New Jersey has, in a suitably low-key way, been something of a crypto and blockchain hotbed ever since the Princeton-educated Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital’s presence was felt in the middle of the last decade.
So it might not come as that much of a surprise to find out that one of the Garden State’s counties is starting to move its property developments onto the blockchain. Bergen County, in the northeast of the state, is NJ’s largest subdivision by population, and it is now taking the lead in getting its information into Web3.
NJ's interest in the blockchain follows several other states that have dabbled into crypto for various reasons. Governments entering into crypto have brought attention to the sector, which extends to established cryptocurrencies and also new ones regarded as some of the best presale tokens to watch. These tokens are promising because they offer several perks, including low transaction costs and quick speeds.
The county’s government has announced that it will be working with blockchain company Balcony on a five-year deal to tokenize the deeds to 370,000 properties.
This will mean that the deeds will be transferred to a blockchain, which should, at least in theory, cut the time it takes to process the deeds and also make real estate transactions quicker by as much as 90 per cent.
It also promises a reduction in fraud and disputes over who owns what title, according to Hoboken-based Balcony.
The company’s CEO, Dan Silverman, said that the move was a major moment for how governments dealt with their real estate records.
He said: “We’re demonstrating how secure, distributed systems can replace outdated infrastructure and deliver real-world value for both governments and the public.”
Bergen County’s deeds, which cover property worth around $240 billion, involve locations in every one of the area’s 70 municipalities and cover around one million residents, will be transferred to the Avalanche blockchain, founded by Princeton alumnus Emin Gün Sirer and based in New York City.
While the scheme is the largest one in the Garden State, and the first whole-county blockchain project in NJ, it is not the first time that somewhere in New Jersey has put its real estate deeds in the hands of a blockchain.
The cities of Camden, Orange, Fort Lee, and Morristown have all recently sought to tokenize their deeds in an attempt to help speed up sales while keeping people’s personal data secure.
Balcony claims that its work in the city of Orange, Essex County, dug up just under $1 million worth of lost revenue that would have otherwise remained obscured thanks to outdated or incomplete records.
With the project seemingly the largest such development in American history, Bergen County now joins a select group of places across the world to have put their property data on the blockchain.
It is, however, not entirely clear whether any other New Jersey counties, such as Atlantic, will follow suit and, if so, when that might happen.
Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, announced earlier this year that it would be using the blockchain to tokenize its property assets.
The Dubai government’s Land Department (DLD) said the scheme, which was operating in conjunction with the UAE’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), the Dubai Future Foundation, and the UAE Central Bank, would allow people to own a small percentage of property in the emirate for as little as $540.
It is unclear whether similar proposals for fractional property purchases will be put forward in New Jersey.
The news about Bergen County’s tokenization plans comes as the Garden State was revealed to have the second-highest proportion of adults who owned crypto, behind California but ahead of New York and Washington.
New Jersey is also the highest-ranking state when it comes to Google searches for Ethereum (ETH), and the second-highest for overall Google searches about crypto, again behind California.
The state also has one of the highest occurrences of Crypto ATMs, while it is also reportedly one of the most “crypto-ready” states in America.
