BLOCKCHAIN AND THE DISRUPTION OF NOTARIES The earliest written records go back 5,000 years ago in ancient Sumer. They were made on clay tablets and contained lists about the ownership of cows, sheep and wheat. Since the early days of civilization, humans saw the value of a reliable technology to record property. In modern days, notaries are the professionals in charge of keeping secure and fraud-proof records. Mariana Izaguirre had lived in the same house in Tegucigalpa for over three decades. One day the police visited her with an eviction order. She tried to explain it was her home. But it was in vain. The government property registry indicated that the owner was somebody else. The confusion only cleared up a few months later when the house had already been demolished. Mariana was the victim of a criminal organization that stole files from the Honduras land registry and fraudulently claimed land ownership. This is just an example of how poor records can cause serious harm to people and hinder the functioning of a society. Economist Hernando De Soto estimates that about 5 billion people lack reliable property titles on their assets. About 2.3 billion don't even hold the deed to their house. These people not only face a permanent risk of eviction. Their property cannot be bought, sold nor used as collateral in a loan. Currently, some countries like Georgia, India and Singapore are experimenting with blockchain for building secure property registration systems. Alice agrees to sell a piece of land to Bob. The payment is done in the public property registry. With an electronic signature, the transaction is recorded in the blockchain. Everyone can see that the transfer of property happened. Anyone can check the digital record and know all the previous owners of that piece of property. You can verify that the seller is really the owner of that land. Since it's a distributed database, nobody can delete records nor make arbitrary changes. Blockchain technology can be used to register all kinds of property. Imagine signing a contract with a mobile app. A proof of signature on the blockchain makes it clear that the contract was signed and no party can repudiate it. Photos taken with a mobile phone and stamped on the blockchain would be valid as evidence. It would be like carrying a notary in your pocket at all times. But blockchain ushers a transformation that goes well beyond government records. It can also bring new forms of ownership. Tokenization is the process of representing an asset under the form of a special cryptocurrency called a token. Shares of companies, houses, vehicles, practically all kinds of assets can be tokenized. This allows to make investments and exchange assets for very small amounts on a global scale. Transactions that didn't happen before because their cost was prohibitive. A big real estate project in New York City could be financed by 50,000 investors where each contributes a few dollars in cryptocurrency. Investors may be in Argentina, the Philippines, Ecuador or France. For the blockchain, it makes no difference. When the project starts to generate rent income, funds are be automatically disbursed to the token holders, with no intermediation fees. In the sport industry, a token could represent the ownership on the rights over a football player. So anyone could own 0.001% of Messi. Science fiction? Not at all. In September 2019, the basketball player of the Brooklyn Nets Spencer Dinwiddie announced he would tokenize his NBA contract. He planned to sell the tokens to the public. Buyers would receive capital and interest payments backed by Dinwiddie's contract. In the future, many professionals will be able to tokenize their work and sell the tokens on the world market. You could trade your share of Dinwiddie's contract against one square meter of the New York real estate project which is now in the hands of some small Mongolian investor or against the right to a part of the produce of a Peruvian fishing ship or against royalties from a song by a music group from Japan. Since the Sumerians, ledger technology affected the evolution of societies. Blockchain ushers an opportunity to build a new property registration system. A true revolution of notaries.