Unlocking Trillions: How Ethereum Could Fix Property Rights Worldwide

This weeks piece is going to be a bit different from what you are used to, because it will start with something economical to then show the importance of blockchain technology. The fun thing about long form content, like my newsletter, is I finally get the opportunity to fully explain some reasons why I strongly believe we should all fight for a blockchain enabled future. The following is one of these reasons, and it’s a big one.

Property Rights

Let’s start at the beginning, what are property rights as we know them? GPT explains them as followed: property rights are clear rules that ensure what you own is truly yours, protected from being unfairly taken by someone else.

The basic trust that anything you own, is actually yours and can’t be taken away (without any reason) by anyone. Not your neighbor, not your government, not your family, it is yours. Now to most people, who grew up in a country like The Netherlands, this is the most normal thing. If I buy a house I know that it is mine and I can (almost) do whatever I want with it. There is a strong legal framework that protects me and a policing force that can govern this legal framework if necessary. This means, if I decide to invest in my house, I can do that safely. The same goes for businesses. Let’s say I launch a coffee business, I know (if I have my legal contracts in order) that I own the business and I can decide to do whatever I want with it.

Having all of this is not a given, far from it actually. The following might shock you. What seems like a basic human right to many of us, is anything but basic for most of the world. Demographically, a staggering 83% of the global population lives in countries with low to mid IPRI scores in 2024, meaning that a lot of people continue to encounter challenges due to inadequate property rights protections.

The result of this, related to the average income per person in a country, is that people in a country with strong property rights (aka a high IPRI score) earn an average of 19 times more than people in the low-mid countries. That is an insaneeeee difference and show how important it is for a countries citizens, and their wellbeing, to have these rights.

For your information, here is the top-10 countries in the world with the strongest property rights. Some big countries missing indeed: United States (14), United Kingdom (15), Canada (16) and France (20) all miss out on the top-10.

But the connections between strong property rights and other important elements go beyond just economical. The Property Rights Association also found the following correlations, copied from their website:

• A very strong correlation with the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (0.92), indicating its role in attracting and retaining talent for achieving growth and well-being.

• A very strong correlation with the Global Entrepreneurship Index (0.90) showing its crucial role in driving free enterprise.

• Outstanding correlations with the Global Innovation Index (0.88) and Government AI Readiness Index (0.85) insisting on the appropriateness and relevance of a robust property rights system for emerging societies.

In countries with weak property rights, things get fragmented fast. You don’t get one clear system everyone trusts, but a fragmented system where the strong dictate.

Instead of one legal system that protects everyone equally, you end up with gatekeepers: powerful banks, local governments, or corrupt institutions that decide who gets access to what.

Let’s look at something “as simple” as getting a loan from a bank. In countries with strong property rights (high-IPRI), you could use your house as collateral. That means if you don’t pay back the loan, the bank has the legal right to take your house. It works because everyone trusts the system. But what if you live in a country where you can’t actually prove the house is yours, even though you’ve lived there for 20 years, built it yourself, and no one’s collecting rent? That’s what happens in countries without strong property rights. You might own something in practice, but without a trusted system to back you up, it doesn’t count.

And if it doesn’t count, you can’t use it to access capital. No loan, no credit, no opportunity to grow.

The same goes for getting an investment in a business you want to start, or expand. What investor is going to put their hard-earned money into a business that you can’t even prove is yours?

Let’s say you’ve been running a small café for five years. It’s successful. The community loves it. You want to open a second location and need capital to grow. But when an investor asks for your legal documents, something that proves you own the original café, you have nothing solid to show. No registered business license. No legal lease. Just your word…

That’s a red flag. And it’s not because they don’t trust you personally, it’s because there’s no system in place that anyone can trust.

Even worse: if that investor gives you money and something goes wrong, how do they get their investment back? What legal protection do they have? What guarantees? In countries with weak property rights, the answer is usually: none.

