The Entrepreneur DNA - How Blockchain Will Reshape Real Estate, Mortgages, and Money Forever | Thomas Gaffney

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

In this episode, I sat down with Thomas Gaffney to unpack what’s really happening as blockchain and real-world asset tokenization quietly reshape real estate, finance, and ownership. We talked about how mortgages are moving on-chain, why transparency could prevent another 2008-style collapse, and how people may soon pay mortgages and car loans with crypto. We also explored Bitcoin as digital gold, fractional ownership of massive assets like apartment buildings, and why blockchain’s biggest impact will mostly happen behind the scenes. This conversation completely reframed how I see the future of money, real estate, and risk. About Thomas Gaffney: Thomas Gaffney is the Chief Operating Officer of OFA Group, a public company focused on architectural design, AI-driven innovation, digital assets, and real-world asset tokenization. He’s served in this role since March 2024 and brings over a decade of experience as a startup financing attorney, guiding technology companies from seed stage through IPO and strategic exits. Thomas’s expertise spans venture capital financing, equity structuring, and navigating complex legal frameworks in tech and finance. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Penn State University and a Juris Doctor from Wake Forest University School of Law. Under his leadership, OFA is advancing blockchain infrastructure and real-world asset tokenization through platforms like Hearth Labs. Connect with Thomas Gaffney & OFA Group • LinkedIn: Thomas Gaffney / OFA Group• Website: ofacorp.com• Public Ticker: OFAL About Justin: After investing in real estate for over 18 years and almost 3000 deals done, Justin has created a business that generates 7 figures in active income through wholesaling and fix and flipping as well as accumulating millions of dollars of rental properties including 5 apartment buildings, 50+ single family homes, and 1 storage facility Justins longevity in real estate is due to his ability to look around the corners, adapt to changing markets, perfecting Raising private capital, and focusing on lead generation which allows him to not just wholesale and fix & flip, but also accumulate wealth through long term holds. His success in real estate led him to start The Entrepreneur DNA podcast and The Science Of Flipping podcast and education company, and REI LIVE where he’s actively doing deals with members. He has coached and mentored thousands of aspiring and active investors over the last decade. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up? The Entrepreneur, D&A family. If you are into blockchain and cryptocurrencies and understanding the revolution that is upon us, then you are not going to want to miss this episode. Thomas Gaffney is the C.O.O.F.A. Group. And he is quite literally on the front line of revolutionizing how we tokenize real world assets, such as, as an example, my favorite real estate. Today we're going to talk about all things about this tokenization of the frontline assets. Thomas Gaffney is here. What's up, buddy? Hey, man. How you going? Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, this is going to be fun. So I'm a big real estate guy. I've done this for over two decades or about two decades now.

The first thing I want to jump into immediately is what we're already talking about offline, if you will. This whole thing about real estate and how you're going to be able to transact real estate with, you know, cryptocurrency and blockchains and how did like what is going on you are literally on the front line as someone who buys and sells houses every day i am not seeing any movement in the subject matter i'm not seeing you know anything change functionally as a moment in time on the front lines that does not mean there's not big waves happening what are you seeing on the front line of all this uh i'm seeing a huge explosion in growth interesting over the last um three years um the on chain r w a market not including stable coins, has grown almost 400%. It was at $4 billion in 2022, and now it's up to about $30 billion. And you've got Citigroup, many of these big banks projecting in the next five years,

that this market's going to be over $5 trillion. So right now you said $30 billion to go to $5 trillion? Yes, they think it's going to 100x. That's how fast it's going to move. I want everyone to understand. what the difference between one billion and one trillion is. I like there's a you guys can Google this, but like if you actually had to do a multiple of what the difference is

between a billion days and a trillion days or any type of multiple, it is such a vastly different number. It is almost incomprehensible. Like there's a fun little thing you could do that it would take however many years to get to a trillion, you know, and then it would take however, many days like it goes from seconds to minutes to hours to days to months the years and then they talk about with for a billion and a trillion all those type of things yeah um anyways to go to 30 billion

which is a big number there's no doubt to five trillion is gargantuan yes and a good way i i saw it uh for elon for 500 billion right Elon could potentially spend 10 million dollars a day since the building of the pyramids and you still today would not he would only spend like $10 billion. Right. That's what I'm saying. There's fun little things you can Google to understand how big that number really is. Yeah.

