According to CryptoPotato, the city of Baltimore is looking to speed up the foreclosure process on vacant homes with a $225,000 blockchain project. The current process can take two to three years due to the need for multiple title searches to verify the entire ownership history of a property. The city's spending board agreed to the contract for the project in December.
Over the three-year pilot, Medici Land Governance will input records for the city's roughly 13,600 vacant properties into a blockchain, creating a more secure and efficient database than the system currently used by the city. Baltimore solicitor Ebony Thompson says the city will now keep an immutable chain of custody, eliminating the need for multiple title searches and allowing homes to be certified more quickly as they change hands to new developers and residents.
The blockchain project could also help third-world citizens capitalize on their property by recording ownership and opening liquidity. Smart contracts could enable the world's poor to draw lines of credit against their homes, one of the most common ways new businesses obtain start-up funds. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto estimated in 2016 that providing impoverished populations with property deeds for their land, homes, and unregistered businesses would unlock $9.3 trillion in frozen assets and turn them into capital for the world's poor.