Wyoming Reveals Plans to Put Land Records on Blockchain

By Debarun Gupta

The famously Blockchain-friendly U.S. State of Wyoming’s Teton County has expressed an inclination towards putting its land records on a distributed ledger system.

Teton County, with a population of 23,265 which includes the town of Jackson and a section of the Yellowstone National Park has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a startup named Medici Land Governance (MLG). Overstock.com’s Blockchain investment arm Medici Ventures owns majority shares of the startup and has started work on building the new registry on the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

Starting from 1996, the new distributed ledger-based system will be able to keep track of release of liens, land transactions, and mortgages to name a few. Overstock confirmed in a press release on Thursday that the new system will strengthen and preserve the existing security measures and privacy protections.

The release said,

“The title information that is obscured for viewing on the current system will also be obscured from the blockchain-based system, but all public records will be available at the county clerk’s office…We are proud to see Wyoming lead the way in implementing cutting-edge technologies, such as blockchain, into existing markets like land registry.”

Teton County’s County Clerk, Sherry Daigle added in the press release that depending on how well the system performs in Teton and by gauging its success in the region, the new registry system can be put in place all across the state of Wyoming.

OIP indexes files from storage or distribution systems such as IPFS and others using the Florincoin blockchain.

OIP’s co-founder Devon James extended his support to Wyoming once he heard about the state trying to actively implement Blockchain technology into its systems. He added,

“I began attending Blockchain Task Force meetings and contributing to their public discussions, but I was particularly interested in their ‘Real Property Records on Blockchain’ initiative because the specification we’ve been working on for almost 5 years …is a worldwide public database where anyone can publish, read, display, sell or audit the records, making it a perfect fit for their use case.”

State senator Ogden Driskill reportedly took the charge in this issue, bringing several county clerks and James to the table to discuss the issue. Wyoming Blockchain Coalition’s co-founder Caitlin Long said that there were, at present, six bills regarding Blockchain waiting to be heard in the next legislative session, but they have been endorsed by joint committees and they are most likely to pass without many obstacles.

She revealed Wyoming’s ambitious future plans, which includes putting all government corporate registrations and business records on the distributed ledger systems. Long expressed her belief that if Wyoming was successful in adopting Blockchain technology, other states would soon follow its model.

Debarun Gupta

Debarun is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and writing when he’s not watching cat videos on YouTube.

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