Municipality of Tulum will try red blockchain for land registry

Tulum will register the real estate property of its citizens in the blockchain.

Municipality of Tulum will try red blockchain for land registry
Tulum will register the real estate property of its citizens in blockchain.

The regional government of Tulum, Mexico, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a subsidiary of the electronic commerce company Overstock, to build a digital registry of local lands based on crypto active technology. This was announced by the US corporation in a press release on Monday, February 4. The agreement was signed by the mayor of Tulum, Víctor Mas Tah, and the CEO of Medici Land Governance, Ali El Husseini. The company, which is responsible for developing the new registration system, is a subsidiary of Overstock's venture capital administrator, Medici Ventures.

According to the information, the agreement provides for the collection of real estate property data in a defined area of the municipality of Tulum, a task that will be carried out jointly by the municipality's staff and Medici Land. The information will be incorporated into a registry, based on blockchain and other technologies, to structure a land administration system that allows massively issuing the certificates of ownership. If the project is completed with the city of Tulum, the municipal officials will also have a method to capture and record in an automated way the subsequent transactions related to the ownership of the land.

Tulum is a municipality in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, located on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, in the so-called Mayan Riviera. The main economic activity in the area is national and international tourism, which is why it has an important hotel zone. Mayor Víctor Mas Tah declared that with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, "a new stage of territorial ordering for the digitalization of land ownership and related processes begins".

For his part, the CEO of Medici Land Governance, Ali El Husseini, said that "the adoption by Mexico of advanced technology in its land registry, will increase the opportunities for people to strengthen their connections with the global economy." The startup, founded in 2018, has made alliances to develop distributed land administration systems, with local governments in Zambia and Rwanda. Also, in December 2018, signed an agreement with the authority of a town in Wyoming, United States, for that purpose.

In November 2018, it became known that Overstock, an online retail store with more than twenty years of operation, would focus its business on the cryptoactive sector. Subsequently, on January 24, 2019, one of its subsidiaries, the tZERO crypto company, launched its security token through the secondary trading platform, PRO Securities.