Followup Article on ACChain and their Real Estate Project in Texas

In this earlier article, we looked at ACChain and its ACCoin token in some detail. One of the projects of ACChain is a real estate token (RET) funded housing project in the Fort Worth,Texas area. While doing research on ACChain, I ran across some additional information on this real estate project which may be of interest. Below are links to the information that can be used to learn more about the companies involved with this project. 

Near the end of this article please be sure to read the comment I got by email from Willem Middelkoop on this. Willem does have good contacts in China so his thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.

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ACChain describes the Real Estate Token (RET) here as follows:

"Real Estate Token or RET is an encrypted digital token that represents digitized real estate assets, generated based on ACChain open source blockchain technology."   . . . 

"RET is issued base on the real estate and ACChain. Sendera Ranch community is the real estate which is located in the thriving Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, the 889.53-acre development will add 2385 homes in the beautiful community of Sendera Ranch. The development is divided into 10 phases and based on current market valuation, the average price for house is US$270,000 and total worth approximately USD655 million."

This establishes the link between ACChain, the RET, and the Sendera Ranch housing project in Texas also described in this PR notice about the project. If you scroll down this web page you will see that the CEO of Serene Country Homes, the company managing the Sendera Ranch project, is Dirk Foo. Joe F. Attrux is the CFO and Allan Lind is listed as the Executive Vice President. In the description for each of these three executives for Serene Country Homes, we learn that these same men are executives for the A2A Group of Companies which has (had?) an office in Singapore. They also have offices in Canada, Malaysia, the Phillipines, and Fort Worth, Texas.This page of the A2A web site describes the Sendera Ranch project in Texas in some detail.

At this point we have now clearly established a connection between the ACChain, the RET, A2A, and the Sendera Ranch property in Texas.

Lets look at the web site for Serene Country Homes. Here we see that the Sendera Ranch property is just one of several projects for Serene Country Homes. Right now, the Sendera Ranch project is listed as "available soon". We also see that Serene Country Homes has been in business for four years and has an A+ rating with the BBB (Better Business Bureau). The BBB notice also shows Dirk Foo as the CEO which agrees with the other information we cited above. There are no customer reviews or complaints on file with the BBB.

At this point everything looks pretty normal. It seems clear that the Sendera Ranch project managed by Serene Country Homes will be built using funding provided from the capital raised in the ICO for the Real Estate Tokens (RET's) associated with ACChain. The plan is to raise $655 million to build the project by getting investors to buy 655 million RET's at a 1:1 exchange rate with US dollars. The owners of the RET's will own some kind of a real estate investment in this Sendera Ranch project. 

One interesting aspect of this is that if an investor accumulates enough RET's, they can actually exchange them for one of the houses in the project according to point #2 under Exit Mechanism on this web page. It should be noted that on the RET web site it says that US investors are not allowed to participate in the purchase of RET's (see footnote in this press notice posted on Reuters)

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I did find one article in the StraitsTimes that does raise some questions related to A2A Capital Management which we mentioned above. Here are some excerpts from this article:

"A land-banking scheme that offered attractive returns for cash investments in real estate in the United States and Canada has come under the spotlight.

Five investors who claimed they put an aggregate of more than $1 million into A2A Capital Management's projects between 2011 and 2014 have filed police reports against A2A. It is believed that many more investors in Singapore have invested with the property development and investment firm, which lists about 15 real estate investment projects on its website. (editors note: see here that Sendera Ranch is one of the projects on their list)

A2A was placed on the investor alert list of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on March 23 (2017). It "provides a listing of unregulated persons who, based on information received by MAS, may have been wrongly perceived as being licensed or authorised by MAS", according to the MAS website.

The firm was set up in 2009 and has a paid-up capital of $100, records from the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority show. A2A has vacated its office in Raffles Place and moved to the Philippines. (editors note: A2A shows only a correspondence address in Singapore on this web page)

It had several schemes with different maturity periods. For example, an investor paid US$10,000 (S$14,000) or CAD$10,000 (S$10,400) for a "unit" of land in Texas or Ontario, Canada. The investors expected to get their capital back plus profits. The distributions would be based on the progress of sales and construction."

