Discovering the blockchain approach for property NFTs

The beauty of blockchain is the end-user freedom to trade and the natural perpetuity of digital assets. When approaching smart contracts for Montavera, the concept is simple with a focus on ownership and utility. “Future-proofing,” however, quickly raises new challenges. We have these main goals for properties:

1. Ownership of a property offers exclusive access to your discord “neighborhood.”
2. Ownership allows you to house Gurus up to whatever the max occupancy is designated from the metadata for that property. 
3. Unused rooms will be available to be rented out to other Gurus at a price set by the owner.
4. Residential properties will act as a shelter to maintain Aura income for staked Gurus.

Leaning on our battle-hardened experiences in contract development, we created a lengthy list of FAQs for our stakeholders: How are Gurus attached to properties? What if a property gets sold and has Gurus? What if a Guru is traded while in a property? How do we do bulk move-in or vacating? How is rent collected? How does eviction work if rent is not paid? How do we make sure Gurus can’t be used twice in different properties? 

The list goes on and on, but the good news is that we think we have solved most of our questions with our approach.

We need property NFTs to be able to grow new neighborhoods and change over time. Therefore, there will be a “burn” function implemented on the contract as well as re-minting on the same token ID. There are also resort and business properties which require unique contracts to serve purposes beyond occupancy. For this reason, we can’t have occupancy recorded on a property contract. We will see multiple property NFT contracts in the future. We also don’t want there to be actual transfers of Guru NFTs to a properties contract because that could get way too complicated when unstaking a Guru. That’s why there will be a delegation method where a ledger is kept of where each Guru is housed. If a Guru is unstaked, we will use this ledger to vacate them from any property they were previously on.

The solution we came up with will be the introduction of an Occupancy/Rental contract which is separate from the Property contract. Ownership of both assets will be validated within the new Occupancy contract where owners will also be able to set and collect rent as well as move Gurus in and out.  We are also setting up batch functions using mapped arrays so multiple Gurus can be housed/vacated in one transaction.

We’ve made good progress on the Property contract with a batch minting function so that we can release entire neighborhoods as they come out. Waiting for them all to be done at once will take too long, so we plan to release the properties by district. And speaking of properties …

Property Art!

Behind the scenes, we have been absolutely obsessed with the look and architecture of Montavera. The properties of each district will share distinct features so, at just a glance, you’ll know if you’re looking at those snobby Gurus from Lakeview Estates or a grifter buying up all The Streets. 

We’d also like to announce that EVERY property NFT will have its own unique art asset! Many locations within Lakeway Estates, Long River, The Streets, and Tivea are currently under development. We’re also doing our best to include context in the image if your property is near a major bridge, water feature, neighboring district, etc. It’s been so much fun fleshing out Montavera imagery! Here is one of our favorite assets so far — the Tivea Tree.

Thank you, seekers! We will definitely have more updates as we get closer to releasing the first district!