> the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The system we have works, but it could work better.

This already exists in many states. It's a political problem (whether or not to use of tax money to pay for the digitization of old records), not a technical one: https://www.uslandrecords.com/uslr/UslrApp/index.jsp

Related information, like liens, is available via those public records as well.

From what I've heard from insiders at the BigCos who are buying many of these 'blockchain solutions', the main advantage of blockchain is that it is a sexy buzzword which convinces management to pay for BigCo to update/solve some unglamorous problem they weren't willing to throw money at beforehand.

'I presided over the digitization of all old records' isn't something an MBA type necessarily wants on their CV, so they won't push for it no matter the value to the company.

However 'I lead a team implementing a solution to digitize and store records on the blockchain' is how the MBA type gets a promotion/new job offer and how the technical guys can get the budget to do important stuff that was otherwise too unglamorous to be prioritized...

I'm not in the states, I'm in Australia. The records here exist but AFAIK cost money to retrieve and are scattered, generally you end up paying a moderate amount (say $1k - $2k) for a conveyancer to look up all the relevant records before purchasing and spot any problems for you.

Arguably you'd want the conveyancer anyway to go through the legal concerns, and clearly "blockchain" solutions are not the only possible solutions - simply digitising them and making them available and sensibly organised would be fine.

Sure, and I'm not saying that it does, but it may also be one possible solution. Not necessarily the best but probably better than what we currently have.

I thought real estate was already in the public domain.