Avalanche published a blog post stating that California's Department Of Motor Vehicles (DMV), in conjuction with Oxhead Alpha, digitized 42 million car titles on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain.

I wanted to be happy about this announcement, but Governor Newsom’s Commiefornia California (which Elon Musk is exiting) does not exactly inspire thoughts of self-sovereignty and private ownership, so I am skeptical.

From the foundation's blog post:

Together, the three partners [Oxhead Alpha, Avalanche, and the DMV] are building a DMV-run blockchain

A "DMV-run blockchain" would be a private and permissioned digital ledger, possibly a subnet within the Avalanche ecosystem.

Considering that the government-run DMV will be in complete control of this new blockchain, does it even matter who owns the actual car titles?

These digital titles will soon be claimable by vehicle owners through the DMV’s secure mobile wallet app in minutes using a verifiable credential.

I somehow doubt the DMV's app will get Californians to write down a 12 or 24 word seed phrase, which would be the only way to make their customers true owners of a digitized car title.

While I applaud the group's efforts to make the transferring of car titles more efficient (and possibly more transparent), the solution doesn't achieve the end goal of verifiable ownership of physical property, and it's highly unlikely that California's government would be in favor of that. So how do we get there?

Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs)

NFTs are unique digital tokens that exist on blockchains. They can represent digital items, or real-world items.

We already have NFTs that represent characters in games like Axie Infinity, and digital land titles in a game, but how could we apply this technology to real-world items?

There has been talk for years now of tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) like government bonds, but this could also include things like physical land, houses, and vehicles.

The Future Of Car Ownership

Imagine a world where car manufacturers mint a unique NFT on a public blockchain (Avalanche or other) for each vehicle they produce.

This could be done in bulk using technology like Solana compressed NFTs.

When the producer sells wholesale to a dealership, they sign a transaction transferring ownership of the cars to the dealership.

Finally, the car dealership signs a transaction transferring ownership of the car's digital title to you, after you pay for it with Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

Later down the road, if you want to sell the car, you simply put the NFT up for sale on a decentralized exchange (DEX) and wait for a buyer.

Someday in the future this could all be done automatically via a crypto payment, DEX transaction, and a self-driving vehicle that would deliver itself after receiving payment.

All of this would require that you generate and safely store a seed phrase, instead of depending on the government to manage your private property.

Privacy Concerns

Of course, we don't want the entire world seeing the transfers and their associated data, so parts of it could be obfuscated on the blockchain using zero knowledge proofs.

A zero knowledge proof would allow us to verify that we do indeed own the car's digital title (NFT), without revealing sensitive data like our name, crypto balance, or address.

What If You Lose Your Seed Phrase

A major problem is what happens if you lose your private key, and you can no longer prove your ownership of a car? Who would then become the default owner of the car?

We covered potential solutions to this problem in a previous article about blockchain-based IDs.

WEF Concerns

Of course, the whole idea behind private ownership of physical items goes contrary to the WEF's plan of "you will own nothing and be happy".

In fact, The WEF's plan is to eliminate "reduce" private car ownership by 75% by the year 2050, and I highly doubt California's government would interfere with that objective.

At the end of the day, if we truly want self-custody of our money and physical items, we will have to take matters into our own hands, and decentralized blockchains will play a huge in that.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the HIVE blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Until next time...

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