Not Ready for Prime Time in Mortgages, But…

Despite the growing pains and the volatility, crypto assets (the good ones, at least) are finding their use cases. Numerous financial and tech giants are offering customers digital asset options, and investing in the sector in various ways. The federal government recently put all hands on deck to find ways of keeping crypto assets useful, fair, and secure.
The mortgage industry, though, has done no more than dip a toe into distributed ledger a.k.a. blockchain technology. But the industry has to get to grips with the digital age. It has to smooth out the experience for borrowers of mortgages and home equity financing. Today’s mortgage applicant has to submit stacks of paper statements. Underwriters reject copies of webpages because they could be falsified. Title searches involve multiple sources of data when one ought to be enough. And so on. The process is antiquated and stressful, to put it mildly. “We’ve always done it like this” seems to be the only justification for much of the mortgage and title processes. Perhaps distributed ledger technology can help reinvent it. We’re not there yet.
Meanwhile, blockchain and real estate seem to be meshing quite well in the area of greenhouse gas emissions tracking.
Continue reading “Blockchain Makes Headway in Carbon-Busting”