According to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, using the “blockchain” of crypto technology is the “way of the future” to store birth certificates, estate deeds and other government documents.
“From everything to using blockchain — to look up deeds, to deal with birth certificates, other records, this is the way of the future and we’re going to talk about it,” Adams said Monday in a room full of cryptocurrency investors. I’m excited.” ,
Proponents of the idea argue that storing one-of-a-kind government documents on a digital ledger – in a manner similar to NFTs – would cut administrative costs and fraud.
Other municipalities, including Cook County, Illinois and South Burlington, Vermont, have experimented with using blockchain for property deeds in recent years.
And in 2019, a Brazilian hospital through a partnership with IBM placed a newborn’s birth certificate exclusively on the blockchain, local media reported.
Adams has long promoted cryptocurrencies and related technologies, but on Monday it appeared for the first time that he supported placing government documents on the blockchain.
“The inability of the government to create these partnerships between sustainability, corporate entities and the government is what’s holding us back from solving so many problems,” Adams said.
Adams famously converted his first three mayor paychecks to bitcoin and ethereum this January and February in an effort to unify the mayor of Miami. The current crypto crash means that Adams’ investments are likely to be underwater.
So far this year, Bitcoin is down 38%, while Ethereum is down 46%.
Adams’ press secretary, Fabian Levy, declined to say whether Adams had sold any of his cryptocurrency investments prior to the current crash.
“We do not comment on Mayer’s personal investment,” Levy told The Post. “There are personal financial disclosures that they have to fill out that contain this information.”
The mayor made the remarks during a brief speech at the Security Token Summit – a cryptocurrency convention in Manhattan – just days after a major crash last week wiped out billions of dollars of crypto investments.
Attendees at the $2,000-per-ticket event spoke with panic about the collapse of the stablecoin TeraUSD as they consumed croissants, fruit and coffee.
Despite the uncertainty, Adams reassured crypto fanatics that “fintech, blockchain, cryptocurrency is here to stay.”
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