So the result? The investor walks away. The business doesn’t grow. The opportunity is lost. This is also one of the main reasons why the enormous capital available in high IPRI countries does not flow into countries that need it most, although there are clear economical incentives to do so.

All because the system doesn’t offer the basic building blocks of trust that make economic growth possible.

I think we can all agree by now how important it is, for a society, to have strong property rights so that people can flourish. In short:

Let me elaborate briefly:

Property rights = trust
When people know their stuff won’t be taken from them, they relax. They trust the system. They start planning for the future instead of just surviving the now.

Trust = investment
Now that people trust the system, they dare to invest. In their homes. Their businesses. Their neighborhoods. Their ideas.

Investment = growth
When enough people start investing, you get momentum. You get new companies, better services, job creation. Things move forward.

Growth = prosperity
Growth is what makes life better. A society that gives people security ends up getting innovation, talent, and wealth in return.

For a country to get strong property rights, it needs a few key things:

1. Clear laws that define who owns what.

2. A trustworthy legal system that enforces those laws fairly.

3. Protection from corruption, so property can’t be taken away unfairly.

4. Stable government institutions that don’t change the rules overnight.

Now let’s see how new technology can help with this.

Ethereum; the digital property rights layer.

As mentioned above, we can probably all agree that property rights are incredibly important to help people make their lives better. Having access to financial tools and global markets can unlock so much prosperity for people, it would make our world a better place.

The goal of Ethereum, the number two blockchain network in the world behind Bitcoin, is to bring a digital property rights layer to the world. Not only online, but also to countries that currently lack it. Again, another example that has nothing to do with “buy crypto and become a millionaire overnight” but focused on making our world better, helping more people and keep things honest. Let’s look how blockchain (and specifically Ethereum) can help with the challenge of lacking property rights in the real and digital world.

Before we dive in, I asked GPT to explain the key concepts of blockchain technology & Ethereum so everyone understands its potential at the end of this piece.

1. Blockchain: A shared notebook that’s open to everyone. Anyone can write in it, but once something is written, it can’t ever be erased or secretly changed. Everything is transparent, permanent, and trustworthy.

2. Ethereum: Ethereum is a blockchain that lets you do more than just track transactions. You can actually build apps, games, and smart contracts right on it. Think of it as a blockchain with its own built-in programming language, powering a new kind of computer.

3. Smart Contracts: These are self-running digital agreements. You write rules in code such as: “If you pay me X, you automatically get Y” and the blockchain makes sure it happens exactly as promised. No lawyers, no middlemen, no room for cheating.

4. Digital Wallet: Your digital wallet is your personal vault on the blockchain. It stores your crypto, NFTs, digital identity, and anything else blockchain-based. Most importantly, you, and only you, control it. It’s your own secure safe, but online.

5. On-chain vs Off-chain: Something that’s “on-chain” is permanently recorded and verified on the blockchain, meaning you genuinely own it and nobody can take it away or alter it. Something that’s “off-chain” is stored privately by companies, like your Instagram account or Kindle books. Technically, you don’t own these, you’re just renting them, and they can disappear at any time.

Bringing Property Rights to the Low IPRI Countries
Now we know the above, let’s start by how Ethereum can unlock trillions of Dollars in the world economy and help countries (and their people) prosper like never before.

As discussed, in countries without strong legal systems, property ownership is often informal. You might live on land your family has held for generations, but there’s no official paper that says it’s yours. So you can’t prove ownership. You can’t borrow against it. You can’t sell it safely. That land, in practice, is locked-up capital.

Then there is Ethereum: A trusted, global system, open to anyone with an internet connection, where ownership can be recorded immutably. Transparent, tamper-proof, and available 24/7.

