California digitizes car titles, putting 42 million vehicles on the blockchain

In an effort to fight fraud and speed up transfer times, the California DMV has digitized 42 million car titles and plans to let users claim their vehicle's title through an app next year.

The move comes in response to Governor Gavin Newsom's 2022 executive order outlining plans to use blockchain technology for government applications. This is the first time a US state has done something like this. 

According to California's government, as of January 2024, the state had 35.7 million registered vehicles and a population of just over 39 million. It seems that either every registered vehicle, or at least the vast majority, will have a title that will be accessible digitally.

Also: Blockchain could save AI by cracking open the black box

Getting the vehicles on a blockchain platform was just the first step. Next, California plans to create an app and a digital wallet through which residents can access their vehicle titles. The state is still refining the infrastructure and app, so titles won't be available for owners to access digitally until early 2025.   

Oxhead Alpha is handling digitization through its Avalanche blockchain platform. In a post about the process, Oxhead Alpha said owners would be able to claim titles through a secure wallet app in minutes, enabling them to track and manage pink slips in one location, cutting down on trips to the DMV and post office and speeding up a process that could take weeks under the old system.

The technology could also give the government a heads-up about lien fraud, Oxhead Alpha says, with "an immutable ledger that bad actors cannot manipulate" or a clear, unchangeable record of a vehicle's ownership. Historically, Andrew Smith, President of Oxhead Alpha said, these systems were accessible by large financial organizations but did very little for regular citizens. If this system proves successful, he hopes other jurisdictions will follow.  

If California follows through on its plan to incorporate more records into the blockchain and if other states follow California's lead, we could see this technology come to a number of different areas -- mortgages, birth certificates, and more. In 2021, accounting firm Deloitte partnered with Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain, to expedite FEMA disaster relief applications.