On Tuesday a very small, but telling, acquisition occurred in the technology sector. Apple purchased the Artificial Intelligence platform Silk Labs, a California producer of smart home technology. Silk Labs produces a product called Sense, a home monitoring camera with capabilities like facial recognition that will speak to other internet enabled devices in the house and customize preferences based on the individual in the room at that time. It also has the power to recognize who’s not supposed to be in the room, mainly, bad guys.

Cool, but why does it matter that Apple bought them?

Sense has a particular value-add that is thought to be the reason Apple targeted them instead of a competitor: an enhanced focus on privacy. Rather than stream footage to the cloud 24/7, Sense will only send “Key Learning Moments” to the cloud, and will send the data anonymized.

The focus on privacy is a big step in the battle between the encroachment of technology into users’ private lives, and what users are willing to share in exchange for the benefits of tech.

Privacy, then convenience.

The stakes for tech giants have never been higher, and the past few years have yielded significant push-back from user groups about certain technology companies’ ability to peer into our private lives, and disseminate what they see.

This poses a challenge for the ever-growing market of CRETech or PropTech start-ups, a significant portion of which are concentrated in the analytics and data-gathering space. In fact, I’d say it’s the biggest threat to the $30 billion global smart home market, despite it’s projection to grow to over $50 billion by 2022.

Apple is putting a bet on Privacy.

To wrap it all up, how much people care about the privacy of their personal information depends on a number of factors, mainly age, but also how you control what you share.

The good news for those of us who do care about privacy, but don’t want to go back to 1970 to get it, some companies are taking notice and we should too.

The smart home market is expected to grow into a $53 billion industry by 2022, according to Zion Market Research.

If true, that will comprise 3.5% of an estimated $1.5 Trillion construction industry in the United States. It is difficult to say if this will be a sustaining addition to the well established industry, or a new market disruption, as the majority of smart home additions are slow to be absorbed.

Given the global escalation in construction costs, there is a desperate need to find efficiencies and make development feasible to match growing housing demand in prime markets. Since the issue is not location specific, but a recurring theme in almost 50 of the world’s most desirable cities, there is a noticeable vacuum in innovative methods and products that can alleviate the astronomical cost burden that has no end in sight.

Enter Amazon, the real-world version of the Tyrell Corporation. Amazon has injected $6.7m in Plant Prefab through their Alexa Fund.

Why is this important?

Prefabricated homes allow the majority of building systems to be pre-assembled off site. Imagine you’re building a Lego house, and rather than assembling all the 100+ blocks, the blocks come preassembled. It saves a considerable amount of time and coordination, reduces errors, and makes things tremendously more efficient.

A University of Utah study reports that modular construction processes result in an average of 16% cost savings and 39% savings in time. When considering a development proforma, these savings are passed directly to the consumer, allowing end units to be rented or sold for considerably less and still maintain a reasonable development yield.

What will happen to all the disruption of jobs from the skilled and unskilled labour? We will have to wait and see.

Until recently, prefabrication of homes was reserved for more pedestrian housing. With startups like Plant Prefab, we’re moving into a more advanced, luxury style of prefabrication.

Watch for this as for-sale product coming to a city near you.

What is PropTech?

Ironically, the youngest vertical of the technology industry is growing rapidly to serve one of the oldest industries: real estate.

Much like FinTech has transformed the financial sector, PropTech (or CREtech for Commercial Real Estate) is the technology that is being used to transform the way we think about and use property. Andrew Braum describes it as “a movement driving a mentality change within the real estate industry and its consumers regarding technology driven innovation in the data assembly, transacting, and design of buildings and cities”.

What are PropTech startups focused on? Why are they needed?

This question may seem obvious (because, honestly, who needs a realtor anymore?)* but I assure you that we are only scratching the surface of the potential of this tech vertical.

*note: I’m being facetious, the brokers I work with are invaluable and some of the smartest people in the industry. Technology empowers, not replaces them.

As a property developer, here is a short list of the inefficiencies I face daily:

• Need for multiple intermediaries in all transactions (real estate, insurance, banking);
• Information asymmetry — in markets, in building efficiency, pretty much anywhere in the business;
• Cumbersome and intensive legal agreements;
• Inefficient building systems and building programming;
• Lack of ability to move quickly;

The list goes on and on… the point being that there are a lot of difficulties translating such a physical (and old school) world into the digital realm.

Where do we draw the line between PropTech, Fintech, and other tech startups?