A trusted organization, like a local government, an NGO, or even a private company, could set up a digital registry of property ownership using the Ethereum blockchain. They would first verify property ownership through local leaders, historical records, or even satellite images. Once verified, ownership gets recorded permanently on Ethereum. With this secure digital proof of ownership, your property suddenly becomes a powerful asset. You could now use it as collateral and finally get a loan from a bank or investor. You could safely sell it, transfer it to your children, or confidently invest money into it. This simple digital record unlocks huge economic potential, releasing “dead” capital and opening doors that have been closed for generations.

The term dead capital was first used by Peruvian Economist Hernando de Soto Polar. De Soto estimated in 2015 that 5.3 billion of 7.3 billion people globally (aka over seventy percent of the world's population) hold dead capital that is worth US$ 9.3 trillion in assets. That land or property, while valuable, can’t be leveraged or invested to create more wealth—hence “dead capital”.

All together a great example of how the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, purely because the right frameworks are not in place. Isn’t it time we change that? This also goes beyond purely economic reasons. What about passports, birth certificates, all needed to unlock more help and care for the people that need it most and who are exactly those who don’t have it. Of course, why it will be hard to change the old way of working is because there are people, governments and companies that now earn a lot of money from this (despite the harm to others). It won’t be easy, but it is worth the fight if it could help so many people.

For richer countries, there’s also an obvious selfish reason to help unlock this “dead capital.” Billions of people worldwide would become new active participants in the global economy. That means more potential customers, entrepreneurs, and investors who can buy products, start businesses, or invest in companies like Apple (who’s shares could be made easily available via Ethereum, something Blackrock is trying to achieve).

It means new markets opening up, more money flowing globally, more growth opportunities, and ultimately, more prosperity, not just for developing regions, but for wealthy nations too. It truly creates a scenario where everyone wins. So to go back to the 4 points that the country needs for strong property rights, in short how Ethereum can help with that:

1. Clear Laws → Smart Contracts: Ethereum uses code (smart contracts) to clearly and permanently define ownership. Public, provable, and accessible to everyone.

2. Trustworthy Legal System → Automatic Enforcement: Smart contracts enforce themselves instantly and transparently. No delays, no bias, no bribes—just fair and automatic execution.

3. Protection from Corruption → Decentralized Security: No single entity controls Ethereum. Nobody can secretly take or change ownership records—making corruption virtually impossible.

4. Stable Institutions → Transparent Governance: Ethereum is governed openly and evolves slowly. Changes require broad community consensus, so the rules of the blockchain won’t suddenly shift overnight. Smart contracts can’t be changed.

Bringing Property Rights to the Internet

Now let’s continue with a story you, might, have heard me tell a million times before. The summary of it is: you do NOT own ANYTHING on the internet today. You pay for access, not for ownership.

Creators who have built their whole business/life on Instagram, do not own any of it as Meta can decide to delete it all tomorrow. The e-book you bought, or the game you bought, you are basically renting them because if Amazon or Playstation don’t like that e-book or game anymore they can delete them instantly. The example I always like to give in my presentations is as followed (click here for a video):

At the moment, you can buy a game for your PS5 in two different ways; on a disc or digitally (as a download). Now let’s say I buy a game but after playing it for a few days I decide that I don’t like it as much as I hoped. If I bought the physical version, I have options. I could resell it online, resell it to a second-hand store, loan it out to a friend, gift it to my brother. Whatever it is, I can do it because I paid for the product and I own it.

Now we move to the digital world and all of a sudden all my rights just disappeared. I pay the exact same amount, for the exact same product. But after playing it and not liking it, I can’t do anything with it. It sits on my Playstation and is wasted money. I can’t resell, I can’t loan it out, I can’t even gift it to my brother.

Isn’t that bad? Why is that? Because until blockchain technology was here, there was no way to build a trustless system on the internet. I am bound to the rules of Playstation and they decide that this is ok. So I am f’ed.

Now even easier than for physical assets, a blockchain enabled internet would make the world a more honest place. I think that is very, very important considering that our lives are becoming more and more reliant on digital. The line between physical and digital is blurring more and more every day, so wouldn’t you agree we should have the same rights we have in the physical world as well? This is exactly what the, very hated word, NFT tech is meant for by the way.

