The current system is designed to segment knowledge, maximizing friction and monetization through what economists call "double marginalization." Most industry professionals understand only narrow slivers of the full transaction landscape. Real estate agents focus on marketing and negotiation but remain largely ignorant of lending, legal, and technical requirements. Mortgage brokers understand financing but lack deep knowledge of property evaluation, legal processes, or technology systems.

This knowledge fragmentation serves the interests of each specialist group by creating dependencies that justify their positions in the transaction chain. However, it also creates massive inefficiencies and coordination failures that compound costs for consumers. Each knowledge silo requires separate relationship management, creating multiple principal-agent problems within individual transactions.

To build Elephant Protocol requires deep, interdisciplinary knowledge across real estate, lending, legal, technical, and regulatory domains simultaneously. Teams must have capabilities across API systems, serverless architecture, tokenized finance, and legal compliance while understanding the operational realities of property transactions. This knowledge integration represents a fundamental barrier to entry that most industry participants cannot overcome without abandoning their existing business models.

The protocol's competitive advantage stems partly from this knowledge integration---by understanding the full transaction stack, we can optimize for end-to-end efficiency rather than local optimization within individual service categories. This systems-level approach enables innovations that would be impossible for participants trapped within traditional knowledge silos.