OVER Renting Smart Contracts

We are proud to announce the release of the Beta version of OVER Renting Smart Contracts!
This is a big step in the development of OVER, which increases the platform’s utility and usability and creates a new monetization vector for OVRLand.

The whole system is conceived to maximize OVRLand availability, limit monopoly risks, and solve the “Lost Keys/Zombie Land” problem while rewarding OVRLand owners.

Creating smart leases for virtual lands presents some significant challenges. In particular, there are two potentially competing interests to compose:

• Property rights: the owner has to be free to do whatever he wants with its OVRLands
• Collective/platform interests: maximizing the availability of a scarce resource, the OVRLands.

OVRLands owners should be free to set the rental price they deem correct for their OVRLand, even though this could lead to very high rental prices.
In the medium term, market forces are expected to solve the pricing problem by aligning rental supply and demand. But what if the owner of the OVRLand sets a very high price and just forgets the OVRLand, or loses control of its private keys? The OVRLand would de-facto become unavailable.

Finally, there is the “Lost Keys/Zombie Land” problem. What happens if the owner of an OVRLand loses the keys to its wallet or dies? Would that OVRLand be unavailable forever?

To overcome these challenges, we made all of the OVRLand rentable by default. The base price is ~3$ (in OVR) for 1 month period – on the next version of the SC, the base price will vary according to the number of minted neighboring OVRLands -. The OVRLand owner will have a 3-days window to decline the offer. He can also request a different price and a different renting period (multiples of 30 days). The OVRLand owner will be notified by e-mail and on the marketplace messaging board of the rental request. If the OVERLand owner does not respond within 3 days, his OVRLand will be rented for 1 month, and he will receive the basic rental rate.

With this system, the active owner of OVRLand can set the price he prefers for the rental of its OVRLand. But, even if the owner is not active, the OVRLand will generate a basic income for the owner and remain available to publishers.
Furthermore, this system solves the “LostKeys/Zombie Land” problem since the OVRLand is always available for a 1-month rental period.

An OVRLand owner will be able to modify his basic rental request, both in terms of value and time. For example, he can set the minimum monthly price to 50 $, the minimum renting period to 3 months, and the maximum to 6 months.
Moreover, he could make the OVRLand virtually unavailable by setting a very high monthly rent request.
This Custom Request will be valid for 3 months (avoiding the “Lost Keys/Zombie Land” problem). It will have a small cost – ~0.50$ in OVR – to disincentivize monopoly behaviors on large quantities of OVRLands.

This is just the first version of OVRLand Renting Smart Contracts. The described rules are our best estimate of an optimal OVRLand rental management policy. However, we believe that the final decision on how to manage OVRLand smart contracts at best should be made by the OVRLand owner community.
Such decisions will be handled by a DAO, which will be published on the Polygon blockchain. Meanwhile, we invite interested parties to join Discord to discuss renting policy optimization.