MIRIS chair discusses the world’s first 85% energy-positive hotel ‘Svart’

Coin Rivet recently interviewed Nicole Anderson, co-founder and managing partner at the Redsand Group and chair of the board at MIRIS, to learn more about the world’s first off-the-grid, 85% energy-positive hotel in the Arctic Circle known as ‘Svart’.

Nicole has long been an innovator and pioneer in the financial services industry, winning multiple awards and ushering in an era of sustainability and tokenised business models.

“I attribute my success to one thing – it’s actually always doing what I say I’m going to do and building incredibly strong networks that come back time and time again,” she tells us.

“I spent my days working within my business and looking at futuristic and – dare I say it, because I hate the word – truly disruptive new business models in what was historically and predominantly financial services and innovation. But now I have a much broader remit looking at sustainability and how technology and business models need to change in order to make our planet greener.”

MIRIS is a security token offering (STO) and focuses on three core areas: sustainable energy, sustainable living, and sustainable finance.

Svart 

MIRIS is a hybrid company in the sense that it unites its three pillars of sustainable energy, sustainable living, and sustainable finance into one focus area.

“What MIRIS has done is brought it all together,” Nicole tells us. “Not because it wants to necessarily push that onto the outside world, but because it has to for its own survival and for its own business. MIRIS has historically been a sustainable real estate business working in Scandinavia – it’s a Norwegian company – looking at building the most beautiful, most occupiable residential properties.”

The company now looks at what smart communities need to survive, how to bring off-the-grid solutions to communities, and how to bring utility services to these communities.

“MIRIS has turned its attention to that,” reveals Nicole. “MIRIS is involved in a very, very iconic project, which is a hotel. It’s going to be the first off-the-grid, 85% energy-positive hotel in the Arctic Circle, which will be ready, launched, and occupiable in 2021.

“This hotel is called Svart. It is going to become the MIRIS example of how you bring sustainability in all these three pillars together and build something very tangible and concrete.”

Svart will be a world-first and will only be accessible via an electric boat.

Debt sale program 

MIRIS recently launched its “debt sale program”. Nicole tells us that the debt sale takes the form of a bond and is a “very simple” financial investment offer that is “totally accessible” to retail investors as well as professional investors.

Simply put, it is an offer whereby you can invest in a range of products that MIRIS will be launching to market.

“It’s a very safe, asset-backed bond – it is tokenised,” explains Nicole. “The return is what you would expect from a European bond issue – it is sitting at a 7% return. It’s over three years.

“It is absolutely secure, highly transparent, and has no esoteric crypto speculative association whatsoever. The very cool thing for participants coming in within the next two months is that they will be able to convert this particular bond – so reallocate the bond issue – to equity stakes in projects.”

Commenting on MIRIS’s choice to issue the bond, Nicole stated: “MIRIS wanted to be really clear about the fact that whilst it was leveraging its own tokenised funding mechanism, it actually serves its own requirement to its own closed platform – which is MIRIS X. It wanted to make it highly accessible and really debunk any myths associated with any funky investment offer that could be unpegged or looked upon with suspicion.”

MIRIS represents a ‘coming-of-age’ 

Speaking on the significance of tokenisation, the chair of MIRIS revealed: “Redsand has almost been entirely focused on blockchain innovation for as long as I can remember, and as a consequence, we began to very quickly realise the business application use case value of tokenisation.

“When you aggregate above the technology debate and begin to look at business use case application, that’s where the idea of tokenisation becomes a much more intellectual, important topic to challenge.

“When you look at an application of applying blockchain to use cases – like tokenising value or tokenising intelligence – bringing that together in instruments that change business models is really the value of tokenisation.

“Where we’ve applied that specifically is, as you would expect, we’ve blended the innovation of how you create new financial commercial models like revenue models through tokenisation with how you can do away with or optimise the legal drain on a business model through smart contracts.

“MIRIS represents the coming-of-age, I believe, in real asset-backed token issues which represent a digital asset value to the world.

“But it also represents an incredibly important cause which is actionable, and properties and developments and smart communities are for a real cause – this is a real-world issue. But MIRIS believes in the mechanism of tokenisation to achieve that.

“MIRIS is this potential blend for people who are actually looking for a little bit more tangible return in a tokenised business model and investment, but which is still very blockchain-true.”