Land Registry Using a Distributed Ledger

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IST-Africa 2022 Conference Proceedings
Miriam Cunningham and Paul Cunningham (Eds)
IST-Africa Institute and IIMC, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-905824-69-4
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Land Registry Using a Distributed Ledger
Nolwazi NCUBE1, Belinda MUTUNHU2, Khulekani SIBANDA3
National University of Science and Technology, Gwanda Rd, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
1Tel: +263 784258211, Email: nolwazincube@gmail.com
2Tel: +263 772775077, Email: belindamutunhu@nust.ac.zw
3Tel: +263 712544684, Email: khulekani.sibanda@nust.ac.zw
Abstract: Land registration is a system that provides landowners with land titles
secured by the government. Zimbabwe has no electronic system for keeping land
registry records. Developing a system that automates, and keeps the land registry
records immutable, is possible by creating a blockchain system that stores all the
transactions made during the process. The immutability nature of blockchain offers
plenty of security features that will protect the system from hacking and other
malpractices from intruders. It uses strong cryptographic protocols and standards to
secure the records stored in a block of data thus making it more reliable for the land
registry to transfer the land ownership from a seller to a new buyer. This paper
presents a system based on a Hyperledger Fabric distributed ledger that will record,
store real-time transactions made during the process of land registration, thus
decreasing the cases of fraud as immutable transactions are being stored in the
permissioned distributed ledger network.
Keywords: Blockchain, Hyperledger fabric, permissioned, distributed ledger, land
registry, transactions.
1. Introduction
Land Registry is a record of ownership, possession, or exclusive rights inland to provide
evidence of identification, facilitate transactions, and prevent unlawful disposal [1]. The
system of land registration starts with the status quo of the reputation of the land, which
includes the sequential steps of identification, planning, allocation, and survey of the land to
deliver documents required to resource registration and issuance of each recognized deed or
certificate of leases [2] [3]. Registration of land gives landowners a touch of protection
toward a declaration for damaging ownership of land with the aid of the use of an
unauthorized occupier, similarly to fending off the need to deliver vintage documents
whenever property changes in hand [4]. The sign-in gives a clearer image of the criminal
state of the land with the resource of the use of starting up the rights and covenants which
gain or burden to pick out in question. Registration of land identifies proof of indefeasible
ownership [5]. The registration documents are submitted to the Land Registry office.
Registration itself is performed through a group of people at the applicable Land
Registry office. Arguments in favour of land titling were recommended for plenty of years
[6]. They generally include a few perceived advantages like greater efficient use of the land
as it will increase tenure safety and get rid of disincentives to make investments in the
longer-term control and productiveness of the land [7]. Land titles allow the creation of a
land market, permitting land to be transferred from much less to greater dynamic farmers
and consolidated into large holding [3]. However, many people have become victims of
fraud. In the paper-based framework of a land dealing, lawyers can perform fraud by
forging the victim's signature. In the digital system, solicitors who certify have got right of
entry to the digital signature certificates to sign files digitally on behalf of their clients. It is
less difficult to commit fraud because the solicitor acting as a certifier isn't always required
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to falsify the victim’s signature. The solicitor can prepare the files, sign them digitally, and
submit them electronically to the land office for registration. It appears that the registration
provides greater possibilities for solicitor fraud to occur [1].
Using the blockchain database that keeps a constantly growing listing of information,
there may be no need to modify the historic records prohibitively costly, so as soon as
records are encrypted, they may be immutable, that is, they become permanent and cannot
be modified therefore providing a single version of the truth and providing assurance at the
authenticity of the recorded data [8]. The Land Registry using a Distributed ledger System
will permit digital information to be distributed on the "distributed ledger", but not copied.
The same information is held in a decentralized manner across a network of nodes, rather
than in a single location. This means that the information is less susceptible to corruption,
human interference or error. Every node on the network must accept every new addition of
a new piece of information or "block" to the chain [8] [9]. This will provide security and
trust. This system once deployed into this industry, digitizing ownership information, will
shield records, ensure transparency, security, immutability, and increased efficiency [10].
