet on consumers ran on one hypothesis: with plans for every budget, thousands of subscribers act as a single group buyer. Fractioning splits a property across many wallets, buying power negotiates better deals, and a diversified, high-yield portfolio pulls the next subscriber in. A flywheel, meant to turn like a growth engine.
To reach the subscription, I mapped a conversion funnel.
- Wallet / account creation
- Experimentation · NFT airdrop
- Subscription · fractional ownership
GTM #1 · the airdrop
Distribution by giving ownership away.
I led the journey from acquisition to subscriber conversion. Its engine was an airdrop: Brazil's first tokenized property, split into fractions and given away to get people transacting. This was the funnel's experimentation stage, the taste of ownership that sat between opening a wallet and paying for one.
The redemption flow I designed, as it shipped (2022).
The reservation
Ask for the card, charge nothing.
The next funnel step was subscription: fractional ownership, paid month to month. External counsel flagged the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator. As it stood, with payment taken upfront, the subscription could read as a securities product. I redesigned it into a no-charge reservation.
One screen deeper sat the deliberate call: keep asking for the credit card, with copy that reassures the user nothing is charged in advance. The potential-revenue number mattered to investors, so I traded more friction for the figure that told the business what it might one day earn.
The reservation flow, as it shipped (2023). No charge is taken; the card is verified only, and nothing is charged in advance.
End of 2023: the result of the bet
End of 2023
- Wallets created~30,000
- NFT holders15,000
- Subscription reservations~1,000
- Potential monthly billing~R$50,000
Revenue: none.
Runway: six months.
The diagnosis
Not a demand problem. A sequencing problem.
The funnel had worked and the business had not. In mid-2023 we surveyed the reservation holders on why they had joined: 117 responded, each picking up to three motivations.
Why they reserved % of 117 respondents
Three in four had reserved to try the technology, ahead of rent and ahead of wealth. That is the early adopter's answer. Read against Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, the numbers stopped looking like rejection: the wallet had won its innovators and early adopters, and stood at the gap where consumer products stall.
Adoption curve after Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, with the wallet where 2023 left it.
That reading became the pivot, decided with six months on the clock. Stop attacking the end consumer first. Recruit real estate developers to seed the ecosystem, then come back for consumers from the other side.
The revenue strategy, flipped. Consumers stop being the base and become what the base carries.
GTM #2 · the pivot
A new brand, built to be the standard.
The pivot shipped under a new, commercially agnostic brand: Propriedade Digital, sold as the market's registry rather than one company's product. Netspaces stepped back to one player among its partners, and Propriedade Digital became the standard they all run on. The institutional Netspaces site split away from the commercial one.
The front-end became the platform.
The platform went white-label, and I was its principal architect. One backend serves every partner: shared cloud functions and a single database answer each wallet, and an origin parameter threads every request back to the front-end that made it. Each front-end loads a setup file carrying its client's theme.
The theme file only works because of what sits under it. Drawing on my design-system years at Globo, I built the tokens in three tiers, so a component never names a color and a new brand only changes values.
- Global
- The raw inventory of values that defines everything in the system, a full scale from
--color-ui-100: #ffffffto--color-ui-900: #000. - Semantic
- Names an intended use and generates the theme stylesheet, mapping roles onto the scale:
--color-surface: --color-ui-100,--color-text-primary: --color-ui-900. - Component
- Binds a semantic role to a specific component, which is what lets components be shared across brands:
--background-card-real-estate: --color-surface,--color-text-paragraph: --color-text-primary.
The result
The result · 2024
126
licensed cities at the close of 2024, in every Brazilian region. The goal was 100.
The goal, as it was set, ran in Brazil's leading business daily: licenses in 100 Brazilian cities in 2024. Covered by Valor →
Real estate developers bought the platform and began offering tokenized property to their own client bases. The traction engine the GTM #2 hypothesis had counted on, now turning.
The company that had measured its future in months closed the year at break-even. From six months of runway to a business that paid for itself.