The truth is, there’s a lot of grey area. Who’s to say your building’s Facebook page doesn’t count it as PropTech?

A fun Venn-style infographic shows one idea for the spatial relationship of the industry:

Platforms in PropTech vary as widely as the property industry itself. Major players have been noted disrupting many areas. Some that I’ve been paying attention to are below (but not limited to, honestly there’s thousands):

• Automation: Smart real estate like Amazon Go, similar automation is taking place in office buildings
• Mortgage and Lending: Blend, Ethos, States Title
• Real Estate Brokerage: Opendoor, Harbor, Appear Here, VTS
• Rental and Hotel: AirBnB (obviously), Lyric
• Facilities and Property Management: VTS, Enertiv, Wiredscore, Eden
• Construction: Honest Buildings
• Insurance: Hippo
• Legal: Notarize (this is a BIG one)

Where is all the money coming from?

Global investment in PropTech companies grew 63% from 2016 to a staggering $12 billion in 2017. Why so much attention in this vertical?

Historically, the real estate industry has been the hardest to disrupt. Just look at the life cycle of Redfin, a company that set out to change real estate listings, and ended up conforming to the status quo of the business.

The truth is that connecting the highly tactile and visceral industry of real estate to the more disconnected, automated and efficiency based software industry is very hard. It’s taken time for those lack of efficiencies to really become a pain point that a live human could not solve. For example: when you’re making the largest transaction decision of your life, like a home, you generally want to speak to an expert.

But over the last few years, that has changed. Enter: the money. VC and Incubator firms such as Fifth Wall, Aurum, PiLabs and Navitas and MetaProp have been market leaders, gobbling up billions in value of investment in PropTech, likely aiming for an exit to an IPO or, if they’re lucky, to be purchased by the corporation they’re disrupting.

Established companies purchasing their potential disruptors is an old concept, but it’s new to Real Estate. Salim Ismail would be proud. For instance Jones Lang Lasalle (JLL) and Cushman and Wakefield, two major global brokerage firms, have entered into the foray of PropTech to stave off elimination (and likely make a couple bucks doing it). JLL has gone so far as to create a new investment arm, JLL Spark, targeting primarily early stage digital real estate companies set to disrupt each of its service lines.

In Europe, a continent likely ripe for Smart Building retrofits, investment funds have popped up to create opportunities similar to their American counterparts. Proptech Capital is one such group taking charge over there.

Why does it matter?

Many thought leaders (smarter than I) have been puzzling over the death of productivity growth in developed economies, despite better-than-ever access to digitization, machine learning and software process enhancement.

In real estate, it’s like the wild west of technology startups, and productivity enhancement is arguably there for the taking. Although certain disruption is taking place in the industry, other, more established areas of the business will adapt to tech slowly, gauging market demand and iterating to adapt.

It will pay to keep an eye on these companies as they creep into our everyday lives. End user demand will always dictate adoption, so as the tech-savvy demographic becomes more attune to real estate inefficiencies, demand for PropTech will continue to grow.

The built-form world of real estate, design, and construction is ripe and ready for disruption. Although change is happening in almost every industry vertical, below is a handful that I’ve found the most impactful in 2018:

1. Coworking:

Coworking isn’t new. WeWork has been around (in various forms) since 2008 and Regus has been around since the ’80s. What is new is how disruptive co-working has been to the traditional landlord-tenant office model, so much so that the insatiable demand is gobbling up what little contiguous office space there is in the prime parts of Vancouver. This rush to lease valuable space is having a ripple effect, sending vacancy rates to their lowest levels in years, which has in turn driven a building boom in Vancouver with almost one million square feet coming online over the next eight quarters.

Some in the ‘biz are skeptical of the WeWork model, stating that they offer sky-high rents and take down large swaths of space, only to ask for large inducements (tenant improvement allowances, money landlords pay up front) which they use as working capital to fund their operation for the first few years of their term. They state that the businesses are unsustainable, that occupying large amounts of expensive, prime commercial space a big bet with huge imputed value that’s unjustifiable (WeWork is valued at $20B whereas the more established Regus has a market cap of only $2B, comparatively 10x less).

WeWork has one thing going for it — a dynamic team and the flexibility to pivot that comes with being a private company. Miguel Mckelvey (co-founder of WeWork) stated that their interest isn’t in growing value, it’s about adapting to evolving business problems. To think about it a different way, as people’s values around how they work shift, so will WeWork’s model. They’re also sitting on a big pile of data that I’m sure they’re having no problem monetizing.

