Page 26 - February 2018 Disruption Report Flip Book

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Blockchain advocates claim that the integrating digital ledger technology and digital tokens into more than 3,200 courthouses and city halls across the country can eliminate a largely paper system that is fraught with error. There’s a reason that the U.S. title insurance industry, which insures property owners against defective ownership records, generates $17 billion in revenue annually, according to IBIS World.
Three real estate title pilots have been conducted to date in the real estate sector. In Sweden and the Republic of Georgia, pilot programs were conducted using a private blockchain, Both countries have a title registry system, in which the government performs the conveyance among parties. The third pilot, conducted by Cook County’s Recorder of Deeds (Illinois), utililized bitcoin’s blockchain as a public ledger of transfer and the colored coin functions as the digital deed. (Medium, Ragnar Lifthrasir, 08/07/17)
In an interview at the Realcomm Conference Group, Ragnar Lifthasir, president of velox.re, described his eight-month collaborative, volunteer pilot program with Chicago’s Cook County Register of Deeds that created the first legally valid real estate token (deed) in the U.S. Lifthasir said: `
Blockchain does two things very well. It allows you to transfer digital assets peer-to-
peer securely without the need for a trusted third party or permission from a third party. The second thing blockchain does is it gives you this immutable public ledger of the transactions. So you can see with real estate how that can apply. With blockchain, you can use Bitcoin blockchain to transfer properties. You could use it to transfer the conveyance of those properties and then with you know the crypto currencies you can fund them... So it’s the perfect technology with a perfect industry (e.g., real estate).
...It takes time [for adoption of blockchain]. It takes time for software developers and entrepreneurs to build the right product for the right fit. It takes time to get people understand what blockchain is—that’s a big battle.
We just finished a pilot program with Chicago’s Cook County Recorder of Deeds, where we tested conveying properties on the Bitcoin blockchain. We just wrapped that up. It
went very well—it took longer than we thought. Lawyers [made it take longer]. We always knew that the technology could be used to transfer properties. It wasn’t really a technology question, it was a legal question. Even if you can do it, can you do it legally? Will it hold up in court?
...The first thing that we did is distinguish two different processes—there’s the conveyance of the property and then there’s the public recording of a property. Two very different steps
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