True story: What is the experience of selling a house with Bitcoin in Japan?

These "infrastructurers" without gorgeous narratives ultimately define the true value of the crypto economy.

Written by: BitpushNews Mary Liu

He was a former practitioner in the traditional banking and wealth management offices.

It is also the pioneer in turning digital currency into a tool for buying a house.

He insisted on sharing on Twitter for 10+ years,

It also received the most mysterious group of on-chain customers in the world.

You can use USDT to buy a Japanese B&B here, or you can also discuss the assets going overseas while petting cats.

"I bought a house for my cat!"

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You may have heard of this "Cat General" who is active on Chinese Twitter as a cat head. He used the cat-head mask as his logo, and his speech style was humorous and sarcastic. "Black Osaka is my profession", and he called himself a "kelp-level financial practitioner", but his true identity is the CEO of Keihan Housing Co., Ltd., a Japanese creative start-up real estate company.

In this article, we will go deep into the world of Mao Zong and learn how this rigorous entrepreneur who wears a cat hood, curses Osaka people, but actually handes coins for customers and houses.

The native "Cat General" from Lujiazui financial circle

As early as 2016, Mr. Cat started investing in Bitcoin.

He studied finance, and he followed the "professional route" he studied all the way to undergraduate and graduate students. After graduation, he entered banks, securities companies, and wealth management institutions to work. He became familiar with the traditional finance paths.

He compared and said: "The cryptocurrency circle started to be popular in 2017, so I just wanted to jump over, but no one paid attention to me."

He submitted his resume to mainstream exchanges including Binance, ZB, Gate, etc., with a background in French business school and a resume in traditional finance, but he did not get a currency circle offer.

It was also the same year that the regulator ordered the closure of all domestic exchanges, and the crypto industry quickly fell off. He was "missed" the first Crypto wave.

But this is just a small episode. At the same time, he has already started to build his personal IP.

Mao Zong is not an "entrepreneur" with one person, but a "inheritance". The first generation of Cat President was a leader who came from Noah’s wealth. Later, he passed this account to him by chance.

Today, Cat has a stable fan base on Twitter. His avatar is a custom-made cat-head mask, which started at a Halloween party during his study abroad in France in 2015. It was truly used as a brand and was his decision after entering the banking system in 2017.

By chance in 2018, he learned about the opportunity of Japanese real estate -the Japanese housing market was not popular at that time, but he "saw the direction."

On January 3, 2020, President Mao flew from Pudong Airport to Osaka to inspect business. At that time, a news from Wuhan was broadcasting. He thought it was a joke, but he did not expect that he would never return home again. covid "sealed" him in Japan, but also opened another door.

Crypto + Real Estate: Take a Pragmatic Path

An interesting trend seems to have appeared in recent years: many people are not actually "necessary needs", but are based on comprehensive considerations such as asset allocation, identity, and lifestyle optimization.

Some people want to send their children to study in Japan, so they buy a house first; some people live in Southeast Asia or the Middle East and think that the cost of living in Japan is reasonable and the safety factor is high.

According to Tencent News, data shows that the number of Chinese people buying houses in Japan increased by 50% in 2022 compared with 2021. From October to November, it soared by 120% in just one month, with Chinese people accounting for 80% of foreign home buyers in Tokyo.

There are also many people who make money in the crypto circle, who are eager to convert their assets into "visible and tangible" physical assets. They do not understand the process of Japanese real estate and cannot find a suitable intermediary.

And Mr. Mao understands the language of the crypto circle and has a financial background, and is still in Japan. He grasped this part of the demand: Japanese real estate is relatively stable, with considerable returns, and a clear legal structure, making it an ideal place for crypto funds. Purchasing a house in digital currency has since become a realistic option.

This is exactly what he is good at.

Mr. Mao said that he is not the first person to do this business, but he is the first person to systematically output the process: "In 2018, someone bought a house with digital currency, but we wrote the first Chinese guide."

His blog post, "A Practical Guide to Digital Currency Transaction in Japan's Real Estate", is almost textbook-level, and is clearly written from the path to exchange exchange, payment methods to possible pitfalls.

He also shared real cases:

"The Koreans used UST to buy a house, but LUNA collapsed and all defaulted."

Because of seeing the crazy crypto circle, he is extremely cautious and only does one-on-one real estate transactions. In the crypto industry where trust is extremely precious, he has won reputation through solid delivery.

