I am very interested in bitcoin because of the underlying technology behind it – namely the blockchain. And that’s because it has the potential to be applied to and to disrupt many different industries and sectors, including real estate.
That’s why I was fascinated to learn over the weekend that Honduras, with the help of a Texas-based company called Epigraph, is in the midst of building a permanent land title registry system based on the blockchain architecture.
This is particularly important for Honduras because the country currently suffers from a significant amount of land fraud. And according to Reuters, 60% of land is actually undocumented. So the impact of a secure blockchain-based registry system could be transformational.
Obviously the impetus for Honduras doing this is to fix the broken system that they currently have in place. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t also be done in the developed world to reduce transaction costs and improve overall transparency in the marketplace.
Hopefully Honduras will show us how it is done.
If you’re curious and would like to learn more about the blockchain, here’s a short primer. Once you’ve read that, you can then check out this post I wrote talking about how the blockchain could be applied to real estate.
