Blockchain real estate: The messy landing of digital property

Abstract

This paper analyzes the bridging of digital-based crypto capital with one of the most long-standing and material parts of the economy, real property. Specifically, it uses two cases focused on US-based efforts to use blockchain to fractionalize the ownership and administration of land and housing. We frame this paper around the disconnect between rhetorics of frictionless capital and their dependence on the materiality of real property. Thus, rather than being exclusively a technology for transparency and investment (as proponents stress) blockchain engagements with the materiality of real estate embroiled within centuries long processes of dispossession, predation and exploitation. The two case studies are CityDAO, an online business/community focused on building the “crypto city of the future” holding two rural parcels of land in Wyoming and Colorado, and RealT, a fractional, tokenized real estate platform that invests in rental housing, using Section 8 vouchers as a means of ‘bridging’ global crypto-capital into the materiality of Detroit’s housing market.