It's insane. So talk to like, you know, I now keep the real estate and then we can move on to other sectors and other, you know, real world assets. Like in the real estate space, what are some things that are going on that maybe the day-to-day consumer of real estate? I buy in flip homes. I buy in rent homes. Like I'm transactionally in this space really heavily. what is going on that I'm not aware of that's actually starting to move the needle. Sure, sure.

So let me give you just a little bit of background, right? So I became obsessed with this concept, right? Remember how it impacts like everyday consumers? Remember the, obviously 2008 crisis, right, where you have these mortgage-backed securities. And during that time, they had these things. They were kind of structuring them, putting it into different vehicles. and they were called like basically CDOs, credit default swaps. And they, like these mortgages were failing, right?

They were coming across. They were failing. And they were in these instruments. And so no one really knew what was in this instrument, right? So the entire market was shorting them across the board, right? Where you can have one CDO that's worth, say, 97% of them are functioning well. and then you have so you have ABC. A has 97% the people are paying the mortgage, B, 50% people are paying their mortgage. So this CBO sucks. And you've got like 85% over here on C. Right. There was no way back then because of like the counterparty risk to really tell what was in those things and who was paying and what wasn't. So they shorted the entire market and then just destroyed the entire mortgage. They shorted even the 90% paying and the 85% pay. They shorted it at all. Exactly. So what's going on now, right, is, and it's kind of in the background. Like most people won't really see it day to day what's going on, right? They'll still apply for a mortgage. They'll still potentially go to a bank and get it locked in, right? And so it'll be making their payments. But what's going to be happening in the future is that and what's currently happening now is people are putting these mortgages on chain, right? And so instead of it just being at a bank and centralized and having to go through filing,

cabinets and find things within like the centralized computer system, right? They are now putting it onto a decentralized ledger. Really, that's really all blockchain is. It's just like a recording system that's kind of immutable that you can't change, can't hack into it. And it's open and it's incredibly easy to find information, right? So if all mortgages were put on chain during the 2008 crisis, you would have had real-time information to know that that one CDO had a 97%

continuing payments, right? So you're not going to short that. You wouldn't short that, right? Exactly. So, like, you'd be able to see it in real time, right? And so how this kind of works. Are you familiar with stable coins or anything by any chance? I am, yeah, but I think just for the open listener,

maybe do a just brief understanding for those that might not be. Sure. So a stable coin is essentially a, say, let's say, USDC, right, United States dollar coin, is a token that exists on a blockchain, that is backed, that represents $1. So every time you have a $1 token of the USDC stable coin, you have a dollar worth of spending.

It's supposed to be parity with the U.S. dollar. And essentially they are backed dollar by dollar, for dollar. Every dollar that goes into USC is backed by usually treasuries, U.S. treasuries, right? Short-term bonds, whatever it is. And they keep that dollar just on-cham. stable at a dollar, so it's a one for one parity, right? And so you can transact these stable

coins as dollars on chain, send them cross-border, whatever you need to do, buy Bitcoin, buy Ethereum, send it to your coin base account, to your friend, and then they can take it out and exchange it for Fiat for $1, right? And so what's happening now is that your mortgage is going to be on-chain, right? And then you can pay and you can pay and you, USDC, and what happens when you do that, when you pay your mortgage every year for month, it records that transaction on the ledger via the smart contract, which is the RWA, right? And then it will update in real time that your status is up to date. And it's kind of uniform.

