Land Registration and ‘Disruptive’ (or ‘Trustworthy’?) Technologies: Tokenisation of Immovable Property

Abstract

After a brief description of the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on land registration law and some of the questions raised by these developments, an attempt was made to find tentative answers. The focus was particularly on Distributed Ledger Technology, blockchains and smart contracts. “Blocks” can not only contain monetary value (the “Bitcoin”), but also represent value of an underlying asset. Here we pass to the digital economy and, more specifically, to the token economy. A first analysis was offered as to how tokenisation may affect land registration and first answers were provided, also looking at the recent trusted technology legislation in Liechtenstein. Although much is still uncertain, a more positive approach as can be found in the law of Liechtenstein, where the new IT technologies as a matter of principle are called “trustworthy”, seems to be more productive than negatively qualifying these technologies as “disruptive”. Unfortunately, the Liechtenstein Act excludes tokenization of immovable property, at least in the Principality itself. It will be worthwhile to watch developments.