The StraitTimes article goes on to describe some investors who put in some large amounts of money and either did not get any returns or less returns than they expected. The article concludes with these three paragraphs:

"When Mr N contacted A2A in February, its client services department replied, saying the relocation of its office to the Philippines was the result of the authorities here "putting regulatory impositions" on land-banking products. So the firm decided to "disband retail sales and operational activities" here.

It also stated that the management was working on the payout timelines for the projects, and would provide an update as soon as they were firmed up. Mr N wants to reach out to other investors and organise a meeting to discuss what they can do collectively.

The president and chief executive of the A2A group of companies is Mr Foo Tiang Meng Dirk Robert. Mr Foo, 58, who is also a director of A2A, previously worked at land-banking firm Walton International.  A2A told The Straits Times that its query had been "forwarded to management in the US".

note: this article was also reported in Yahoo News
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My added comments: This last bit of information does call into question what the situation is with A2A in Singapore. Since  A2A is directly involved with the Sendera Ranch project and Dirk Foo is the CEO of Serene Country Homes, I am not sure what to make of this information. The ACChain and the RET are also directly tied in to this project along with A2A and Serene Country Homes. The Walton International company mentioned in the last paragraph appears to be this company, another real estate development company that also has offices in both Singapore and Texas.

I do not want to try and speculate what the legal situation is in Singapore regarding A2A based on this one article. However, it does seem like that the Chinese government and/or the PBOC in China would not want to be associated with this kind of publicity regardless of what the situation is. 

So that makes me wonder how likely it is that either the Chinese government or the PBOC has any kind of relationship with ACChain. It is still impossible for me to know, but since I did find all this information while researching ACChain, I wanted to make it available to anyone interested in ACChain and the other entities connected to it mentioned in this article. I won't draw any further conclusions on it here as to whether ACChain is working with any official institutions within China. Readers can study the information in this article and our earlier one and draw their own conclusions.
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Added notes --- The white paper for ACChain concludes with this statement on page 8:

"ACChain will be the common community of asset tokens. Asset digitization, with ACChain linking billions together, will create global circulation of assets. Together we can build a future: a shared economic communality and a digital kingdom for all."

It is clear that ACChain seeks to duplicate the process used to "digitize" these homes built in Texas into RET tokens that can be used like money across all manner of assets using all kinds of local tokens exchangeable into global tokens. The stated goal is no less than "linking billions together" into "a digital kingdom for all."

ACChain has already done this with tokens for various kinds of tea for example. As you read through the information put out by ACChain, this picture seems to emerge. Their plan is to try and make the ACC (Asset Collection Coin) the primary cryptocurrency in the world above Bitcoin, Etherium, etc. by allowing people to exchange these other cryptos for the ACC (see page 4 here). They present this as some day leading towards some kind of "SDR Digital Currency" that can be exchanged for the various legal tender national currencies (USD, GBP, RMB etc). There is no evidence of IMF or BIS involvement in this plan at this point in time.

So what we need to follow over time with regard to ACChain is whether or not this is just the ambitious plan of a strictly private venture based in China (not connected to any official entities) or if this truly is an attempt to begin the process of consolidating all the existing cryptocurrencies, tangible assets, and fiat currencies of the world into one global tradeable "token" (the ACC) that they describe as leading towards an "SDR Digital Currency." I want to again emphasize that there is no such thing currently as an "SDR Digital Currency" using blockchain technology that people outside the IMF can use like money. Readers should look at the documented information provided in this article and our earlier one and draw their own conclusions about ACChain.

OMFIF Adivsory Board member Willem Middelkoop offers his comments on it just below.
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Willem Middelkoop (The Big Reset blog) offered this comment to me by email in regards to the ACChain project:

"We know the PBOC is working on a digital currency but I doubt this is a project under their supervision."

Willem sits on the OMFIF Advisory Board (see the Industry and Investment section)
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More Added notes:

ACChain appears to be in the middle of a somewhat complex chain of interlocking new cryptocurrencies and tokens. In that regard here are a few more links you may want to explore:

ACChain explains its connection to the NPC (New Puer Coin)

Puerbank article - appears to be related to the PuyinCoin - issued for various teas and may have changed names to the New Puer Coin (NPC) - it is unclear if this is related to ACChain, but it sounds very similar in concept. 

