Make Sure Your Solution Can Scale

After a registry understands the utility of blockchain and determines it can help with a specific problem, project leaders must ensure that a solution can scale. Pilot projects are a good first step to work out kinks, yet many have struggled to expand and impact larger populations. Crucial stakeholders were ignored or a solution did not address an actual need. There were often unrealistic expectations concerning project outcome. Below are two other recommendations to help ensure a project scales, as implementation under the wrong bureaucratic or legal conditions will also frustrate progress.

It is difficult to scale a blockchain-for-land project in a fragmented land administration system. Propy, for example, tested blockchain to record property in the small Vermont towns of South Burlington and Hubbardton, but expansion elsewhere is slow.¹ Most property databases in the United States function at the county level,² and management is at the municipal level in Vermont.³ That is well over 3,000 different ecosystems with their own laws, procedures, and institutional structures. Land is similarly managed at 3,400 privately-owned cartorios in Brazil.⁴ Implementation with each individual record office would be a grueling process. It is likely more efficient to deploy a solution at a national-level registry, with local offices channelling information into a larger database.⁵

Any project will not exist in a vacuum; it will be subject to the laws and regulations of a particular jurisdiction. Governments may need to adapt or pass legislation recognizing the legality of digital signatures, the electronic recording of deeds, online conveyancing, or electronic notarization.⁶ Some places are more responsive to change than others. The U.S. states of Vermont, Wyoming, and Arizona have proactively “passed laws to carve out a legal framework for blockchain,”⁷ while change is sluggish in Brazil and Ukraine.⁸ As Sergio Jacomino, head of the Institute of Property Registry in Brazil, reflected on a pilot: “I registered [a property transfer] in the blockchain and what is the legal value of it? None.”⁹