UrbanScale is a decentralized application connecting you with your local government. It promotes research into the financial health of our municipal institutions by incentivising research and investment in our public institutions.
Municipal bonds are debt obligations issued by public entities that use the loans to fund public projects such as the construction of schools, hospitals, and highways. Purchasing municipal bonds is in effect lending money to the bond issuer in exchange for a promise of regular interest payments and the return of the original investment.
Unlike stocks, which trade on public exchanges, municipal bonds don't trade on a centralized exchange. Rather, they trade directly between two private parties. They aren't regulated the same way stocks are, you might find that you're charged a steep markup, which means your broker sells you bonds at a price much higher than what he or she paid, in addition to whatever commission or fee that broker collects.
Financial economists who study bond markets have widely attributed this to the lack of reliable data on trade prices in the bond market as compared to the abundance of publicly available information on stock trades. The Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act provides a sweeping, government-wide mandate for federal agencies to publish all their information as open data.
UrbanScale is a platform for public institution to issue bonds to secure financing and a platform for individuals to invest in bonds of their choosing.
It's made a webapp running on NodeJS backend and a VueJS front end. Users have a choice of using their local wallet or connect with Portis which makes the wallet management much easier for the average user.
Bonds created through UrbanScale are issued using a custom ERC20 contract on Ethereum.