Global Seminar | Tokenising building data assets on a Blockchain for the circular economy

Future Cities Lab (FCL) Global Seminars

Ideas, discussion and thinking on sustainable cities and settlement systems at the intersection of science, design, place and time.

Tokenising Building Data Assets on a Blockchain for the Circular Economy

Building information is currently not treated as something valuable beyond its immediate scope of application. One of the reasons for this is the lack of a long term value proposition and/or clear pathways for generating revenue using building data. As a result, valuable building information is unavailable to interested individuals and data analytic companies.

In order to monetise building data, it has to be first systematically generated or collected (e.g., during the construction phase of a building). Furthermore, building data must be maintained, curated and regularly updated to remain relevant and up-to-date as time
passes. All this incurs costs and companies may not see the point of doing so beyond what is needed to achieve their immediate tasks at hand.

Among other potential use-cases for building data assets, they may provide information about building components and their materials to entities that specialise in mining and recycling building materials, thus contributing to a circular building materials economy. Pathways for generating revenue would provide the necessary incentives to maintain and update data until the building is demolished (and possibly beyond). We believe that building data assets have a crucial role to play in the context of sustainable material flows in circular future cities.

To this end we use tokenised data assets on a blockchain as a tool to connect building owners with the consumers of building information, coordinate the activities of the built ecosystem and at the same time, maintain the economic incentives required to keep
the wheels running.

Presenter:

Sarad Venugopalan
Blockchain Researcher & Developer of Circular Future Cities, FCL Global