Yes.

No. Anyone can mint Erthos Credits. True decentralization requires an inclusive society where everyone, and not just the rich or technically advanced, is able to participate. Otherwise, what’s the point?

No. All real estate (land, commercial, residential, etc.) can be digitized to mint Erthos Credit.

Think of digitizing your home as selling it, except that after receiving your money, you get to keep it for the rest of your life. *jaw drop* If you wanted to sell it, the MINT would buy your remaining property interests at market value. Since you already received value for your home, a post-digitization sale price would, in most cases, be calculated as if you had kept your home and a professional appraiser would assign an appropriate rental value for that period.

New freedoms that we weren't born with tend to look that way. How would you react if you were told that you could no longer remove money from your wallet unless you got a bank’s permission, accepted a high-interest loan with monthly payments, late fees, and risked losing your entire bank account if you defaulted? It may be difficult for us ‘old-worldie’ types to imagine a world with these new freedoms, but our grandkids will look back and think how crazy people must have been to pay a bank just so that they could use their own, hard-earned money, stored as real estate equity. For example, if you owned a $1M house free and clear of any mortgage or other liens, then you would have $1M worth of equity in real estate. This is one way in which humans ‘choose’ to store their wealth. But, if you would rather store your wealth in a real estate-backed cryptocurrency, then you Once Upon A Time . . . people weren’t allowed to own land. Only kings and queens could own land. One day, lowly peasants were bestowed the sovereign power of land ownership, the world changed, and democracies were born. The End.

You are promoted from lord of land to a royal member of what we regard as the most elite group in the world, the Erthos Minting Guild ("MINT"). The MINT is where you claim your throne in a democracy of kings. As a fully inducted member of the MINT, you’ll enjoy the loyalty and support of your fellow guild members to build a brighter future. Members of the MINT receive equal voting rights and are privileged to receive benefits of the MINT. (You can call our ecosystem the Erthosystem to sound trendy.)

Better. One of the thorniest problems in estate planning is the passing on of real estate. This is so for numerous reasons, not the least of which includes the fact that real estate is cumbersome and expensive. A home can burden even adult children with mortgage debt, property taxes, insurance, utilities, the cost of maintenance and upkeep, etc. This often results in the need to sell the property anyway, and under the worst conditions, causing fights among family members, sale delays, and a compromised sale price. Imagine four grown children. The daughter who lived with and took care of mom and dad feels entitled to remain in the home rent-free, two other siblings want her to pay them rent, and the fourth daughter, who runs a successful business in another state, just wants the home liquidated so that she can get a lump sum of money. To sell or not to sell? Who picks the real estate agent? Families literally break apart over these issues. Erthos to the rescue! Minting your home equity into Erthos Credits can eliminate these problems by liquidating the value of your home without losing your right to live in it. Property owners who digitize real estate can set aside a portion of their minted Erthos tokens to leave to their children. Whether and how best to use this is for you and your advisors to determine, but it gives estate planners an important added tool.

As part of the minting process, you will receive an NFT that gives you the ability to confer a right of first refusal to any family member who may wish to succeed you in owning or renting your home. Also, if you’ve left them some Erthos Credits, then they could apply that toward their acquisition of the family home.

How many Erthos Credits are you leaving them? Over what period of time? We cannot predict changes in the market value of Erthos tokens or real estate. But, here’s something cool: When a family member exercises their right of first refusal to purchase the family home, that comes with the more affordable option of purchasing it “as-digitized.” Thus, if the traditional market price of the property rose to $1.2M, your family member may be paying something closer to half that price, rather than at a price that rebuilds the equity, anew.

No. They would always be free to allocate any additional funds that they may have (or savings from the lower sale price) to purchasing or issuing Erthos Credits, separate and distinct from their home. For some people, the right to purchase an as-digitized home may be the only way they could afford to buy it.

It’s too early to tell what will best suit the needs of society. As things stand, properties can be resold at their traditional, full market value (i.e., like you are buying to own it forever), they can be sold as-digitized, or they can be rented. To accommodate keeping certain residential properties within a family, the right of first refusal to family members ensures that the most affordable options remain available for this purpose. As the Erthos Project matures, we may be able to allow every buyer to choose their purchase option. Imagine buying a $1M home and having the option of paying $1M, $500,000, or renting it. That way, the market speaks its needs. Selling homes as-digitized could certainly help solve the affordable housing crisis.

Any appreciation in real estate value would be translated to the Erthos tokens held. That’s true for you and anyone who owns and holds Erthos Credits. Thus, years later, if the backing property values have increased 300%, that would translate to the appreciation of Erthos Credits. Ultimately, the market would decide the degree of that translation and the same principles would apply in reverse for any depreciation.

Smarty pants!