It's out there. And it's just a way more efficient way of tracking these things, especially when you start thinking about funneling together and securitizing them like they were doing like mortgage-backed securities in the 2008 crisis. Yeah. The insight, I think, is the big thing here is so much easier to read and understand relative right now. I'm not behind the curtain in those instances, but that's my understanding of the whole thing is to really simplify, or not just simplify, but really make it a lot easier, again, simplified, to see and read what is actually going on. So there isn't any of this further confusion, right?

Yes, exactly. And that's the whole thing. And like humans won't be necessarily doing it. It's going to be a lot of AI automatic algorithms, trading everything, fixing it all. But they'll be able to see like the snapshot and be like, oh, this instrument that has a thousand mortgages in it, 999 of them. are up to date, whereas this instrument has a thousand and only 400 of them are up to date. Okay, short this one, keep this one alive. Yeah.

That one goes down, but the other one stays up, right? And so it's going to, like, because you can trade these things on the market and they would have the accurate pricing real time in terms of like trading it, say, on the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange, whatever it was back then. but they didn't have, and this is what's important, the underlying, like, proof and the underlying, like, information of the underlying asset, right? Like, the mortgage. They didn't get that actual information, right?

Like, they just had, like, the value of what it was trading, and in theory, the yield they were supposed to get based on the value that they have, right? So, but now that's going to be updated real time, And so that's kind of what we're building out, actually, with hearth labs is we have like an AI tool that is going to be tracking all of the, it does the KOC process. It does the records for payment, how much money's coming in, how much money's going out. Risk at default. It like analyzes all of that information to give real time data to the market for the instrument so that the price can be adjusted accordingly.

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I think that's so much in your day-to-day life that like, how does that affect the normal person? Sure. And maybe it doesn't. Maybe this is really meant for New York and the big banks and understanding how to package loans and, you know, and that's okay. But people need to understand how this is actually going to affect them.

I think the big, in my opinion. Sure. I have a platform of great entrepreneurs like yourself that I get to interview. I think the biggest misconception about all this is how it actually affects them. The people, right? The small, it doesn't matter an entrepreneur or not. How does this any of this affect people? Like, how would what you just said, and I understand what you're saying,

basically what instrument would they use based around the clarity of understanding the asset, right, to be able to securitize it? but how does that affect a person, like a normal Joe on the street? Sure. Well, what it does is, so it's kind of two ways because you won't necessarily see it directly if you're just a average Joe, just whatever. You'll still go to the bank. You will still get a mortgage.

And the one way it can really affect you is you can either decide to pay with it on chain. So this affects a lot of people who actually want to use crypto or very into crypto, want to use stable coins rather than the Fiat, US dollar or something, they can actually pay their mortgage with USDC. They can convert it into Bitcoin, pay it, be good to go, right? But like the average Joe who wants to just go and pay it on the bank, they say they pay with Fiat and then the bank updates the ledger and then the ledger is done. So you won't see that that much because that process is kind of turned out and kind of works. Where you will see it is that money, your money and your

mortgage is going to be safer than, you know, party risk. Like a lot of people, my age, don't really remember 2008 too much because we weren't really in the market at the time, you know, but it was a really bad time, you know. Oh, yeah. Your homes. I got crushed. Yeah, yeah. You know, the markets got destroyed.

And so that likely, the counterparty risk, meaning the amount of vendors involved, right? So you've got a bank, you've got an originator, you've got a lender, you've got someone you're selling, once you package that up, you're selling it to a bank and then they're selling it to people, right? Like this chain of like, say, 10 to 15, 20 people that used to exist to make, to start a mortgage, make it happen and get it all the way to securitizing it and selling it in shares, right? Like the amount of the systematic risk is going to be significantly reduced. Well, so that's good. this won't necessarily happen again. And I think it would be, over time, it's going to make it, I think, easier to get a mortgage.

