ADVERTISEMENT
Advertise with BNC

City of Rotterdam to use a blockchain for lease agreements

Deloitte Netherlands recently announced that the city of Rotterdam will use a blockchain to record lease agreements for the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), enabling the city and companies housed in CIC office space to conclude contracts faster and easier.

Deloitte Netherlands recently announced that the city of Rotterdam will use a blockchain to record lease agreements for the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), enabling the city and companies housed in CIC office space to conclude contracts faster and easier.

CIC provides high quality, flexible office space designed to house startup communities in future-focused cities. The company was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now houses more than 1000 companies in close to 50,000 square meters of premium office and coworking space across 8 facilities.Their downtown Rotterdam office is a central location for the city’s start-up scene.

“Startups housed at CIC have raised over $2 billion in venture capital investment and created over $2 billion of publicly disclosed exit value, CIC companies have added an estimated 40,000 jobs to the economy,” states CIC, which describes itself as a “new driver of economic growth, employment and investments” in the Netherlands.

“CIC’s mission is to change the world through innovation by developing ecosystems that allow exceptional entrepreneurs to create new products and companies better and faster.”
— – Cambridge Innovation Center

Recording legally binding contracts on a blockchain is the first step towards more efficient and transparent management. “The next step will be monitoring the rental payments,” said Deloitte’s manager of Real Estate, Jan Willem Santing. Deloitte is a partner of the municipality of Rotterdam, and according to the CIC, was instrumental in helping bring their organization to the Netherlands.

“By implementing additional block chain applications in the real estate industry transaction times and costs can be reduced further,” stated Santing in the announcement. “Furthermore it enables decision makers to use data analysis for making future investment decisions on selling, buying and constructing real estate.”

The pilot project is part of the area’s Next Economy Roadmap, an initiative covering 23 municipalities in the Metropolitan Region, including Rotterdam and The Hague. The cities are experimenting with several potentially disruptive technologies, including blockchains.

Deloitte is contributing experience from delivering smart city services across the globe. Based on capability and strategy, IDC MarketScape named the global consultancy a worldwide leader in smart cities consulting services in August 2015.

“Smart Cities are not an isolated phenomenon but are part of a broader transition towards a digital economy.”
— – Deloitte

Several Smart City initiatives have recently announced that they are using the technology. Amsterdam is considering a healthcare provider network for one trial, and the city has already held at least one public meeting on the subject of blockchain tech use in their smart city program.

Further afield, China has 285 smart city pilots underway, and at least 300 cities identified for Smart City development, including Beijing and Shanghai. At September’s Global Blockchain Summit, held in Shanghai, the primary event sponsor, Wanxiang, announced the biggest municipal blockchain investment to date, as part of the Hangzhou Smart Cities program.

The Chinese automobile manufacturer has set aside US$30 billion to invest in 83 million square feet of Hangzhou real estate for a major technology lab, which will explore blockchain technology. The company will also fund blockchain-focused startups.

Texas-based Factom has already sent people to China to take part in smart cities initiatives, deploying blockchain solutions as part of at least one smart city pilot. The startup’s platform secures data on the Factom distributed ledger, and then anchors it into Bitcoin’s blockchain for added immutability.

The Kingdom of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is also a major player in the Smart Cities landscape. Industry experts and leaders from public and private sector entities recently met at the Dubai Smart Cities Forum to share expertise, discuss challenges and review international standards as part of joint efforts to achieve Dubai’s smart city ambitions. The theme was “Blockchain and the Next Wave of Smart Cities Technologies.”

Australia is also looking into the technology. The recent Smart Cities Australia Forum, held in Syndney, included a workshop discussing the topic. “The platform on which Bitcoin operates, Blockchain is a general purpose technology that can disrupt any centralised system that coordinates valuable information,” states the agenda.

While Deloitte describes the new real estate blockchain application as “the first time lease agreements are recorded in blockchain,” several other governments have deployed blockchain projects for land title registry. Sweden, Honduras, The Republic of Georgia, and Ghana all have blockchain-based systems for recording real estate ownership.

“By building a blockchain-based property registry and taking full advantage of the security provided by the Blockchain technology, the Republic of Georgia can show the world that we are a modern, transparent and corruption-free country that can lead the world in changing the way land titling is done and pave the way to additional prosperity for all.”

  • Papuna Ugrekhelidze, Chairman of the National Agency of Public Registry of Georgia

ADVERTISE WITH BRAVE NEW COIN

BNC AdvertisingPlanning your 2024 crypto-media spend? Brave New Coin’s combined website, podcast, newsletters and YouTube channel deliver over 500,000 brand impressions a month to engaged crypto fans worldwide.
Don’t miss out – Find out more today


ADVERTISEMENT
Advertise with BNC
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertise with BNC
BNC Newsletters: A weekly digest of the most important news and analysis.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertise with BNC
Submit an event on bravenewcoin.com
Latest Insights More
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertise with BNC