TECHNOLOGY
Blockchain-Based Property Registry
The distributed-ledger approach to representational infrastructure that de Soto has increasingly advocated — immutable, verifiable records of ownership that do not depend on centralized government institutions.
Blockchain-based property registries represent de Soto's technological extension of his institutional framework. In his later work and advocacy — including his 2024 LABITCONF appearance in Buenos Aires — de Soto has articulated a vision in which blockchain, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure converge to create the institutional foundations for economic inclusion that physical property registries alone cannot provide. A blockchain registry performs the functions de Soto identified for formal property systems — fixing economic potential, integrating information, creating accountability, enabling fungibility, networking people, protecting transactions — without requiring the centralized government institutions that have historically been prerequisites for property systems. For the AI economy, blockchain-based registries for digital assets, including software products, could close the representational gap that currently renders extralegal intelligence dead capital.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The appeal of blockchain registries to de Soto's framework is structural. Physical property registries require centralized authorities — county recorders, national cadastres, government ministries — whose trustworthy operation depends on state capacity that many developing countries