Digital Journal article describes a January 2016 meeting on a future "Financial System based on a Standard Digital Currency" - Puerbank was at this meeting along with the Bitcoin Foundation head as well as a representative from The White House. The information link at the bottom of this article related to Puer Bank takes you to this web site (PEB PuerCoin). This news release seems to tie the PEB, NPC, and ACChain together.

Twitter Feed for PGB - Puyin Blockchain Group - shows picture of Wan Jia

Dallas Morning News on Puyin Blockchain Group relation to Texas real estate project

Twitter Feed for Pencil Blockchain - involved in the Texas real estate project

ScamAdviser info page for ACChain.org - confirms it is based in China & the web site is very new with little information available at this time.

Discussion thread on the StraitsTimes article and A2A Capital Management - last post in this thread says the Puerbank was considering a "bailout" for A2A Capital Managment. It is unclear if this is the Puerbank mentioned in the article above or if any such "bailout" ever took place.



As you can see, this is a very complex web of organizations all based in China. It appears that the links above tie these organizations together. Nowhere does any connection to the PBOC or Chinese government show up that I can find and Willem Middelkoop says he does not believe one exists.  In addition, we can find no connection to either the IMF or the BIS.

However, these two paragraphs in the Digital Journal article cited above are interesting given those who attended the meeting in January 2016 to discuss a "Standard Digital Currency". They seem to confirm that all this is clearly a "private digital currency" intended to at least initially compete with legal tender currencies and to "become the cornerstone in developing digital currency by central banks in different countries". Where all this is headed is still unknown at this time.

"Board chairman Mr. Ye Qiang (Puerbank) made a joke with Mr. Brock (Bitcoin Board Chairman) shortly after Brock’s affectionate expression to Guiyang. He said, “Mr. Brock, you are a destined capitalist of block chain in Chinese version.” Everyone Smiled heartedly. The topic speech by Mr. Ye Qiang illustrates Puerbank Group standard digital financial system from 7 aspects. Firstly, the official released White Paper for Standard Digital Currency Version 2.0 is an upgraded version after lots of updating and perfection work, with perfected, novel and original business mode of standard digital currency. The standard system gets clearer describing: The standard system is an ecological system, in which the specific combined commodity is considered as standard assets, anchored with digital assets with encryption into digital currency, together with the digital assets circulation under application context of block chain. Secondly, source opening is the essential strategy. Through the establishment of open sources system of digital assets, the primitive distribution of digital currency is achieved. He who owns the assets owns the currency, to realize the autonomous system of consensus, co-management and disperse centers. Puerbank Group has completed source opening and supplementing of hundred billions of assets. Thirdly: Harmony and inclusiveness. Mr. Ye Qiang showed his expectation of the co-existence of “digital legal tender and private digital currency”. The private digital currency gains rapid speed in development based on block chain technologies since its creation so as to become the cornerstone in developing digital currency by central banks in different countries.


It is a current situation that digital legal tender co-exists with private digital currency, whose pathway to supervision and governing should be: through abundant market competitions, optimizing the public’s attractiveness to private digital currency and the capabilities of self-control and self-governing (similar to Germany’s policy), completing the design and argumentation of supervision regulations. Mr. Ye Qiang held that “standard system” is the most effective concept and plan to promote the market competiveness of private digital currency. Fourthly, token application is the best tool of digitalize physical assets. Puerbank’s core business is the development and promotion of token applications. On January 9th, we are going to promote 7 mature token applications specific to 8 celebrated enterprises, facing hundred thousands of customer groups, with token assets volume amounting to around 34 million RMB. Fifthly, trade. Another Puerbank Group’ core theory is “assets swap” besides “standard system”. We hope to trace from the traditional finance system centered by currency back to the bartering time. The digital assets finish assets circulation without the medium of traditional currency. Therefore, we promote the trading system “PBAM”, covering such functional modules as browser system of block chain data, settlement system, trading system, exchange system, ICO system, Risk Management system and cloud strategy funds tools, etc." 

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3196757#ixzz4qSRppj9t