Meet the Bitkub CEO turning real estate on its head with cryptocurrency and tokenised ownership

Jirayut “Topp” Srupsrisopa, CEO of Thai crypto exchange Bitkub, is a true believer in the potential of digitised finance to revolutionise real estate ownership and transactions

The Bangkok-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub is a juggernaut. Launched in early 2018, it has quickly become the largest digital asset group in Southeast Asia. The company experienced eye-watering growth in its first half-dozen years in operation, including 1,000 percent growth in each of its first three years and 2,000 percent in its fourth.

Bitkub today boasts more than 5 million customers in Thailand—around seven percent of the country’s population—and one in 10 smartphones there has Bitkub’s app on it.

The company is led by youthful CEO Jirayut “Topp” Srupsrisopa, who has become the literal face of cryptocurrency in Thailand, his likeness gazing down from massive green billboards throughout the capital and beyond. Indeed, Topp is practically inseparable from the Bitkub brand itself.

We’re heading toward a future where anything that can be digitised will be digitised. All the world’s processes, anything with a value around us, will be digitised and tokenised, including real estate

After attending high school in New Zealand, he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in the UK, where he received a master’s degree in economics from Oxford in 2013. His favourite subject, he says, was monetary history, a subject that prepared him to keenly anticipate the already unfolding economic changes—including the revolutionary potential of cryptocurrency. “I knew that money changes every 50 years and I was convinced 10 years ago that this would be the future of money,” he says.

“It’s the most decentralised in terms of computing power,” he says, referring to Bitcoin in particular. “And the collective computing power. It is one of the highest, most stable, resilient blockchains out there. It cannot be manipulated by any particular entity. It’s the first-ever public infrastructure for payments, except for physical cash, but cash is very hard to move.

Of course, anyone who has followed cryptocurrency prices in recent years knows it hasn’t all been a smooth ride. Topp has steered Bitkub through turbulent periods of gut-churning volatility, including the fallout from scandals that saw the collapse of the FTX exchange and the Luna cryptocurrency.

But despite the ups and downs, Topp says he has remained steadfast in his belief in the underlying blockchain technology and its role in the future, including in real estate.

Tell us about the tokenisation of real estate. What does that mean?

We’re heading toward a future where anything that can be digitised will be digitised, especially with AI coming. All the world’s processes, anything with a value around us, will be digitised and tokenised, including real estate.

This democratises investment opportunities for many people. For example, in Bangkok, one condominium unit costs something like 10 million baht (USD270,000). And you can only serve a middle-class or upper-middle-class group of clients. People at the bottom of the pyramid can’t afford it. They cannot rent it out for passive income since they’d have to buy the whole unit.

Now we are turning things around. We can fractionalise apartment floors or condo rooms into fractional ownership, smaller pieces, and smaller units, where ownership is per square metre, or per coin. We can tap a lower group of the pyramid. And when there’s a dividend from the rental fee, you give them out on a pro-rata basis. If you own more square metres or more coins, you get more dividends.

At what point do you think this concept will be more widespread?

I would say less than five years. That’s when AI will already be human-level smart. That’s a pretty conservative estimate.

One other thing with this. Once we tokenise real estate into digital units, we can now play around with these tokens—not just as ownership of real estate or fractional ownership, but you can use smaller units as payments. For example, if we were to go out for dinner today and I didn’t bring any cash and you paid, I could go home and wire you a fraction of a condo as payment. And you could liquidate that in real time on the secondary market.

What other ways is this technology being used in the real estate sector?

To remit money. For example, China has capital controls. If you want to wire money out of China to buy a condo in Thailand, traditional real estate firms would have to keep opening new bank accounts every week because the government would keep shutting down their international bank accounts.

But with Bitcoin you can stay in your house, moving your thumbs on your phone to wire as much money as you want. And within 30 minutes, money would hit the bank here (in Thailand). You can buy real estate in a frictionless manner. In the past, you could not buy real estate in another country with a phone connected to the internet.

The price fluctuation of Bitcoin is cited as a concern for transactions like that. When do you think there will be a flattening out of the price?

This is basic finance. When the user base is small, volatility is high. When the user base gets bigger, volatility drops. But in the meantime, you can use stable coins for remittances. It’s perfectly stable: one-to-one.

Bitkub is also a payment processor, so we convert to fiat. We humanise the flow without the real estate firm knowing what’s happening on the back end. So, when customers or crypto nomads want to buy a condo in Thailand, they wire us crypto, and we auto-sell it at the market rate at that moment. And then we wire it to the real estate developer without informing them what types of tokens their client paid for the condo with. The developer doesn’t need to know—just that the money hit their bank account.

How do you think smart contracts will change the nature of real estate transactions?

When real estate deeds become digital or with fractional ownership of real estate, then we can do more applications with smart contracts. We can create predetermined conditions for different events to trigger and execute— manual work without people acting as an intermediary. So, it’s going to cut out middlemen first. Second, it’s going to create new business models, because when the marginal cost of execution goes to zero, it’s going to trigger new behaviours and new business models.

Are there threats to this happening from the regulatory or government side? Or is this technology an unstoppable force?

Unless you shut down the internet, it’s not feasible to prevent it. It’s not possible to shut down the internet. So, it’s an unstoppable force. You must live with this technology. You cannot effectively ban it unless you tell everyone to stop using the internet. There’s no way backwards. You can only govern the technology with all the players involved.

During the cryptocurrency pullback, everybody was afraid. How did you keep customers calm amid concerns over the exchanges themselves going under and the money not being there?

A lot of education. I also showed my face everywhere. I’m not hiding anything. I showed who is behind the company, who the backers are, and who the operators are. I shared all my personal stories and the stories of the company. I have a huge follower base in Thailand now, even more than the company, to be honest. Transparency is the best way—to be transparent with the customers and in communication is very important. The downside is that sometimes I get blamed for everything that goes wrong. FTX was my fault. Luna was my fault because I’m the face of the company.

What is your thought about where it goes from here?

I’m a long-term believer. I’ve been doing this for 11 years now. I would have left a long time ago if I wasn’t a believer. I believe in Bitcoin and the tokenisation concept.

Do you have any predictions for the price of Bitcoin?

That’s a billion-dollar question.

The original version of this article appeared in PropertyGuru Property Report Magazine Issue No. 184 on issuu and Magzter. Write to our editors at [email protected].