The historically untapped wealth that you and your minting community release into the economy increases the realization of prosperity in a more efficiently run society that dramatically boosts tax revenues through increased economic activity. In the U.S., alone, there's roughly $20T dollars of wealth that's just sitting there, trapped as equity in real estate, doing nothing. In other words, $20T dollars worth of human productivity and economic inertia goes to die inside of real estate, because it is pulled out of our economy and frozen in equity. Due to these societal inefficiencies, no one can benefit from this value; not the banks, not the governments, and certainly not homeowners. To illustrate the proportion of what you and your minting community can achieve, let us imagine the full $20T was accessed by property owners. Assuming an interest yield of 10% on $20 trillion imputes an income opportunity loss to property owners (i.e., money they could have made) of nearly $2 trillion per year. Applying a blended, federal income tax rate of 20% to the $2T of interest income, illustrates a potential tax revenue opportunity loss of roughly one-third of $1 trillion. That's a substantial amount of tax revenue for a government that is accustomed to operating at an annual budget deficit of $1T.

Exercising the right to mint Erthos Credits may become as important as exercising the right to vote, because: The minting of Erthos Credits funds federal, state, and local governments through taxable transactions and economic activity. ​ The minting of Erthos Credits aligns wealth interests with a healthy, life-sustaining planet, and environmental restoration and preservation. The minting of Erthos Credits helps to preserve democracy by enhancing the political and financial independence of everyday people. The minting of Erthos Credits promotes world peace by promoting an internationally shared commonwealth. The minting of Erthos Credits helps to restore the middle class and to narrow the wealth gap. The minting of Erthos Credits can ultimately solve the affordable housing crisis. The minting of Erthos Credits allows anyone to access and receive the bounties of civilization. The minting of Erthos Credits gives people hope, turns helplessness into permissionless, and eliminates the despair that leads to drug addiction, suicide, mass shootings, and debilitating depression. And the list goes on . . .

You do. After you have converted your equity into Earth-backed crypto, you can continue to collect rents from your rental properties for the rest of your life.

No. That equity belongs to you. Equity in real estate is your hard-earned, after-tax money that was stored in real estate. It’s yours, it was always yours, and you shouldn’t have to pay anyone back for using your own money.

Not so much. Once in circulation, Erthos Credits are backed by all digitized property as a diverse collective.

Yes. In addition to receiving fungible Erthos Credits, Issuers receive a non-fungible token (NFT) that represents their retained rights to own and possess their property. These NFTs evidence the ownership interests in a particular property, a right of reassignment, and a posthumous right of first refusal. Issuers can reverse the digitization of their properties and exit them from the eRTHOSystem (i.e., redeem) by burning their NFTs and burning the quantity of Erthos Credits mintable and minted from their properties.

Details about security and which aspects can be safely made public must be cleared by our security experts and we prefer to err on the side of caution. Also, because security concerns arise in different ways and in different contexts, it is difficult to give a simple answer. For example, an exploit could be made by a hacker to a line of code, or an online scam artist could trick a user into parting with their assets in a given transaction. We recognize the vulnerabilities and potential exploits of any computerized or digital system. That said, we do enjoy one advantage that other tech projects do not have. The Erthos Project’s real-estate backed digital credits coexist and correlate with real assets in the real world. Thus, if there’s ever a blackout, bug, glitch, data loss, hack, etc., we have additional tools to retrace ownership rights using physical documents and records in the real world to restore credits to their rightful owners. Again, while no system is risk-free, we are fortunate to have these added failsafe mechanisms. As the crypto industry continues to evolve and become part of our daily lives, so too will security innovations and protective measures, and we expect that to include insurance products with crypto-related policies.

Yes. As is typical of any crypto project, it is necessary to protect token holders, the token, the protocol, the ecosystem, and everyone’s wealth from such things as market manipulations by wealthy traders (a/k/a whales). A classic example is when a whale sells $1B worth of a token, causing the price to plummet, this can cause panic sales and force liquidations and losses by others based on the terms of previously ordered or leveraged positions with an exchange. Following the aftermath, the same whale can then repurchase the tokens at a substantial discount. To prevent these types of abuses, smart contracts typically have provisions that restrict all or a portion of tokens from being sold or "swapped" for fiat (like US dollars) or other tokens, for a given period of time. Such restrictions are particularly important for new projects. In the Erthosystem, depending on whether the property that you digitize will continue to have a mortgage or other liens on it, you can expect at least 20%-30% of the value of minted Erthos Credits to be restricted from immediate sale or liquidation. Such terms will vary widely depending on the maturity of our project and economic factors. Any holding requirements will be clearly spelled out during the minting process. IMPORTANT NOTE: Restrictions of this nature typically do not limit other uses, like staking or making purchases, and in fact, encourage such uses.