Key groups to watch in this vertical: WeWork, Spaces (Regus), countless up-and-comers in the US and Canada markets.

2. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Google Glass bombed. Snapchat’s glasses failed. Say what you want about adoption cycles, I personally think the world just wasn’t ready for everyday application of AR.

But to the built-form world, AR is becoming a necessity.

For design and construction firms, the ability to move a 2D concept into 3D removes an enormous barrier for clients to visualize a product. We are now able to mock-up and export design from a 2D back-of-the-napkin concept to 3D built-form representation in a matter of moments. There’s also technology to transform existing space into digital form, like Matterport.

At Omicron (shameless plug #1) we’re implementing this system with large-user clients, and it’s game changing. Seriously. Having a group walk through their space before it’s built removes so much ambiguity and makes our lives so much easier. After all, it’s far more expensive to change things once it’s built.

In marketing, AR and VR are still second fiddle to real life touch-and-feel, but it’s getting close. We’re using VR to superimpose buildings on existing vistas to help demonstrate this concept, which has been hugely beneficial to potential lease and sale clients (shameless plug #2).

Look for this type of modeling to be the norm in the next 2–3 years.

Key groups to watch in this vertical: Unity, Fuzor, Pair, Storyboard VR, ARki

3. Smart Contracts and Blockchain Transactions

What kind of tech-based blog would this be without a mention of blockchain?

Seriously though, in 10 years we’ll look back and wonder how we did things without Smart Contracts. They make a highly illogical process (incomplete information about the market, due diligence research and satisfaction, incomplete history of an asset) logical again.

Without boring you with the details, using a Smart Contract will eliminate process redundancy that comes with human involvement. Right now, if I want to execute a real estate purchase contract, I need a lawyer (and a realtor) to review and execute, and countless other consultants to have signed off. With Smart Contracts, the terms are coded and encrypted, so when satisfied the contract executes itself. For a guy who’s company spends hundreds of thousands in fees on a typical commercial deal, sign me up.

An area where Blockchain and Smart Contracts can have a huge impact is on ownership of real assets. Fintech companies around the globe (my favourite is Fundrise) are utilizing crowdsourcing for ownership of investment properties. Crypto currency could accelerate this trend and offer a new way to own and trade ownership in an asset through ICOs of asset-backed crypto-currency.

What about the government, tax, and you know, laws and stuff? Don’t worry, there’s a blockchain company for that! Groups like Harbour are working to create software that abides by securities laws (in the US), and models such as theirs could pop up globally, providing legal backing to transactions that have to navigate tricky government regulations.

Key groups to watch in this vertical: Etherparty, Propy, Populous, Harbour

4. Retail 2.0 (The Delivery Economy)

When I visited my brother in London, they introduced me to this new concept they invented called “the reverse drive through”. Essentially, they had developed such familiarity with their local Uber Eats delivery personnel, the delivery people would come to the front window of their house and hand the food through the window of their living room. Brilliant!

In a dense, transit-oriented city like London, delivery simply makes more sense than attempting to grocery shop, furniture shop, or really shop at all, and face having to haul your goods on the Tube.

This notion is being reflected across the globe, so much so that Amazon has endeavored to set up fulfillment centres in almost every dense metro area in order to deliver goods to consumers within days, even hours of order. It’s so convenient and cheap, why bother going to the store? Enter Autonomous Vehicles into the equation, and there’s a new ecosystem of uber-efficient consumerism knocking on your door. Pun intended.

More novel competitors are popping up that value-add the delivery service by offering premium “baskets” of chosen goods. Take Foxtrot, who gather and ship specialty snacks, craft beers and everything you need to host a fancy party, without ever having to browse the store. Interior Define is another group that is disrupting, of all things, furniture sales by allowing customers to pick a style, pick a colour, and customize as needed.

Does this spell the end of bricks and mortar retail as we know it? Not entirely.

Enter b8ta, a company that showcases bleeding edge consumer tech, allows you to play with the toys, experience the product, and then go home and buy it online. The concept takes the stress out of dealing with salespeople, and allows consumers to self qualify the product in person and make their choice of where to allocate dollars in privacy. This is the model of the future, and has been the de facto trend for consumers for a while. b8ta is the first group (that I’ve seen) to fully embrace this trend in retail

Key groups to watch in this vertical: Amazon, Interior Define, Foxtrot, b8ta and countless others.

