Last week, MakerDAO quietly divulged that Tesla will use MakerDAO’s debt financing capabilities in coordination with 6s Capital in order to build out a collision repair shop strategy.
The Defiant reported, “On March 30, 6s Capital, a commercial lender powered by MakerDAO, closed a real estate financing deal worth $7.8M for Tesla…”
As MakerDAO’s Nik Kunkel told Bankless podcast‘s David Hoffman, the potential long term benefit to Tesla and its stock price is the ability to roll out a wider strategy for collision repair that does not create capital expense but rather, operational expense, given the beneficial way MakerDAO’s loan system works.
On the details, Kunkel said (lightly edited for clarity):
“What’s happening here is that Tesla wants to build a network of collision repair centers, I believe right now in the US, but I think eventually it’s supposed to be a global thing. But they don’t have the capital to build all of these things themselves. And if you think about them doing a capital raise, debt on your balance sheet isn’t the best thing when when you start like analyzing the health company – it would really slow down their ability to execute on this right, [if] it shows up as a capital expenditure.
So what they’re doing is they’re using credit tenant leases, in order to raise the cash to build these. So what a credit tenant lease is, it’s essentially saying that if someone (i.e. 6s Capital) were to finance the construction of this, then Tesla will promise to pay a certain amount of rent. Every year for X number of years, and maybe the amount increases by Y percent per year.”
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