E-Poster Presentation Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2021

Validation of NFT's for Smart Contracts Based on Fungal Assessments in the Built Environment: Implications for Real Estate Condition Reports (#229)

Cameron Jones 1 2
  1. Biological Health Services, TOORAK, VIC, Australia
  2. National Institute of Integrative Medicine, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia

Recent changes to the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2018 and the Residential Tenancies Regulation 2021 includes an expanded definition of urgent repairs where mould and damp caused by or related to the building structure may make the property unsafe or insecure. Consumer Affairs Victoria has interpreted these changes as requiring the tenant to support their request for urgent repairs by providing proof that the mould is dangerous and or causing a health issue.  All tenancy agreements now require the rental provider to ensure that the subject property is in an appropriate state before the renter occupies it. Consequently, a tenant can terminate the contract for breach of the implied term or request repairs. Both tenants and landlords may need to collect evidence-based data about the property beyond what may be captured in the condition report.  Assessing the microbiology of the built environment normally includes mould and bacterial airspace and surface assessments. Any digital file can be tokenized including reports, microscope imagery, or supplementary clinical files. We show how the Enjin blockchain is used to provide the tokenisation of assets (inspection reports and raw data) and mint these into a non-fungible token (NFT).  The token owner or holder is then linked to a set of digital assets that are permanently connected with the property. In the event of a dispute over mould, the token for that property can be retrieved against the address in the same way as a title search. This paper provides proof of concept showing how environmental, clinical and property data can generate blockchain assets on the Ethereum Mainnet.  Benefits of this approach include decentralised file retrieval and the ability to store the ground truth for real estate condition reports.  This model can be scaled and built into an economically sustainable model using a combination of free transfer fee tokens or a per-transfer, fee-based model. The method is extensible to other decentralized settings or protocols.