5. Real Estate Brokerage: Commercial, Residential and Mortgage

Real estate brokerage is a well established and lucrative businesses. The US Residential Real Estate brokerage industry alone has an estimated value of $200 Billion. Realtors thrive off of the information asymmetry that comes with imperfect market information. Buyers and sellers of real estate trade infrequently and rarely, if ever, trade assets with so much risk and such large amounts of their own money. Consequentially, most individuals see it worthwhile to have an industry professional on their side and are willing to pay large sums to ensure a smooth transaction.

However, groups like Opendoor are changing that. Founded in 2014, this group is disrupting brokerage by going digital. The key value-add of their platform: they take the risk out of buying or selling a home. Both purchase and sale decisions can be made with clarity and security via their online system. No open houses, realtors, staging or any of that, they actually buy your home and then re-list it. It’s quite brilliant. Zillow, the monster real estate listing service, has attempted to create a competing system with minimal luck so far. I guess something about an online company, that was built on the backs of realtors, suddenly pivoting to put realtors out of business has investors scratching their heads. Either way, this is the future.

For commercial brokers, there are abundant digital systems popping up that endeavour to smooth out the asymmetries of the built form world. Case and point: VTS, which is a CRM on steroids, closing the gaps between landlord-broker portfolio knowledge. Groups like AppearHere are creating AirBnB type listings for pop up locations, which will have a huge effect on the retail bricks and mortar business, as well as tenant attraction and retention.

Mortgage and financing isn’t immune to disruption either. Groups like Blend and Ethos are connecting buyers with financing faster and cheaper through instantaneous qualification.

These innovations are making the trivial automatic. Brokers and service providers that have genuine relationships and offer value that treats the evolving business problem will always be needed. However, those that have operated on transactional paper-pushing will soon be obsolete.

Key groups to watch in this vertical: Opendoor, AppearHere, Blend, Ethos, Zillow

A Quick Primer

Despite the recent tragedy in Arizona, the driverless cars being tested today are the Palm Pilot version of what will eventually be the iPhones of autonomous vehicles in the future. Adoption is coming, it’s a debate about when.

Certain features of AI in cars have been around since 2006: auto braking, parking assist etc. and currently, cars are being programmed with AI features like highway autopilot. Fully autonomous cars will be released as early as 2022, and ride sharing companies are investing heavily.

Right now, humans are the only ones that can perceive and make decisions based on what we see in a split second, kind of important when you do something as complex as driving. However, the theory is that AI has superhuman decision making capacity and 360 degree vision will vastly improve driving efficiency. It just needs the proper information, testing and reasoning ability to work properly.

By using gaming-type programming and advanced sensor technology, it’s possible to program a computer to understand its environment well enough to drive a car. Today, it’s imperfect. In five years, it will exceed human ability.

However, if municipalities, Lyft and Uber can utilize the technology to capitalize on the efficiencies, the our world will rapidly change.

Autonomous Cars are Wayyy More Efficient than Humans

Autonomous vehicles are certain to increase travel efficiency, decrease traffic itself, and make trips between home and work safer and less stressful by driving faster, closer together, and automatically re-calibrating routes based on congestion.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development did a study that assumed rapid adoption of autonomous cars through ride sharing companies like Uber and Lyft, and maybe municipalities purchased fleets of autonomous vehicles (think this).

The report had some significant findings. Autonomous vehicles would cut delays by 60% or more, such that riders can spend more time working, safely sipping their coffee, or even sleeping on their commute. This study (arguably) relates almost as much to rapid adoption of autonomous vehicle ride-sharing as it does to the advancement in autonomous technology itself, but in this scenario, it no longer makes sense to own a car, because the cost of ownership is more than ride sharing and the convenience of ride sharing is higher.

The study states that if adoption was high, the amount of cars needed on the road to meet capacity is only 10% of current volumes. That’s a 90% reduction of cars in existence.

Imagine what that means for space around us. 90% less cars street parking. 90% less cars at shopping malls, in downtown parkades.

So, Real Estate Advantages. #1 — Proximity Issues Vanish

Imagine being able to sleep on your commute? Imagine being able to work on your commute? You won’t worry about all of the negative effects associated with commute times if your commute just involves the working or instagramming you’d be doing anyway. You can finally live in an affordable single family home in Chilliwack while capitalizing on the 2-hour commute to work, sleep, or generally relax.

