LABS Group and Xinyuan Group (NYSE:XIN) Reached A Higher Altitude of Strategic Cooperation on “The First Real Estate-Blockchain Cross-field Integration Project”

On January 29, 2021, LABS Group, the world’s first real estate digital ecology project, and New York Stock Exchange-listed company Xinyuan International Development Co., Ltd. (NYSE: XIN, hereinafter referred to as “Xinyuan” or “XIN”) reached a bilateral strategic cooperation, hoping to start from real estate digital assets, to jointly discuss and promote the ecological development of real estate in the field of blockchain digitalization.

Since the development of the cryptocurrency market, the total market value of Bitcoin has surpassed that of Alibaba, forming a huge base of US$640 billion. However, with constraints to the scale of the digital asset market, traditional industries are also seeking ways to connect with the cryptocurrency world. In contrast to the gold market volume of about 9 trillion US dollars, according to HSBC’s global real estate report, the total value of global real estate in 2016 exceeded 228 trillion US dollars. The huge wealth potential it contains has now become the most ideal trigger for integration with the cryptocurrency market.

Under the huge market prospect of “real estate-blockchain cross-domain integration”, two industry explorers emerged at the historical moment; Labs Group and XIN have reached strategic cooperation at the beginning of 2021.

LABS Group is a real estate plus digital group established in 2018 and developed the world’s first end-to-end real estate digital ecosystem, LABS. LABS uses a regulated real estate stock exchange to subdivide investment, mortgage and secondary markets to reshape the real estate investment in terms of the largest asset class. Committed to the decentralization of traditional real estate assets, crowdfunding and trading utilized by blockchain technology, changing the way people invest in real estate. By segmenting real estate investment using digital currency in terms of global crowdfunding, transactions and distribution on the blockchain, and exchanges’ primary and secondary sales and transactions, all real estate investment pain points are resolved; it is a blockchain digital asset provided to global investors through crowdfunding and digital exchange.

Up until now, LABS Group has received support from New Zealand’s largest real estate developer and a prestigious Hong Kong family business, Hong Kong listed companies GCA Hanhua Capital, YBB Foundation, Centrifuge and other institutions, and has reached strategic cooperation with RioDeFi and Enjin. This time, it received a strategic investment from Xinyuan Group, a listed company in New York, reinforcing the entire ecology of LABS Group.

Xinyuan International Development Co., Ltd. (NYSE:XIN) is a real estate development company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2019, it spun off the property sector, Xinyuan Property Services Group (01895.HK), which was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It is also the first real estate property company based in the central region of mainland China listed in Hong Kong. In China, Xinyuan develops and manages large-scale high-quality real estate projects in more than ten first- and second-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Jinan, Xi’an, and Suzhou, and has been selected as one of the “Top 100 Real Estate Companies in China” for eight consecutive years. As one of the first Chinese real estate developers to enter the U.S. market, Xinyuan has been active in the real estate development field in New York in the past few years, and through its angel investment, real estate digital securitization service provider UPRETS HK Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “UPRETS”) explore to provide a new one-stop liquidity technology solution for global real estate investors and real estate developers.

Until now, the layout of Xinyuan International has covered many first-tier cities and regions including New York, Los Angeles, London, Malaysia, Dubai, and has created a series of boutique residential projects. At the same time, the real estate digital securitization project OST (Oosten project in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) issued by the UPRETS platform technology was successfully listed on the Seychelles-licensed digital stock exchange MERJ Exchange in 2020, and has cooperated with multiple digital asset ecosystems, reaching close strategic cooperations.

Xinyuan will rely on its brand and asset advantages in the real estate field to work closely with LABS Group. The real estate digital ecology solution that LABS Group is building will also be an effective export for many leading international real estate developers, including Xinyuan. Due to real estate’s asset-heavy attributes, investors usually need to have a substantial amount of start-up capital to acquire it. However, if such a heavy asset can be split into several “small units,” then more people will share the real estate investment dividends such as rental income and potential real estate premiums, thereby attracting more multinational investors. Xinyuan will start from real estate resources and provide LABS Group with richer and more professional “hard” resource support. LABS Group also has a strong team with knowledge, capabilities, credentials and resourceful networks in real estate, blockchain and finance to ensure the normal operation of the project. This also means that its “soft” ecology solution will also provide stable technical support for real estate digital products. The union between the two parties will form a new cooperation format combining win-win, mutual benefit and complementarity.

According to LABS core members Yuen Wong and Calvin Ng, the project started planning in 2018, and sufficient layout and preparations have been made in the past two years, all aiming to provide a more active, innovative and win-win ecology for the conservative and traditional real estate development environment.

There will be some changes in real estate in the future. LABS Group and Xinyuan are ready and are moving towards contributing to these changes.