A secured land registration framework on Blockchain

Abstract

Land is an immovable and non-liquid asset having high value. The integrity and proper track of ownership/transfer records of land is a highly challenging task. As the ownership of land can constantly change over time and that too sometimes very frequently, it poses a daunting task of keeping elaborate and long ownership transfer records. The problem further escalates due to presence of fraudulent or incomplete registries which are very difficult to trace back through time. Thus ownership disputes in the system, lead to litigation running for years, leading to wastage of valuable time, energy and resource for solving these disputes. Most of the issues root from the problem of the current land registration systems being either having legacy paper document trails or from poorly kept non-transparent centralized systems. Fraudulent users may try to forge paper documents or modify electronic records to change the land ownership record. This paper proposes a secure record keeping mechanism that addresses these issues using a Blockchain based system which can create record for the physical assets into an immutable liquid Blockchain based token asset. This new block chain token asset can now be used to keep a digitally secured and selectively visible record of ownership, solving the mentioned issues. An implementation of this system has been done using Ethereum and the benchmark data shows that the transaction processing time of such a system is reasonably low thereby making it suitable for practical implementation.