STEPHEN CASTELL | Founder and CEO, Castell Consulting

The market price of a cryptocurrency – which, as a medium of financial exchange, generally has scarcity built into it, but little, if any, demonstrable economic utility – is driven and influenced principally by what its buyers and sellers believe its market price should, or will, be, i.e., by speculation. 

This article introduces the QE2-Coin, a U.K. central bank digital currency (CBDC), originally proposed in 2017, that is, first, inherently designed not to be driven by speculative pressures, i.e., is a stablecoin, and, secondly, is specifically engineered to have utility as a SNUT, a “specialized national utility token” – deliberately architected to be exchangeable for products, services, goods, and assets in the real world, in particular, in the affordable homes housebuilding sector. 

Throughout the post-WW2 decades, despite many political manifesto pledges for reform and repeated central government attempts at encouragement of the home construction industry, there has in reality been a constant and growing new affordable U.K. homes blight, characterized by woefully under-target new housebuilding and poorly executed government stimuli. Without new ideas, innovation, and a powerful vision, it seems unlikely that any U.K. government policy will evolve to rectify this situation and be able to narrow the growing gap between U.K. housing supply and housing need. 

The really socially useful and valuable stablecoin, the QE2-Coin, to be spent in the U.K. housebuilding sector economy, and not converted into any inert non-economically productive asset or instrument, will positively address these homes availability issues, fueling economic activity in the U.K. housebuilding sector specifically focused on providing affordable homes. Uniquely, the QE2-Coin is a “limited life utility token”, meaning that it will have a smart contract baked into it, with functionality coded to “dematerialize” any QE2-Coin token instance, taking it out of existence if it does not get spent and used socially usefully within a defined time period. A QE2-Coin maquette has been created as the basic Ethereum crypto-token QE2. The U.K. Prime Minister’s response to the SNUT proposal is awaited.

However, it is undeniable that there is a severe affordable starter and rental homes shortfall in the U.K. and, whether or not the U.K. government decides to engage with SNUT, there is no reason why the QE2-Coin initiative should not proceed. Visionaries and entrepreneurs in fintech, the crypto community, the investment world, and the property sector are welcomed to join in developing the QE2 SNUT plan for fixing this starter and rental homes shortage.