A team of lawyers, cryptographers, software engineers and former military consultants in London for the last 18 months have been forming a rare and maybe brilliant plan to create a bridge between blockchain and the real world. This system’s success is directly proportional to the extent, according to TechCrunch, to which it reaches legal title over all physical objects in the world.
Mattereum are not villains seeking to conquer the planet. Instead, it simply desires to bridge the gap between programmable blockchain “smart contracts” and actual legal contracts. As many might assume, the gap is filled with infinite knots of legal precedents and jurisdictions.
Mattereum figured out a remarkable way to cut this complex issue. A legal concept universal spread across nearly all jurisdictions, claim that assets have owners, in which these owners can decide within legal limits how to get rid of them. Mattereum believes that if it is granted legal title over assets then it can establish on-chain smart contracts, in which physical assets can be programmatically purchased, sold, rented, assigned, and partitioned — and use their ownership of these assets to rectify disputes and enforce those resolutions.
One example of this is their flagship object, a Stradivarius violin valued at $9 million. Violins dated back to the 17th and 18th century Stradivari family are some of the world’s most coveted, pricey, and extraordinary instruments.
“It will not simply be tokenized and sold in a crowd sale. The governing committee for the instrument will have legal decision-making powers over the instrument, protecting and curating it on behalf of the token holders and posterity, in accordance with a written constitution.”
This particular Stradivarius seems to serve as the prime example of the Mattereum’s system. According to the white paper, the process is described through which an object like the Stradivarius becomes “programmatically” tokenized, licensed, marketed, and sold to investors:
“Assigning legal title over that violin to one of Mattereum’s registrars […] which then licenses control via a set of smart contracts (say, on the Ethereum blockchain) means the violin instantly becomes not just a physical asset but a digital one.