I think it's going to be easier to, you're going to have to go through less of this crazy vigorous due diligence that you have to now because they're protecting against the, what happened in 2008. Just as once it goes down the line, a lot of the issue wasn't necessarily

the person borrowing the money. It was them, selling them like pooling them all together selling them and then shorting them and then the banks that were backing them made them collapse because they didn't know accurately what was in it so that's right risk of doing this is significantly less and hopefully um because like I said you have real time data of what's going on like instead of the entire market crashing because of a artificial short on the entire market, you're only going to be shorting certain ones that are failing, right? And so where you'll see it is it's going to be a lot safer to own a home.

It's going to be a lot safer to have a mortgage in the future just because the information that's going to be relatively available and in real-time update is going to be safer on that back end. You said something that I think really has some interest on my behalf. So everyone's aware Bitcoin over 100 grand is big thing, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. You were just saying essentially you'd be

able to pay your mortgage through Bitcoin. If you want to, yeah. It almost makes banking like unneeded. And listen, Bitcoin has risk to it, right? I mean, whatever it was this week,

like it went from $112,000 for Bitcoin down to 90. Like, okay, right? Like, it moves, but it is probably the stablest of coins relative to USC. Yep. You can make an argument for the person that has a little bit of risk tolerance. Like, put all your cash and Bitcoin moving forward because you'll be able to pay your mortgage through Bitcoin. And Bitcoin goes to a million dollars, which there's a lot of experts that say that that is a very real reality.

I think it's a reality for sure. Not only are you paying your mortgage, but your money that's waiting to pay. your mortgage is making money as it sits there. Exactly. Exactly. Am I like, I'm just sitting back listening to you and like, well then why wouldn't I put all my money in a Bitcoin?

It seems crazy, but like functionally, if I can pay my mortgage through it, and you're talking, and we're just talking about real estate, I'm assuming, I could be wrong, would I be able to pay my car note

through the same way? Yeah, essentially. It's all banking, right? Essentially, it's all banking. And so when you and your company is able to really get this solidified

and the blockchain now is functional to pay loans. Yep. That's exactly what it's going to be. I could go pay Chase for my car loan that I have. Yes. You, 100%. And that's honestly, that's what's going to happen. And that's the reason why for that big trillion, five to $10 trillion number, right?

It's because, like, it just makes logical sense. Like, remove the Bitcoin, right? Like, if you just remove the Bitcoin and you go. And you think about, about blockchain technology in general, okay? Stable coins. You, like, blockchain technology just makes recording information significantly more efficient, significantly more safe. And, um, and more clear.

Yes, more clear. And again, you were going to read it and understand what, what's going on with it. Exactly. You know, and so it's, I honestly think in the future, every single thing is going to be on chain. every single thing because it's just it's a more efficient system right humans are always going towards evolution they're always making it better they're always making efficiency right and blockchain is a more efficient system right so now bring back in bitcoin right and the what you were talking about the fun cool stuff it's like bitcoin how i see it is a massive store value and

and so what that means is you can put your money into it and uh it will will stay relatively safe, depending on your risk tolerance. Me, I was around Bitcoin back when it was having 90% swings in a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, I mean, when I started, and I'm not a good investor for this, but like, I started when it was $1,800. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Right.

And so, which is cool, and I took a risk. But of course, you know, as it started growing, like, how high could it go? So you start to sell, right? And you're like, oh, God, I could have. Anyways. Absolutely. No, I completely agree, right? So it's like, Bitcoin is digital gold.

in essence, right? Like, you have gold, which is a scarce resource, right? You have Bitcoin, which is a scarce resource because the amount of Bitcoin's are capped. There's only going to be a certain amount ever, right? And the technology behind it, which is blockchain, is just it's one of the most, in my, like, revolutionary pieces of technology since the internet, you know, just because it's so cryptographically. secure, you can't, you can't hack it. You can hack into an exchange, which is like you can have an email and password and they can steal information that way, but you cannot hack an actual blockchain, right?

