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A March 10 follow-up report revealed new technical details behind Bergen County's blockchain deed program. Balcony CEO Dan Silverman described the architecture as a dedicated Layer 1 network on Avalanche, chosen to apply customized controls and permissions to government land records.
The underlying agreement
The public action dates to May 28, 2025, when Bergen County and Balcony announced a five-year agreement to digitize and place roughly 370,000 property deeds on-chain, covering approximately $240 billion in real-estate value. The county's Clerk's Office separately confirmed the contract with the Hoboken-based company to digitize deeds and property records.
How the system is being built
The update matters less as a new municipal award than as a clearer picture of how the project is being implemented. Avalanche and Ava Labs have said the system runs through AvaCloud, a platform designed to let organizations deploy purpose-built Avalanche Layer 1 networks rather than use a generic public chain. In public materials, Balcony and county officials have framed the project as a records-modernization effort — creating a digitized, searchable chain of title across Bergen County's 70 municipalities — rather than an investor-facing real-estate securities issuance. AvaCloud's product materials describe the infrastructure as a managed deployment layer for custom blockchain networks.
Regulatory context
That distinction carries regulatory weight. The reviewed project materials do not announce a new New Jersey rule, sandbox authorization, or enforcement action. Instead, the effort sits within the county's existing land-recording framework, under which New Jersey law allows county clerks to maintain records through approved image-processing or data-processing systems and requires recording systems to conform to rules of the Division of Archives and Records Management.
Operational claims and open questions
The public claims around the rollout are substantial: Balcony and Avalanche have said the program is intended to cover the county's full deed base and reduce processing times for certain property-record workflows from about 90 days to one day, while also addressing fraud, title disputes, and ransomware-related vulnerabilities in legacy record systems. The county Clerk's Office maintains a public-facing portal for its recording services.
In practice, the development primarily affects county record administrators, infrastructure providers supporting public-record digitization, and market participants tracking blockchain rails in real-estate administration — not tokenized distribution to investors. Key implementation details — including validator design, access permissions, rollout status, and the legal status of blockchain records during transition — remain outside the public materials reviewed so far.
