01 The co-op
A lender that happens to build houses, owned by the people who use it.
Your deposit is your share, every member has one vote regardless of balance, and the promises that matter are written where a future board cannot quietly reverse them.
“We never sell the land.”
Written as a policy
A board reverses it in an afternoon.
Policies are what a board sets, and what the next board is free to unset. Nothing about the sentence itself protects it.
Written as a reserved matter
It cannot pass without the co-op.
No matter who else joins the board. The protection is structural, which is the only kind that survives the people who wrote it.
02 Structure
Two balance sheets that never touch.
Housing on one side — land and contributed property. Money on the other — deposits, credit and loans.
The co-op members, one member one vote
- Program entity accounts, cards, payments
- Deed & Title Co records, administration
- Clear Capital Holdings where outside investors sit
- Clear Lending funds the credit book
- Clear Properties contributed
- ClearLabs builds the protocol
Protocol foundation ownerless, holds the source
Outside the ownership tree — it contracts ClearLabs to maintain it.
Land backstops construction borrowing and never credit losses, and a member’s savings never fund another member’s credit.
Members hold no shares in Clear Capital Holdings; it is a separate company with its own board.
Investors can hold a seat on that board; the co-op board is elected by members and stays member-only.
03 Governance
Who decides what.
One vote each, councils where people actually live, and a third of the board delegated from them.
- Members
- one vote each
- Regional councils
- per community
- Delegate assembly
- one third of the board
Not proportional to balance. Your deposit makes you an owner; it does not make you a bigger one.
Actual residents, governing their own place. From outside it looks like an HOA. It is not one.
Each community delegates its council chair. Written as a fraction so it holds at any board size.
Five reserved matters, none of which pass without the co-op.
- Selling land
- Diluting members
- Amending the purpose
- Replacing the manager
- Related-party deals above a threshold
04 The protocol
Control is unnecessary when exit is credible.
The ledger, the credit issuers and the tokenized deed and title records run on open-source contracts held by a Wyoming statutory foundation that nobody owns.
github.com/Deed3Labs/Protocol-Contracts · AGPL-3.0
Who maintains it
ClearLabs, and not only ClearLabs.
Currently paid to maintain the contracts, and deliberately not the only party that could be.
If governance diverged
The co-op can fork the code.
It already funds the maintainer, so it has the capability and not just the right.
05 Who
Small, local, and honest about it.
Clear is being built out of the Inland Empire by a very small team, starting with a handful of shops in one corridor rather than a launch.
In progress
2017
since the design work started — the credit waterfall, the entity structure, the protocol
Why a corridor
Ten merchants a mile apart compound.
Ten across the county do not. What is new is that the first product is small enough to actually ship.
We are looking for four people.
- A partnerships lead
- A protocol engineer
- Two advisers who know real estate and banking
Equity-only at this stage, and we say that in the first conversation rather than the fourth. Get in touch