TL;DR
- Bergen County is tokenizing over 370,000 property deeds on Avalanche, covering $240 billion in real estate under a five-year contract.
- Balcony is extending the modernization to Camden, Orange, and Morristown, surpassing 460,000 tokenized properties and $290 billion in combined value.
- The system cuts settlement times from 90 days to just one, protects against ransomware, and detects unreported tax revenues in municipal records.
New Jersey is moving forward with the digitalization of its public infrastructure through a project that will migrate more than 370,000 property deeds onto the Avalanche blockchain.
Bergen County, one of the state’s most valuable areas, signed a five-year agreement with Balcony to modernize its property records management system. The operation represents nearly $240 billion in real estate and becomes the largest real estate records tokenization initiative in the United States.
What Are the Benefits of Tokenizing Property Records?
The goal is to reduce processing times, eliminate record-keeping errors, and protect sensitive data from cyberattacks. Balcony’s platform runs on Avalanche via AvaCloud, enabling local authorities to securely and efficiently manage property transactions. The new infrastructure reduces deed settlement times from 90 days to one and turns documents into digital, searchable, tamper-proof files.
In addition, Balcony is already working to implement this technology in municipalities like Camden, Orange, Morristown, and Fort Lee. Altogether, over 460,000 properties are being tokenized across New Jersey, with a combined value exceeding $290 billion. Integrating these systems on a single L1 network ensures interoperability, lowers operating costs, and improves the detection of unreported or misrecorded tax revenues.
There are already cases showing the potential of this technology. In Orange, Balcony identified nearly $1 million in lost tax revenues due to incomplete records. The modernization effort also reduces vulnerability to ransomware attacks, a recurring problem for New Jersey municipalities, which reported over twenty incidents in 2023 alone.
The State Relies on Avalanche for Records Modernization
Some governments are already moving physical asset records onto blockchain networks. Recent projections estimate the tokenization market will reach $18.9 trillion by 2033, with real estate as one of the highest-volume segments. This public digital management model is already being applied in other jurisdictions, such as California’s DMV, which migrated its vehicle titles to Avalanche to speed up processes and prevent fraud.
The rollout of this system in New Jersey marks a tangible shift toward decentralized public processes, integrating blockchain technology as an operational tool to address structural inefficiencies, security gaps, and fiscal oversight challenges