Like, the difficulty would be going to McDonald's, getting a chicken nugget in trying to turn that chicken nugget back into a chicken. Like that is how difficult it is to hack an actual blockchain, right? And so this scarce resource and people are like, oh, why does Bitcoin have value? It's like because it's a scarce resource, the technology is amazing, and people put value into it. Why does gold have value? Yes, you can wear jewelry, whatever, but 99% of all gold is in gold bars and Mount Knox and all their countries, they're holding on to it. Like, they're just holding on to it because they put value in gold, right?

Yeah, they keep it scarce. Yes, and they keep it scarce. And that's the same thing with Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, so the interesting, so what you just said is why I asked the questions I'm asking. I think the normal Joe doesn't see value in Bitcoin because they can't touch it. feel it, see it, they don't understand the blockchain technology it sits on it, right? Yes.

So they don't know, you know, how it's going to affect title and real estate. And I want to get to other real world assets that you guys are moving the needle on. But like, because it's not there yet, so the tangibility and understanding of like, why is this thing worth $100,000, right? Yes. Because they don't feel it yet in the day-to-day life. And it's the technology. And so where they'll really see it, though,

is like, and this is the theory that I have is that, so blockchain, we have this AI revolution rail, right? Like everything is AI, Tetris, all these L&Ms, right? And so AI and blockchain, and this is why it's important, is AI is digital, it lives on the computer. You can't feel AI, you can't touch AI. You can touch a robot that uses AI, right? But, like, AI that you interact with on your computer,

it's just on the computer, right? And so the AI is developing so that it's starting to do tasks for the everyday person, right? They're called AI agents, right, where they can get you dinner reservations. They can buy plane tickets. They can do whatever, right? And so AI lives on the internet, lives in the computers, so does blockchain. And blockchain is like kind of the foundational piece, in my opinion, for what's going to slowly come around. for AI and building super intelligence, right?

Because right now, anyone can go change information on Wikipedia, an AI will go pull that information, whether it's correct or not, but it's on Wikipedia, right? And spit it out as truth, right? Whereas yesterday it was correct, but someone changed it, and the AI tool pulls it out and then they're like, oh, here it is. Whereas if once blockchain keeps evolving, Wikipedia is essentially going to be

on a blockchain piece where all the changes that have ever occurred on the website for the Wikipedia is going to be recorded, right? And so AI is going to say, hey, that's not accurate. Like, this actually happened on this date and it was this person,

not Fred from Delaware. You know what I mean? So it's going to be actually able to read and create like a memory for super intelligence with AI. And the money that exists, for AI to do all this stuff has to live on the internet. It can't live

just in this like tangible world, right? And so that's why it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting to see over the next couple of years how this really progressed. Well, and when I say they can't touch and feel it is because the internet was something people could use. Right now is a blockchain

there's nothing to use per se. That's not necessarily true. That's where I want to go. So what are people like either naive and don't know that they're in the blockchain or using blockchain. Like where's your company, OPA group? Like where are you putting time and energy and what is actually out there that is in use?

Sure, sure. So one of the things that people right now is because you have to think that blockchain is so new, right? Like it's been around for 15, 20 years, really like just very new. Right. And so they've been building out the infrastructure for these things. Right. Like email was invented back in like, what, 69. And it really didn't receive mass adoption, mass mass adoption to like 2010, right?

Like people are still being their bank statements in the mail. You know what I mean? Like rather than just getting them online and paying them online, right? And so it takes time to evolve, right? And so what people, the first thing that people really saw was like NFTs in video games where they can actually do stuff on chain. Right. So I don't know if you ever heard of actually. XE Infinity.

I have not. It's a, it's a, it's Pokemon, except you have a, your Pokemon is a image that exists and a character on chain that lives in a smart contract called an FD, which is a non-fundable token, and you can battle other axes that you can level up and grow,

and then say you have the best Axi Pokemon style thing, you can sell that, actually sell it, because you put all this time in, energy and effort and you own it, like legitimately own it within the game. Because it's in your wallet, it sits there,

and you've been playing this game for a while, and you can sell it to someone for, say, some of them sold for hundreds, millions of dollars. I literally don't even understand that world. And I know that, like,

Gary V was huge in that world. I had some other friends that created their own NFT. And I go, I don't understand what the hell is. Like, it's an image. I don't get it.