2. Objectives
1. To automate the land registration process.
2. To record land ownership information using authentic certificates.
3. To keep real-time transactions immutable.
4. To search transactions promptly.
3. Methodology
This section describes the methodology and techniques used in achieving the aim of the
project, to develop an electronic land registry system that is based on blockchain
technology. The methodologies in this project include one for researching to get the
information required to know about the land registry systems and blockchain technology, as
well as the requirements in building the system that has all the expectations, features, and
functions of an electronic land registry system. With appropriate methodologies in both
research and system development, any process of completing the project can be managed
wisely and will make a good result. Information gathered from the literature review shows
researchers are using different algorithms in land registration [11]. However, as it is an
ongoing research area, this project requires incremental implementation in smaller
functionalities which will be put together at the end for a complete system. Achievement of
objectives will be as follows:
 The system will be designed to be able to capture and assign land transactions on the
blockchain ledger using a smart contract. The transactions are recorded and stored in
decentralised storage architecture, thereby making any attempt to tamper with records
extremely difficult. This also improves trust in the system because there is no single
entity to entrust with the responsibility of handling this sensitive process, everything is
expected using a smart contract, which is incorruptible because it also resides on every
peer node on the network.
 The system should record real-time transactions - Using the Hyperledger Fabric
blockchain framework, we were able to write a smart contract that ensures that all the
records were registered. Conducting the process of registration without human
interference but only the smart contract was the goal for this objective.
 The system should perform a quick search through the records that will be kept in the
system state - The filter function will include names of owner, deed number, and area.
When the search is complete, the results will be displayed for viewing.
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4. Technology Description
A blockchain network can be public or private depending on the requirements of the user.
Public and private blockchains are both decentralized, peer-to-peer networks where each
participant maintains a replica of a shared ledger that stores digitally signed transactions.
This ledger can only be appended to, but not edited. Participants in a blockchain keep this
ledger in sync through a consensus protocol. This creates a guarantee on the immutability
of the ledger which cannot be corrupted even if there are some malicious participants on the
blockchain. Figure 1 shows a comparison among different types of blockchain.
Figure 1: Comparison Among the Three Types of Blockchain [14]
The Hyperledger fabric private blockchain will be used for this study. The Fabric
platform is also permissioned, meaning that, unlike with a public permissionless network,
the participants in the network are known to each other, rather than anonymous and
therefore fully untrusted. [14] It means that while the participants may not fully trust one
another, a network can be operated under a governance model that is built off of what trust
does exist between participants, such as a legal agreement or framework for handling
disputes. This attribute is important because it enables us to only allow participants from
the Land Registry to take part in the process of maintaining and updating the ledger of
records [15] [16]. This is significant because we do not want outside interference or
participants that will forge ownership records.
Figure 2: Participants in the Distributed Ledger Network [14]
This is a distributed ledger network, wherein every participant has their own replicated
copy of the ledger. In addition to ledger information being shared, the processes which
update the ledger are also shared. Unlike today’s systems, where a participant’s private
programs are used to update their private ledgers, a blockchain system has shared programs
to update shared ledgers [6]. Using them in a land registry can potentially provide an
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immutable registration of a record, to which future records can be compared for
authenticity. Any presumption of validity around records registered in a ledger must be
limited to authenticity, thereby improving trust and security in the process [16] [17].
5. Developments
The system is developed in separate modules, then integrated to give the final product. The
distributed ledger land registration system was modelled to make it possible to break down
the development process into tasks. During construction, separate modules were coded and
tested separately, and subsequently integrated and tested as a whole system as per the
functional requirements. Transitions into a fully operational model would be the stage to
follow, construction according to the methodology we are implementing in this project. The
tools adopted were used for Hyperledger fabric network configuration smart-contract
development, front-end development, and back-end development. The smart contract
development in Hyperledger Fabric is supported in Java, Javascript (Nodejs), and Go
programming languages. Nodejs was used in this project as it supports the skill set that the
developer already has. The smart contract describes the logic of the following operations:
 Registering ownership transactions.
 Validating transactions.
 Ensuring that there is no double registration.
 Assigning land for each transaction.
 Creating payment rates for each transaction.
 Tracking land ownership transactions.
The development of a smart contract in Hyperledger starts with the importation of the
Contract class of the Hyperledger Fabric Software Development Kit that will be extended
by our smart contract. After importing the Contract class, we then define our class which
extends that class as follows:
Figure 3: Code Snippet Showing Smart Contract LandRegistryAsset Class Extending the Contract Class
The contract for creating a land record requires the owner’s name, address, deed
number, and document type. When these details are provided, the new record is put on the
world state. To put records on the world stage, we use the Fabric Chaincode Stub interface
method putState (), which takes in the key and value pairs. The key for storing the record is
the Deed number, which will be used for accessing the record from the ledger.
Figure 4: Code Snippet for Creating a Record Implementation
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The backend of the application is the one that receives requests from the frontend,
which it then passes to the smart contract to invoke transactions. The backend server used is
the node.js express server. Express is a Node.js web application server framework, which is
specifically designed for building single-page, multipage, and hybrid web applications. The
backend server connects users to the network using the fabric-network API. It uses
gateways (organisation 1 and organisation 2) and the cryptographic identities of those peers
to connect to the fabric blockchain network. So, the admin users connect to the network
using the identities that are assigned to them by the membership service provider.
