Among possible applications for blockchain technology, real-estate titles—a bit of land legalese that many people may only think about as they plod through paperwork to buy a house—might not seem high on the list.
Land titles don’t involve digital goods or cryptocurrencies, but those records do have features thatcan lend themselves to digital-ledger storage: They’re generated by the interactions of people and companies that often have no prior relationship, they require long-term storage and trust, and they often remain confined to paper records.
And because of the non-trivial sums at stake in most land transactions, participants have to pay third parties to vet the records.
“我们仍然有一个叫做标题保险的东西，实际上有人必须外出，去当地的市政当局，在档案中寻找纸质头衔，然后，您知道，付给律师，” Ather Williams III，A富国银行的数字创新高级EVP区块链可能性的面板在6月在多伦多举行的碰撞技术会议上。“我认为这些地方可以真正非常有效地推动效率。”
One rural jurisdiction in Virginia’s southwest corner is now trying to do something like that.Wise County’s智能土地记录项目旨在store land titles on a private blockchain-like system, with every change immutably logged.
“您无法删除这些智能记录，” David Fitzgerald说bloquable, the Arlington-based firm working with Wise County on this project. “They’re there for posterity.”
The project stores these real-estate titles in Amazon Web Services (AWS)’Quantum Ledger Database, a hosting arrangement that FitzGerald said lacks the decentralization of a true blockchain but met his clients’ wish to retain more control over its records than a publicly distributed blockchain would allow.
“This is a blockchain-like ledger that we think is as secure as we can get it—and super-economical because it’s on AWS,” he said of the plan. So far, more than 1,200 titles have been written into this ledger system.
Security matters because title fraud happens. Successfully creating a fake title and getting it insured allows出售财产的欺诈者，他们不拥有100％的利润率。
The immutability of blockchain records, in which every change is jointly recorded by the nodes in that blockchain, makes this sort of theft easier to spot, FitzGerald said. What if an error doesn’t get caught before a title gets written to this immutable ledger? The system allows Wise County to write a new record on top of the old one, which gets displayed first but does not expunge or erase the old record.
该项目的另一部分涉及自动化生成的过程“abstracts”总结了财产的所有权，并（在弗吉尼亚州）进行了过去40年的交易。该项目旨在开发机器学习系统，以准备至少部分这些摘要，这项任务今天菲茨杰拉德（Fitzgerald）说，这项任务要求受过训练的专业人员约三个小时的工作。
Title practitioners may lose out, but the elected official overseeing this project predicted that property buyers would win out if this makes title insurance cheaper—or unnecessary.
“The ox that will potentially be gored is title-insurance companies,” said Jack Kennedy, clerk of theWise County and City of Norton Circuit Court。他补充说，怀斯县的相对小度 -2020年人口普查记录了36,130名居民和16,644个住房单位，这是这项研究和发展工作的可行场所。在5月的对话中，他估计该县的费用约为20万美元，其中一些由国营县文员支付。
一位总部位于弗吉尼亚州中部的房地产经纪人不反对使所有权不确定性过时的前景。
“In theory, it makes a lot of sense to have one single manner by which we’re able to tell, without question, how a title has been acquired, transferred, and sold,” said吉姆·邓肯，位于夏洛茨维尔的Nest Realty的合伙人。“我喜欢拥有区块链的概念是一个单一的标题来源。”
Wendy Henry, lead for blockchain and digital assets at Deloitte Consulting, said in an email that在区块链系统上存储土地头衔的其他努力没有扑去。例如，伊利诺伊州库克县没有继续进行2016年的试点项目，她说这反映了数据迁移的困难。
亨利（Henry）建议，在美国以外的国家，最可靠的记录保存和更多的政府腐败的国家中，最佳的区块储存土地头衔的最佳用例将是。她写道：“拥有可信赖的不变记录是一个巨大的好处。”
道格拉斯·海因茨曼（Douglas Heintzman），首席催化剂Blockchain Research Institute，一个多伦多的智囊团，同意。
“The biggest impact for property-title registries currently is in geographies where there has been a lot of corruption in government offices, and as a result, there is little confidence in the veracity of titles,” he said in an email.
But as noted in a2019 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report海因茨曼在他的电子邮件中指出的是，格鲁吉亚，加纳和洪都拉斯国家的区块链努力也有更陡峭的山丘可以攀登，因为缺乏对政府的信任。在弗吉尼亚州西南部，对数字分类帐的验证的需求可能不是那么高，但是政府也少询问其希望它将成为一种更具弹性和具有成本效益的系统的组成部分。
Kennedy emphasized that efficient-government angle in an interview devoid ofWeb3evangelism.
“It’s a practical problem,” said Kennedy. “This has a practical everyday application that can only get better.”