But it goes beyond having ownership rights on the internet. It also will help with ideas, innovation and new companies, which will result in more growth. Just as in the physical world and as discussed in the chapter above.

My number one book to give to anyone who has even a slight curiosity about all of this is “Read Write Own” by Chris Dixon. If you found anything in this newsletter interesting, I would highly recommend reading it.

In the book he explains digital property rights using a simple analogy of a street.

Imagine you’re planning to invest your time and money into opening a shop on a particular street. Before investing, you want certainty about the street’s rules. You want to know that tomorrow there won’t suddenly be a fee for people to walk on the street, limit your customers’ access, or even shut down your store overnight. If you trust the rules won’t change randomly, you’re confident enough to build, invest, and innovate. This is what strong property rights do and why they are so important, as we discussed.

This is exactly what we need online. Right now, most digital businesses rely heavily on APIs or audiences controlled by centralized companies like X, Instagram, or Google. But as we’ve seen before (remember when Twitter suddenly cut off API access? A massive amount of startups died overnight.), this can be risky. They control the “street,” and they can change the rules anytime.

Ethereum finally allows us to create digital streets where the rules are transparent, stable, and predictable. Nobody can suddenly add a fee or lock you out. Once set, the rules stay consistent, allowing people to confidently invest, build, and grow, without fear of sudden disruption.

So we end with the same cycle in the digital world as in the physical:

• Property rights = trust.

• Trust = investment.

• Investment = growth.

• Growth = prosperity.

We also already know what the difference is between a lack or very weak set of property rights is and very strong ones, as seen in the difference between countries.

All together, the above is one of the main reasons I will forever keep fighting the fight for blockchain technology. Mainly sticking to Bitcoin and Ethereum. It will make our world a better place, a more honest place, it can help people who need it most and I think we need all of that.

Google’s old motto used to be: “Don’t be evil.” It relied on trust that the company would do the right thing.

But blockchain can give you a better one: “Can’t be evil.”

Because the rules are baked into the system. Transparent. Open. Unchangeable. You don’t have to trust that someone won’t abuse their power, they simply can’t.

Let me leave by saying that the above is not financial or investment advice and always do your own research. I do hope by reading this that you now also believe that this blockchain thing we are fighting for goes way beyond “price go up” and over expensive monkey pictures 😉.

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• For the OG’s, remember in the second edition of this newsletter we talked about a company that is trying to bring Mammoths (and other extinct animals) back from the dead? Well, they already succeeded and brought back the dire wolf! It immediately got itself a TIME Magazine cover 😉. Absolutely crazy, exciting and scary at the same time haha! For the full click here.

  

• Instead of a scooter or car, why not robot horse to take you anywhere you want? Sounds and looks crazy haha but Kawasaki announced a prototype of something just like that. See the below video for the announcement, the other footage (of someone “riding” it is CGI fyi). Looks pretty cool and heavily reminds of me Horizon Zero Dawn (great f’ing game, made in The Netherlands by the way 😉). Would you buy one?!

• The CEO of Shopify went viral because of an internal memo that he shared with his team. After he noticed it was going viral (which wasn’t the plan, because it was internal), he decided to share it himself too on X. Full memo in his below tweet. The biggest reason it went viral was because he said: “Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” - It gives us a good insight on how AI is effecting teams. I think this strategy is great for forcing people to think about AI first before they think about spending more budgets. He also felt compelled to tell his people that using AI is not a choice any more, it is a MUST. He states: “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify”. I think this is super strong, something every company should do. It might/will cause some pain, but there is no other option.

• I can’t stress the positive impact that meditation has had on my life enough. I have been meditating (almost) daily for about 4 years now and man do I love the results. The hard thing about it is though, you will only recognize the impact after months, if not years, of doing it. But oh man is it worth it! Saw the below posts and made me want to share it again, it truly is a super power ♥️.

  

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^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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