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.
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.
The second pilot, Brazil's first NFT-collateralized real-estate mortgage (2022). Covered by G1 →
Market context: real estate is the largest asset class in the world. Savills, 2022.
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. Wallets fed experimentation, and experimentation fed the subscription.
The redemption flow I designed, as it shipped (2022).
One dependency bent the numbers: engineering could not ship automatic transactions in time, and that measurably distorted the airdrop's conversion curve relative to the wallet-signup curve.
The trade-off
I added friction on purpose.
External counsel flagged risk with the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator, on the subscription product as it stood: payment taken upfront. I redesigned it into a no-charge reservation with a card-verification step. Every user now did more work to say yes, and the company kept the potential-revenue data investors needed.
The reservation flow, as it shipped (2023). Once held, a warning landed 48 hours before any first charge, and cancelling was free at any time.
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. 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.
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.
Adoption curve after Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, with the wallet where 2023 left it.
The revenue strategy, flipped. Consumers stop being the base and become what the base carries.
GTM #2 · the build
The front-end became the platform.
The pivot shipped under a new, commercially agnostic brand: Propriedade Digital, positioned as the market's registry rather than one company's product. The institutional Netspaces site split away from the commercial one, and the platform went white-label, with me as 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 (global → semantic → component): components reference semantic roles, semantic roles resolve to a partner's values. A new brand changes token values, never components. Onboarding a partner wallet became configuration, not a rebuild.
-
01
Split the brand
The institutional Netspaces site beside the commercial Propriedade Digital site, positioned as the market's standard (2024). -
02
One build, any brand
The same screen running under two brands: Netspaces beside SuaInc, the placeholder brand a new partner starts from. One theme file swapped, no component forked (2024). -
03
Partners in production
Partner wallets in production: Vitacon, LBI and Rooftop beside Netspaces (2024). -
04
The tokens underneath
The token architecture at work: the same screen under a light and a dark scheme. Components never name a color; semantic tokens such as --color-text-primaryresolve to each scheme's values: the same mechanism that resolves a partner's brand (2024).
The result
The result · 2024
126
licensed cities at the close of 2024, in every Brazilian region. The goal was 100.
14 real estate developers signed as clients, and the company that had measured its future in months closed the year at break-even.
Runway: no longer counted in months.
The goal, as it was set, ran in Brazil's leading business daily: licenses in 100 Brazilian cities in 2024. Covered by Valor →