As mentioned previously, colored coins and non‐​fungible tokens have assumed a central issuer such as the government. However, many problems with property title start at the issuance stage: disputes that are never resolved, formal title that doesn’t match the local social contracts, and properties that have several registered owners (as in the case of Mariana Catalina Izaguirre).

Is it possible for issuance to be decentralized? Miller and Stiegler explore an alternative solution to government issuance and interpretation: rating agencies. Similarly to bond‐​rating agencies, property title agencies would provide the market with “an estimate of the likelihood that transfer of a given title will actually be honored… Simply recording each village’s track record of honoring past title transfers, and assuming that the future will be like the recent past, is a low overhead procedure that is plausibly adequate. And it places each village in an iterated game with the system as a whole, providing it an incentive to treat these titles as legitimate claims, subjecting them to the local tradition’s means of enforcement. We can think of this as a credit report, not for an individual, but for a village and its system of local law” (2004).

However, the decentralization provided by title rating agencies may make it harder to access property title information. A centralized issuer that only allows a few forms of property may be able to reduce search costs and better deliver information to third parties (e.g. potential buyers and banks). However, this may be at the expense of extinguishing new and innovative forms of property rights. As Fairfield puts it, “Choice raises information costs. It also increases satisfaction. The question is how to best balance the range of choice that increases individual satisfaction with the information costs increased by that range. This is an optimization exercise.” (Fairfield 2015, 846). Yet in much of the world, the centralized issuer may not be functioning. This may make the choice between having decentralized property title, or having no property title at all.