We released our White Paper last Friday (read it here) and have since received a healthy amount of feedback and constructive criticism. We wanted to take some time to address some of the most common questions that have come up.

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 seven 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.

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback and criticism. Please reach out via email or comment below if you have further questions and we’ll be happy to answer as soon as possible.