State Department of Motor Vehicles divisions aren’t exactly known for efficiency. However, a new pilot project from California’s state DMV could look to change that. The state is now kicking off a pilot program, which will operate on Tezos, to manage state records surrounding automotive ownership.

Let’s dive into what this program means, what it is all about, and why it could serve as a major point of institutional-level crypto adoption down the road.

Auto Titles On Chain: Why It Makes Sense

State-governed record keeping, such as automotive titles and registration, is a vertical that NFT and crypto advocates have cited as one major area that blockchain technology can add immense value. If done right, digital record keeping on-chain with this data can reinforce immutability, reduce and optimize the necessary manpower in logging changes and updates to records, and ideally reduce potential errors around record changes.

California is willing to take a plunge, it seems, and is pairing up with crypto software firm Oxhead Alpha to achieve the vision. Oxhead Alpha will be utilizing a specific set of smart contracts on the Tezos blockchain (but not visible on the permissionless, publicly-available Tezos chain) to build out this product.

In a statement cited in Oxhead Alpha’s press release, the state’s Chief Digital Transformation Officer Ajay Gupta stated that these solutions “would avoid repeated verification steps for customer and State/public service entities, resulting in reduced workload, economic benefits and auditability.”

California’s Crypto Roadmap

California holds records of over 30M registered vehicles throughout the state, putting a true test on the capabilities and capacity of the slate of Tezos smart contracts in the works. However, the size and scale of this project, and the state’s reputation for moving at a ‘snail’s pace’ on executional items like this don’t seem to be slowing down the output as much as one might anticipate.

This initiative is rooted in a 2020 state ‘Blockchain Working Group’ roadmap that has sought to pave the way for blockchain-based engagement across a variety of verticals, such as property, utilities, finance & banking, and more. Roughly 8 months ago, California governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order around blockchain-based assets to address both regulation and innovation.

Now, we’re finally seeing a pilot program come to life with true utility and a clear value-add proposition. The program is expected to come to initial fruition by early/mid Q2 2023, and we could see car titles as NFTs by the end of the year. A similar pilot project with the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture is expected to come to life in the month’s ahead as well, with the intent to better track food-borne contamination, effectively moving data surrounding growers and transporters on-chain.