Real Estate Registry on Blockchain: Promise Land or Wishful Thinking?

Why have blockchain pilots in real estate abated somewhat? Those projects bump up against the fundamental inconsistency of blockchain and existing state system, and it seems they cannot confessed to this.

First, there is no such thing as the use of blockchain for real estate.

The first news of the use of blockchain for cadastral registry proliferated as a gospel in 2015 from Honduras with the help of Epigraph and Factom Inc. Being referred to by many enthusiasts for a long time, the project itself was never kicked off.

Bitland has been in Ghana since 2014, and the project has never delivered its objectives to "Register land and real property ownership and use rights" using blockchain.

Propy Inc., during its ICO in 2017, stated that its far-reaching plans were to disrupt the industry by eliminating third parties with a global real estate supermarket on the blockchain driven by smart contracts.

To explain why the mentioned projects failed to revolutionize real estate, we should clarify the most important conceptual inconsistency of the blockchain and traditional legal system.

High-level ideas recently discussed in the industry and academia do not answer the main question: How exactly can blockchain technology be applied? When these scenarios are analyzed, it becomes clear that there is no single use of blockchain for real estate but an array of bold ideas.

Even if we consider here the use of a real public blockchain, we will have another problem: How do we know which record is authorized? Transactions on the blockchain are pseudonymous and uncensored - so, anyone can make any records, including fake ones.

Currently, Oleksii is visiting RMIT and collaborates with the Blockchain Innovation Hub, doing his research in the field of the use of blockchain technologies for e-governance and e-democracy.

Oleksii works on tokenization of real estate titles, digital IDs, public registries and e-voting on blockchain.