Page 27 - February 2018 Disruption Report Flip Book

THE FUTURE FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE FJEABNRUUAARRYY 22001188
and different laws, different parties. So, we broke it up into those two parts. So for the conveyance part, it was actually pretty straightforward. The conveyance happens between the buyer and the seller—the government really doesn’t get involved. So that wasn’t as difficult. What’s difficult is how do you take laws that say “paper” [and] convert that into digital. All we did was, we didn’t get around that we simply adopted it. So just like paper deeds, the parallel would be like email. ...Basically what we did is we said what’s the existing laws and then we design the software to comply with those laws. On the software side, it was relatively easy. The hardest part was getting five different lawyers to all agree and sign off on it . That was the hard part. But we did it, so we’re happy
We had we have five lawyers. We had one, we had two to represent Cook County [Goldberg Kohn], we had our lawyer and then we had a lawyer from the International
Block Chain Real Estate Association and then we had another lawyer from a large law firm Hogan Lovells, Lewis Cohen is his name. They all sort of refereed and brought different expertise and domain experience and that’s what took so long. We were able to show from the pilot program that you can legally transfer property on the Bitcoin blockchain
...Blockchain technology is part of the larger trend of decentralizing all the things. It’s making people more sovereign. It’s more sovereign in their property rights, more sovereign with their money, more sovereign with their identity more, sovereign in terms of being able to raise funds, raising money for real estate raising money for your startup. Blockchain is already greatly affecting that and you know money is a pretty big thing to disrupt. (YouTube, Ragnar Lifthrasir, 06/14/17)
The Cook County pilot successfully completed several tests of a Bitcoin blockchain real estate conveyance with a Chicago property owner, which met the all the legal, procedural, and software requirements agreed upon by the pilot program participants. Cook County Register of Deeds approved the legal instrument used in the real estate conveyance via a blockchain conveyance— the first known legal and paperless conveyance of its kind.
“I do believe that in the fullness of time, we’ll see real estate in the U.S. all recorded and tracked in some distributed ledger system,” says Lewis Cohen, a partner at Hogan Lovells, who participated on the Cook County pilot. “Realistically, it’s going to take some time to deal with the fact that right now we have 3,200 counties, and even if you take it to the state level, we still have 50 states.” (Medium, Ragnar Lifthrasir, 08/07/17; FastCompany, Steve Melendez, 09/15/17)
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