Why This Major Country Is Bullish on Blockchains

The U.K. recently announced that it is going to officially issue an NFT and begin supporting stable coins. In this Motley Fool Live segment from "The Virtual Opportunities Show," recorded on April 5, Fool.com contributors Rachel Warren and Travis Hoium discuss some of the potential applications of blockchain technology in this interesting context. 

Rachel Warren: I think what's interesting about this is that they're trying to really get ahead of. We haven't seen any country that I'm aware of so far that has wanted to mint its own NFT and the UK making this move is an incredibly interesting step. As we're seeing the state of regulation really taking hold or starting to take shape as it is in the US. I think that bonds well overall for the industry. One thing that I thought was really interesting was that the government saying they want to look into the application of blockchain technology as a way of issuing debt instruments. Does that mean you could have individuals that are obtaining loans or lines of credit that are built on the blockchain? Again, I don't know exactly how that would work. But that's a fascinating thought. [laughs]

Travis Hoium: That's exactly how that would work. Again, we dive into this stuff a little bit more on the crypto show. But think about a home is probably the best application. If you're home and the details around it are on the blockchain. Now, every time you sell your home or take a loan out for your home, you don't have to go to some title service company to say, "Is the home the home that we were saying that it is and it is it owned by the person that he says?" It's on the blockchain. That is an example that I think makes sense. We're starting to see digital. You can take a loan out based on digital assets. If you have $500,000 crypto punk, you can take out a loan against that crypto punk. Those are just early examples of finance industry starting to figure out this digital space. If all these assets are on the blockchain instead of in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere or in the county office on paper somewhere, that's probably a better solution from a technology standpoint.

Rachel Warren: Well, what's interesting, you were mentioning the potential use case for buying a house, which I think is a great baseline to start when you're looking at these potential ways to use blockchain adoption in that way. One of the things I've seen stories about four years now is real estate fraud. People trying to fraudulently sell someone's house out from under them. You think about how that unique way of verifying ownership that can't be replicated could really erase or at least mitigate a lot of these types of fraud that we see, just in real estate specifically as an example. Obviously there's a lot of other potential, they're in different industries.