According to Mao Zong, digital currency trading in Japanese real estate has several significant advantages:

• Convenient cross-border payment: no need to pass through traditional banks, fast transaction speed and concise procedures;
• Low tax sensitivity: Different countries have different identifications of Crypto Assets, and in some cases they are more flexible;
• Natural market matching: crypto circle investors are mostly younger generations and have unique preferences for asset allocation and lifestyle.

In those years, when industry insiders were crazy about the myth of getting rich in DeFi and NFTs, Cats had quietly turned the "USDT to Tokyo Real Estate" into a business.

How to acquire customers? A person who has been writing Twitter for 10+ years has become his best advertisement

"90% of my customers come from Twitter." - Mao Zong 2022

In the early days, General Mao also adopted the "traditional routine" marketing method, writing official accounts, talking about practical things, bragging about Tokyo, and talking about policies...

"But it's too much, everyone writes the same."

Until one day, he took a photo of the ATM full of garbage in Namba, Osaka and posted it on Twitter with the caption "This is Osaka", and it turned out to be explosive.

"I have gained more than 10,000 followers, and at that moment I knew I found the traffic password."

This unintentional move made him realize that the market did not lack the flattery of Japan, but a person who dared to talk about the "negative" and "reality". Since then, General Mao has launched the marketing strategy of "professional black Osaka people", which has also made him the most alternative real estate agency in the crypto circle.

In the era of information flooding, you cannot talk about finance as an ordinary person, nor can you talk about Japanese real estate in the tone of an ordinary intermediary. In this era of serious homogeneity, either it is done interestingly or no one remembers you.

And the slogans "I bought a house for my cat" and "I am so poor that I only have a mortgage of 320,000 yuan" come from his real life - In 2018, Mao’s total assets exceeded 30 million, but he was burdened with a large amount of mortgage loans. In order to relieve the pressure on his parents, he took over 95% of the loan, and now he has only the last 320,000 yuan left.

Mr. Mao also admitted that this path to entrepreneurship is not easy to walk. The early handling fee was as high as 12%, and the liquidation channel was almost monopolized by Koreans. The LUNA incident broke out in 2022, and the UST used by a large number of customers was reset to zero, and the liquidation channel was once interrupted for half a year.

"The most difficult thing is not the process, it is trust." crypto people are naturally alert to intermediaries, while traditional Japanese landlords are also suspicious of cryptocurrency investors, and a large number of properties cannot match.

He and the team eventually gradually built their own process. I don’t want to be the fastest one, but I want to be the one who lives the longest.

Mao Zong’s customers are almost all digital currency investors born in the 1980s and 1990s. They are relatively young and have strong financial strength, but cannot find a real estate company that is willing to take their orders, because Japanese real estate practitioners are generally older and do not understand digital currency operations. Mao Zong is one of the few people who understand coins and houses.

His company is also in contact with some local Japanese developers, hoping that more "acceptable cryptocurrency payments" will appear in the future.

Don't rush to chase the wind, just hope to be down-to-earth

Speaking of the hot RWA (Real World Assets) track, Mr. Mao was very clear: "This industry was too early, like the fund industry 100 years ago. There is no underlying asset protection and no legal support, and most of them are still speculating on concepts."

He is not in a hurry to issue coins or "mount" the real estate, but only hopes to smooth the process of "handing over coins with one hand and handing over the house with the other hand".

"Japanese real estate is still using fax to complete the procedures. Talking about automatic delivery of smart contracts? That is a very distant future."

But he still believed that the direction was right. In the future, real estate transactions will definitely become more and more platform-oriented and digital. Even if they are not on the chain, they will be pushed forward by digital asset holders.

Mao Zong’s ultimate goal is to turn “buy a house in the currency circle” into standardized services. He is not in a hurry to expand the scale, and he is more willing to serve each customer clearly, verify the model clearly, and then see if it is copied. "As for whether you can do RWA in the future, it depends on the legislation of RWA around the world. We do not rule out that it will test on a small scale, but it is still very far away for the existing Japanese laws to pass the RWA."

Conclusion

This is not a myth of getting rich, but a story about walking a pragmatic path in the gap between tradition and new finance. The cat always finds a position using his intuition about the market and his understanding of human nature -and then sits firmly on it. When the tide recedes, perhaps it is these "infrastructurers" without gorgeous narratives that ultimately define the true value of the crypto economy.