Like, I get that it's art. And art has value. no doubt. Or like there was what were they called like drunken monkeys or something? Or dave yaclough. Board apes. And like they were going for millions of dollars.

Yes. And I just said, I don't understand. Can you at least explain it to me so I have some clarity? Because I have no idea what that was still about to this very moment. So what that was really about was the exclusive club that it would provide. So like the reason why I exploded was because of the sense of community. Right. So, like, yes, the pictures and all that, it was cool.

You're like, wow, I can prove that I own this on the internet, right? Like before, if you make a meme, right, and put it out there, everyone could steal your meme. And then the only way you can say, I made it was to say I've made it, right? But now, say you make a meme, put it on chain and then put it out there, you can show that you are the person that made that meme, right? Because there's a timestamp. It has a unique identifier that's related to the meme that you created.

And so that's like the sell of NFTs and why they're kind of special in terms of like blockchain. But what people really fell in love with was there was only 10,000 board apes, right? And they're selling for tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars, right? And there's only 10,000. And they have this secret community club that you have to have a board ape to get into the Discord channel, to get into what they call the bathroom on their website where it's a community, right? Justin Bieber owned one of these things. Several celebrities, I think Eminem bought one.

Like all these celebrities bought these. And so if you owned one of them and they're in the Discord, you can potentially get access to these people because what you do is you log into your Discord and put in your wallet and then the wallet will read, the software will read your wallet to see if you have a bored ape in there. And if you don't, it won't let you in. If you do, you get in. And then you get access to this high net worth community, right?

And so that was the craze for it because it created scarcity for, like, art, creative world. And then also, like, this community that people can really be involved in. You know, and so it was just, it was the hype of COVID where Pokemon cars were going crazy, Beanie Babies, all the things were going crazy, all these collectibles. And the art just kind of made it fun and entertaining and it just kind of exploded from that. Is there any type of blockchain value to that or no? I mean, it just, or is that more fun? It would sense.

It's that on the blockchain, right? I mean, that's the idea. Yes. But there was no like, again, real world values, more collectibles. Well, yeah, they're, the idea there is collectibles on the blockchain. There's definitely collectibles on the blockchain. The real world value is being in an exclusive club. Yeah.

That's right. Get into meeting, say, Justin Bieber and the Discord. That's right. And he does a private performance for everyone who's a totally good. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I love that stuff, right? In the sense of I really believe community is really everything, right? But let's move on to like the real world value of what OPA group is really moving the needle on.

And we talked about mortgages. Title is one that, you know, being in real estate five years ago, we thought like title companies were going to go under. There's no need for humans. It was all going to be blockchain. I have not seen anything in my own real world experience of buying and selling homes every day. Yep, yep. Just say that that is anything's going on there. But what else are you guys working on to move the needle in the real world blockchain?

Yes. Transactional. Like where I'm trying to go is like, how does the average person listening or watching this? Yes. How do they feel or see blockchain affecting them in the day to day? Sure. And that's the trick is I don't. And I don't even think that that is the goal anymore.

I think it was at one point. Sure. Just because people were just so excited about this technology. And it does have its limits because you can't really feel it touch it because it does live in the world. Like if you want to have like we're just going to, since it does live in the internet in tech, right? Like where you'll really see it is like augmented reality, virtual reality. Like that's where blockchain will take off in that world. In the real world world, it's just going to be in the background.

Like, you don't think about, oh, my banking app is the best thing in the world. You know what I mean? I had the best K-Y-C bank ever. You know what I mean? Like, people aren't, like, thinking like that. But investors, we're just going to really impact the average shows, like the investors, right? Like, you can get this on chain. So they're talking about where you can kind of see it is the Empire State Building.

