Stayawhile is the first company to combine blockchain-based utility tokens and furnished apartment rentals to create a global real estate ecosystem for an international clientele.

Stayawhile is a global network of furnished, branded, designer apartments in major cities around the world. We are already operational in New York City and Boston, and will open in Philadelphia this month. It is our ambition to create a new category — branded medium-term housing — and to become the global leader with hundreds of thousands of branded apartments across the globe.

Foreign nationals typically encounter difficulty renting apartments in markets where they do not own assets. Institutional landlords generally prefer not to rent to international clientele since it is difficult to assess their creditworthiness or to seize their assets when they are held in overseas bank accounts. By launching the Stayabit token, the company will eliminate many of these obstacles and enable international customers to move seamlessly around the world between the ever-expanding network of Stayawhile apartments, creating more of a world without borders.


LEARN MORE:


Token Website: https://token.stayawhile.com/
White Paper: https://token.stayawhile.com/pdfs/whitepaper.pdf
Stayawhile Website: https://stayawhile.com/
Follow on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/stayawhiletoken
Follow on Reddit at: https://www.reddit.com/r/thestayawhile/
Follow on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/thestayawhile/

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:


Why does an apartment rental network require blockchain?

There are several strong reasons to incorporate blockchain technology, but the primary one is that we are by definition an internationally focused business. Our corporate goal and value proposition is to have Stayawhile apartments located in every major area of the world, so you can always find a home wherever you may be. This necessitates a method of accepting payment across a wide range of currencies, which is quite operationally and financially costly — both for us and for the customer. Blockchain enables us to have anyone, anywhere, able to pay instantly and easily.

Why did you choose to have STAY’s have a fixed exchange rate pegged to the dollar?


This is not quite true in the “pegged” sense. We are only proxying a token as $1 for the initial sale, as we need some sort of baseline for the
ETH -> STAY conversion. The only other option is an ETH peg which might make sense in the future when the tokens are in circulation, or after the sale has begun. This is not fundamentally different from what a gift card does (fixed dollar -> token conversion, offers utility and ability to pay in the future) aside from the ETH intermediate step, which is only necessary before the contracts are officially in place.

How do the transaction costs associated with blockchain tech compare to those associated with credit cards?


Let’s price this out. At the moment, we are accepting credit cards as rent payment. Our vendor, Stripe, charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (and it will be some time before we have the resources to implement ACH payments). Sure, the fixed cost only really hurts in microtransactions, so let’s call that negligible. So we’re looking at 2.9% every month.
Now consider the cost with the Stayabit. Let’s assume you have zero ETH in your account (though this assumption is generous — many people who would be buying the token will already have plenty of ETH in their wallet, either bought, mined, or traded). Coinbase charges nothing for initial ACH transfers.

So you will be charged for two things:
The one-time conversion of USD -> ETH
The gas cost per token transaction

Coinbase charges 1.49% for the conversion. Current median gas costs are approximately 10–20 gwei per transaction, which is about $0.08, less than a third of the already negligible CC fixed cost. Thus, the cost is nearly 50% lower for the end user using the token system. This does not even take into account the rent discounts built into the token utilities.

Why would anybody hang onto their STAY tokens — particularly landlords?


Landlords are not the target owner of the Stayabit — the renters are. So why would they want to hang on to their tokens? Well, as detailed in our whitepaper (https://token.stayawhile.com/pdfs/whitepaper.pdf), we’ve enumerated six intrinsic value propositions for the token itself:

Rent Payments
Booking Priority
Collateral
Voting Rights
Credit Scoring Enhancements
Rent Discounts
Membership Club

All of these should be considered strong assets for token holders.


How does voting work within the network?

All token holders will be asked to vote on new locations upon implementation of the token system. One token = one vote. Periodically, we will ask token holders to vote in the future, and focus our expansion efforts on the outcome of the votes.

shouldn't this be in the ANN thread?

Also interested if there are official ANN and Bounty threads.