When Lambo? We don’t know. When Ferrari 599 GTO? Now!
Lambos are a popular meme in the crypto world, and who doesn’t love a beautiful, fast car? While most of us can’t afford a whole one (we’re still waiting for $1m BTC), BitCar offers the next best thing with shares in a classic Ferrari.
Timeshares to timestamps
Fractional ownership of expensive, rare and luxury items has long been a Thing. From the heydays of timeshares in the 1980s to the square foot of Islay that every purchase of a bottle of Laphroaig gets you, we’re used to the concept of parcelling up commodities we can’t own in their entirety in the knowledge that owning a little is better than owning none.
Fractional ownership is an ideal use case for blockchain, for several reasons. It’s easy to create a token to represent the item to be divided up and sold – in this case, a classic Ferrari. The transparency and immutability of the blockchain means owners can be sure their fractions won’t be diluted by the creation of more tokens, and no one can lose or erase their record of ownership. Owners can prove exactly when they bought their shares and when, thanks to the full record and timestamps on each block of the blockchain. Moreover, they can quickly and easily sell their stake to anyone willing to buy it on a global secondary market – something that’s not so easy with a conventional approach.
Smart ownership
BitCar have used Ethereum to create a token representing ownership of a Ferrari 599 GTO – an absolute classic and a rare item of which only 599 were made. Having bought the car at a very competitive price ($561,000), the idea is straightforward: customers buy fractions of the car (from as little as $25) and then five years down the line, the car is sold and tokenholders receive the sale value in ETH. The funds are automatically airdropped to the account holding their tokens. The whole process is managed by smart contracts via the BitCar platform.
Whatever the crypto markets do, the expectation is that the Ferrari will appreciate in fiat terms – aside from being a rare model, the Chinese market is opening up in the coming months, and supercars are a highly sought-after status symbol. At the very least, tokens are an alternative stablecoin, but the likelihood is the sale value will be significantly higher. The car itself is stored in the UK and occasionally exhibited at events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
So here’s how it works:
- You’ll need MetaMask
- Go to https://go.bitcar.io/platform
- Log in and click ‘unlock your wallet’
- You’ll then need to click the bar at the top to register as a member
- Read and agree to the terms, obviously not simply scrolling to the end and clicking ‘Ok’
- Fill out the form
- Approve the smart contract request via MetaMask (you’ll need some ETH in your account for this)
- Now refresh your browser, log in using MetaMask and you can click the image of the car in the centre of the screen to buy some fractions
- You’ll need some ETH to buy fractions, as well as BitCar tokens – there’s a list of exchanges where you can get them.
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