Right. They are talking about putting a fraction of the Empire State Building. into an RWA, and then, which is, an RWA is just a smart contract. It's actually an NFT, but rebranded it RWA, because NFT's got such a bad rap. After everything it went down, yeah. All the JPEGs and all the monkeys and all the crazy stuff, heaven. So an RWA is literally an MET. It's just a smart contract with a unique identifier that you can pin to either real world assets,

something unique, in image, whatever it is. And then you can fractionalize the ownership of that piece, right? So essentially what they're talking about is fractalizing the ownership of the RANs, values, whatever is coming through for the Empire State Building. And say they sell 100,000 units, you can potentially buy one of these tokens that is tied to the RWA and then you will own a percentage of the Empire State Building. So just so we're clear. for those in real estate or not in real estate a syndication fund has a lot of similarity to what

thomas is talking about right where the syndication fund typically owns a percentage of the apartment building or whatever the asset was and as an investor in the fund you have a percentage of that ownership right so as rents or as a sell-off there's typically something that comes back to you as a potential owner and so or a fractional owner and so what we're talking about is the empire state the RWA would own whatever it is. Let's say 10% to keep never easy. And every token in the RWA, let's just say there's a thousand tokens costs $100,000, right? So you have, what is that?

$10 million, $10 million essentially is raised to do whatever, right? For the ownership of that 10% of the Empire State Building. If the Empire State Building sells in 10 years out of profit, then that 10% of the RWA goes into the ownership group that invested the $100,000 a share. So I love that principle. The fractionalization of real estate to me is the highest use that I'm aware of. I'm also in real estate. So you know a lot more of the like real world assets that are actually starting to gain

traction within this. But I think, and maybe you can clarify, I was, I think I was made aware of, like a multi-million dollar home in Florida that sold on the blockchain. Are you aware of that? I don't know if it ever went through. I think maybe it did, maybe it didn't. But for the same purpose,

meaning a group of individuals now owns the home. Yes. Right, on a fractional basis through the blockchain. Exactly. And that's pretty much exactly it. I mean, you hit on the nail on the head, right? Like, that is the cell here. And that's what we're doing with OFA group.

at hearth labs, we are building a essentially RWA launch pad for people who own real estate, who want to take their real estate, put it on chain, get the liquidity that they're looking for, because a lot of times one of the problems is you have these investor groups and their liquidity is locked up into this massive building, right? They go to very specific people or groups, but now you can open that up to the public and get it trading on a secondary market. and you get the access to liquidity that you're kind of looking for so that you can take that money and then invest it elsewhere. So you have investors that go and build a massive building and they're like, okay, well, I want to own this and I want to do it,

but I want to sell off part of it so I can take this now and the proceeds from the RWA sale and go build another building, right? It creates a little more efficient market to allow builders to get more access to their capital, right? And so that's kind of what we're doing at hearth labs. It's going to be, we're going to have, and we're actually doing this OFA group. We're doing it first with one of our properties that we're kind of looking at. We're going to be putting it into a tokenization and launching it on the platform.

And we're talks with a couple exchanges. And we're going to be fractalizing the ownership of this apartment building that we're buying. Yeah. And so we're putting our money where our mouth is. And we're going to really start growing this thing and building it out because there's a lot that's involved. It's pretty technical and pretty complicated just because you have to do the KYC process. You have to have title. There's a lot of working pieces that goes in between it.

And so we're pretty much trying to solve that to create this launch pad to allow people who want access to these markets, who want to be able to fractalize their property to do that, right? And make it seamless and easy, you know. and then they would launch it and have a token, and they would sell out their token. It would be some kind of offering. And then we'd put it on exchanges for secondary market. Yeah, I think, so title, let's talk about title. One place I genuinely believe needs help is title.

Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a real estate transaction. The title is just like a total cluster fuck. Yes. Right? Like they don't know the first thing. They're literally just like, respectfully, I feel like they're just paid hourly workers that don't care.

and aren't willing to do the work to go find the answer of this, whether it's a lien or there's something on title that needs to be removed, but they just say, I don't know, there's this thing. And like the clarity that would happen on blockchain to me is like an absolute need in the space. And I couldn't agree more. It's funny. Like in 2016, I wrote a paper on this one was in law school. Basically, and this is why I got so into it.

It was basically how Orreach, the two, 2008 crisis would never happen if you had everything on a blockchain, right? And so when I wrote that paper, a title company called me, and they were trying to build this out. The only problem is, is to put everything on chain. The only problem is there's no money in it because it's government, right? And so, like, eventually we will get that, I think, you know, but, and it's going to happen just because it is so much more efficient and you can know what's real, what's not. terms of, and this is where the law comes into. It's like, there's things that it's like for title, say, liens. Some states are first to file liens, right? Some states are first to report. Or if you

hadn't filed it, you have a certain window from the time the document was executed, right, as long as people are put on notice, right? So with liens and everything. And so it's going to happen eventually. But like I said earlier, people are still receiving their bank statements in the mail and running checks. You know what I mean? And so it's something that takes time. And the reason why you don't have like a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk or someone out there going and doing it is because there's not a whole lot of money in just recording

titles. There isn't. I mean, that's, you know, now there's money to owning title companies with money because there's fees for every transaction. Yes, yes. But the blockchain wouldn't create revenue. and so there's not a lot of money in it. Exactly.

There's not a whole lot of money into it. And so it's like title checks, right? Because then they go, these are the people that go to the offices, they check how we go through the paperwork. I think that would still kind of exist, but I really think a lot of that, and this goes back to where I'm saying that AI and blockchain have a very similar thing,

is because once all the titles are on chain, AI is going to be able to read it like that, and they will also know what's fake and what's not, what's real, what timestamp was done. Like title checks will be done within an instant. If every single title was on chain and you had AI reading it, it would be completely eliminated. And it would just be, hey, give me the title search for this. Boom, you type in the property. And everything is right there.

And the AI will tell you exactly what's on it. You know, we have to happen for that to start taking the street. You need to get all the local jurisdictions on board to start integrating this. And another reason why it's taken forever is because there is a electronic system, but there's also a hard file system. And so the amount of man hours, woman hours, wherever it is, that would take to put everything that's not on chain now on chain would take a lot of physical time. Right.

And so, like I said, no money. Who's going to pay all these people to do it? And then you also need to go to the local jurisdictions and say, hey, you have to use this software now. You know what I mean? Like, if you know, like local jurisdictions don't necessarily change their processes that often, you know what I mean? And so like it's one of those things that in a perfect world,

yes, we would just immediately be like, hey, guys, you have to do this. Start doing it now because it will only be easier moving forward. Right? They'll have a system that's partial that's integrated and then everything moving forward is on chain, right? And then you just upload all this stuff. And eventually it would just over time, everything will be on chain. But we need someone to do that and get everyone on the same page to make it happen. I feel like Elon Musk is rich enough to be able to carry that bill and push it forward.

I think so too. Yeah. He could be good. Any where do we want, you know, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of questions about this. Where can everyone find you? Where should we push people to like ask you questions? since you're the expert. Where do we want to go for there?

They can find me on LinkedIn, just Thomas Gathney, or OFA group on LinkedIn. Our website is OFACorp.com. We're on Twitter, NetO-X, and Instagram and stuff. But, yeah, I would definitely go to LinkedIn to start. We published all our news there.

We're a publicly traded company. Our ticker is O-Fall, if you want to check that out, O-FAL. And we published news on the NASDA. deck frequently. So you can find us there as well. That's awesome. Well, OFA Group C-O-O-O-Tomas Gaffney.

I am Justin Colby, and this has been the entrepreneur DNA. If you think someone has interest in understanding more about blockchain in how this is going to start to affect people's lives, please share this with the least two of your friends. I'd greatly appreciate it. See you on the next episode.