#2 — Decongestion and More Space For More Fun Stuff

Let’s start with this map:

Everything orange is a metered parking stall, the blue and green zones are resident parking. This is not an exhaustive map, but clearly street parking dominates most of the busiest and most desirable parts of the city. If autonomous vehicles can reduce the amount of street parking, think of the space that will open up on roads for further expansion of housing lot lines.

Now this map. I count 20 parkades, let me know if I’m wrong. That’s 20 sites for new, high density housing and commercial application, likely hundreds of units.

If we can reduce the demand by 90%, think of the opportunities we’ll have globally to reduce high rise parkades, and even better, get rid of gargantuan, fender-bender-inducing, hideous-scars-on-the-face-of-the-planet that we call shopping mall parking lots.

The Economist estimates that 25% of american cities are consumed by parking, think of the effect that having those sites opened to housing and commercial space will do for housing options and affordability.

#3 — The Underground Revolution

Right now in a mid or high-rise building, I’m required to build around 1.5 parking stalls per household, usually underground. Think about every high-rise building in Vancouver, most will have an underground parkade. Now think about what that space can be used for, and how much opportunity that opens up. Storage, data centres, you name it. Maybe we can finally add to some of our great (but limited) basement bar scene.

But Really…How Quickly Will They Become a Reality?

Fully autonomous cars will be on the market in 3–4 years. But adoption of fully autonomous fleets will take longer. The Boston Consulting Group published a report stating that to get to to 25% of the global auto market being autonomous vehicles, it will likely take 15 to 20 years after the introduction of the first vehicles, likely in the luxury sector. If Mercedes is leading the way in 2022, that’s 2037 for mass adoption. Quite a ways away in today’s terms given that Facebook is only 12-years old.

Locally, the Mayors council of BC just announced $7.1b for expansion of transit lines on in Metro Vancouver. Do we need this investment if autonomous vehicles are just around the corner?

Yes. Autonomous vehicles will eventually replace our current systems, but they must grow up to support these systems, not replace them. We still need rapid transit and we still need conventional car systems. Autonomous vehicles are clearly coming; how we react and change the way will live will be crucial to capitalizing on all the opportunities this technology brings with it. Hopefully, if my car can drive itself, I’ll finally be able to work Downtown but own a house somewhere remote and not have to worry about the crazy long, life sucking commute.

The debate about Vancouver’s housing market is not a new one. Google search “Vancouver” and “news” and 3 out of 4 of the top hits reference the housing crisis. I won’t get into the argument about which boogeyman is the cause, whether it be foreign buyers, population growth, or simply a generation of dads buying second homes for their millennial children.

But I get it. The numbers don’t make sense.

The population of the Vancouver Metro area rose by roughly 9.9% from 2011 to 2016. Occupied private dwellings rose 11.9% during the same period. That’s a significant increase in supply.

If, conservatively, a household is two people, then household growth would be half of population growth, around 5%. Using this crude method of analysis, it seems that dwelling growth has outstripped household growth. Why then, have prices risen 20% year over year?

Supply vs. Competition

To clarify, when I say supply, I really mean seller competition. Competition is what cools speculation and keeps price inflation low. Whether it’s oil or toothpaste, a competitive offering of purchase choices means the decisions are always in the buyers’ favour, the opposite of the current housing market in Vancouver.

When pundits argue that there have been equal housing starts to growth in the region, they fail to qualify what the supply actually is. A gleaming luxury tower in Coal Harbour is not meaningfully adding supply to the competitive buyer’s landscape. In contrast, ten 4-storey condo buildings in the same area (that equate to the same dwelling unit increase offered by that one tower) would create competition between the developments, a buyer’s market.

To breed competition, we need better laws dictating how and what gets built. This is the primary argument for abundant housing advocates. It’s not about developer profits and vested interests, it’s about creating competitive markets.

So what’s the deal with Tokyo?

When we look to the cherry blossoms of Japan, we see a very different housing landscape. In the 1990s, Japan went through a significant recession. To help the economy recover, they passed laws in the country that relaxed zoning, allowed owners to do what they wanted with property, and gave federal (not local) authorities powers over approvals. Local authorities mandate uses, design guidelines, density, form and a whole array of other requirements. While the intentions are good, in reality the process becomes incredibly complex and resources in municipalities are strained. What’s worse, there’s a lack of continuity between municipalities and little to no regard for each adjacent cities’ urban centres. A larger regional or federal body with a macro strategy like Japan’s has shown to expedite approvals and allow product to come to market faster, as well as reduce the heat on the municipalities. Since those laws were enacted, Japan has seen the same urban densification, population growth and economic prosperity as cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver (all prominent cities with an “affordability crisis”). However, there’s one distinct difference between these cities and Tokyo: in Tokyo, housing prices have only marginally increased.

Tokyo’s population increased by roughly 7.5% from 2005–2015, but its housing stock rose by roughly 2% per year, or 20% in the ten-year period. In other words, they build houses in abundance, and allow competition to ensure that prices remain level.

By allowing buildings to be torn down and built at will, with minimal red tape and encouragement from the government, housing prices have remained relatively even and there is no shortage of places to live in the city.

There are obvious problems with this progressive strategy, the most notable of which being a sad mish-mash of urban design and minimal focus on guidelines. There’s also far more depth as to why Japan has taken on this strategy.

Vancouver’s tough reality

What I can tell you is the system for building housing in Vancouver is broken, and we can learn from Japan. Municipal policy has aggravated competition creation more than any of the demand growth or foreign buyer issues combined. Planning department bureaucracy, timelines, and taxation are the worst in the country. Builders struggle to take on the economic risk involved with the current build cycle. In fact it is so slow, there hasn’t been a meaningful increase in supply to keep up with the demand, despite what it may seem on the surface. As a builder myself I’m bias. As an almost 30-year old trying to purchase a condo, I’m annoyed.

Our 11% dwelling growth is clearly not enough to stop the bidding wars and buyer competition on the ground level. I’m experiencing it day-to-day. Let’s encourage our elected officials to streamline approvals and allow housing to be created in abundance. Let’s work our hardest to shift this seller’s market to a buyer’s market.

In contrast, on October 14th, 2017, the City of Vancouver held a by-election to select a new Councillor. That election yielded a whopping eleven percent turnout. Eleven percent! City Council arguably has a greater effect on the day-to-day lives of citizens than a federal election, so why such a poor result?

There are many reasons for the disparity between municipal election turnout versus its federal counterpart, whether it’s marketing, location and date, or general interest in issues. However, one thing is unequivocally clear: constituents in this city are not engaged.

That is why the electoral system, and policymaking in general, needs to capitalize on the advent of technology if it is to capture the attention of its constituents.

My plea: move the whole thing online. Easy, right?

Currently, a voter gets a card in the mail with a date and location. To vote, that person has to pause Netflix, get up off their couch, physically go out in the blistering cold to the voting location, talk to someone, mark a ballot and go home. A group of volunteers and City staff then count ballots, and within a margin of error, elects a candidate. The whole process sounds horribly inefficient.

What if instead, we implement a software platform to vote that utilizes two or three step verification and secures the data through blockchain technology. You don’t even have to pause Netflix!

Let’s take it a step further, what if using the same application or platform, constituents can crowdsource issues and, based on word-clouds and aggregation, tell elected officials exactly what the most prescient issues are. We can have officials create and cast votes on policy to deal with those issues in real time! Lengthy municipal review can be shortened to brief pulse checks via online systems. Wanting to weigh in on topics that matter to you? Login and tell them yourself, anonymously and instantly.

But the problems…

There are obvious problems with a digital, crowdsourced legislative model. Three specifically: verification that you are who you say you are, accuracy in the results (no double counting or skewing information), and of course, cyber security or the idea that any of the information will be hacked and influenced. Those are three giant problems for municipal officials to tackle.

How do we make it work?

Very simply, we can take the process online utilizing a blockchain network, but it will require rapid adoption of advanced technology and an open mind to make the process a success. There are US groups taking this on, such as followmyvote.com and Kasperky Lab which are attempting to bring the safety of an encrypted blockchain to voter systems. Very simply, the nodes creating the blockchain network could be made up of actual constituents, government employees and unbiased independent bodies. Multiple verification steps would need to be utilized such as a mailed code and an ID number. Once you’re passed the “you are who you say you are” step, it’s actually quite simple, and given the encrypted nature of blockchain technology, accurate and trustworthy.

When will this technology be introduced?

Without strong advocacy (and a bit of budget allocation) it’s hard to see this system implemented soon. That said, it’s my hope that we can create awareness around the possibilities a system like this would offer and what it would mean for our democratic system in the future.