6. Results
The land registry system architecture is implemented as a peer-to-peer network system with
two organisations. The organisation acts as a gateway to the network, which the application
can use to connect to the network and interact with the smart contract. Records are stored in
a decentralised setup whereby each of the peer nodes in the network keeps the same record
of transactions. The tests were done on each of the components and the whole system by
going through the user journey from registration to checking land records and rates
payments and all the tests of the implementation were a success.
After a user with the role of commissioner has been authenticated and authorised into the
system, they will land on a dashboard that has a table showing all the people who own land
and are in the system. The user can add a new land record transaction. The table has buttons
under the action column, at the end of each table row with READ, UPDATE functionality:
Figure 5: Land Registry Dashboard with Registered Transactions
The READ functionality will enable the user to view more detail about a single record
about that piece of land owned by an individual entity, be it a company or a single human
being. The UPDATE function on the table will be used if there is a change of ownership of
land and the state of the data stored on the hyper ledger must be updated. All this
information corresponds to the records in the smart contract, thereby providing an audit trail
to the process. Therefore, this objective was achieved successfully, as shown by the results.
7. Business Benefits
The use of electronic systems for land registry by the city council has been primed to be the
predecessor of the paper-based recording system, coming in as an improvement in areas
such as security, transparency, privacy, variability, auditability, and convenience. Replacing
the traditional pen and paper system of the land registry is supposed to curb fraud while
making the process more worthy of trust by the landowner [18]. However, the land registry
electronic system has been stalling in being adopted because of many concerns raised by
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the officials, some of which include the system being vulnerable to distributed denial of
service attacks because of the centralization of servers, intelligence agencies having access
to a wide range of network traffic and enough computing power to analyse land records.
The fact that technology can be a great key for providing the integrity of the land records
and data traceability for any audit purposes, makes it very transparent. The introduction of
blockchain comes in to solve many problems and issues raised over the use of electronic
land registry systems. It is a technology that is based on a distributed, immutable,
incontrovertible public ledger. It has powerful cryptographic technology that encrypts data
entered into the blockchain peer-to-peer network, making it almost impossible to
compromise the integrity of the records [8]. Blockchain Technology brings:
 Immutability - This is defined as the quality of a record not modifiable once entered
into the system. Any proposed new block of information in the chain must have a
reference to the previous version of the block [18]. This creates an immutable chain
thereby preventing the problem of the electronic land registry system of having the
integrity of records tampered with.
 Verifiability - All nodes in the blockchain network maintain the consensus version of
the data on a block, providing third-party verifiability. The blockchain network is
decentralized, replicated, and distributed over multiple locations [20].
 Decentralisation - The blockchain network is based on a peer-to-peer network, with
all nodes acting as servers and clients [19]. This ensures a high degree of availability
by eliminating a single point of failure.
 Security - Blockchain offers plenty of security features that will protect the system
from hacking and other malpractices from intruders. It uses strong cryptographic
protocols and standards to secure the records stored in a block of data [21].
8. Conclusions
The model design and implementation were done, and the results were a success as
evidenced by the tests undertaken. All the objectives of this project were achieved
successfully, showing that this model work can be an ideal application in the Land registry
replacing the paper-based recording system also shows that this can be the security feature
in digital land registry systems that will improve the transparency and the security, so much
needed for the adoption of land registry systems take off as it should [21]. The project was
undertaken with a defined scope, and although all objectives were achieved, there is room
for improvement in this model. These areas include adding more nodes to the network. The
more nodes we have in the network validation of the transactions, the more complex and
impossible it is to subvert the system, but it also means that the transaction processing
speed is increased. There is a need to add more nodes to the network while testing the
performance of the system to find an ideal balance. Blockchain technology is very ideal for
protecting digital land registry systems because it provides immutability and security to the
transactions recorded. We have seen how the Hyperledger Fabric framework can be used to
achieve this effectively and efficiently, however, there is also room to explore other
blockchain types such as Hyperledger Sawtooth. It is an enterprise solution for building,
deploying, and running distributed ledgers. It provides an extremely modular and flexible
platform for implementing transaction-based updates to the shared states between untrusted
parties, coordinated by consensus algorithms. The goal is to protect modification of records
by preserving the integrity of transactions and improving security and transparency, and so
we need an airtight solution to help us achieve this, although the researcher recommends
doing within the confines of blockchain technology [8] [9].
The Land Registry project was targeted at using Hyperledger Fabric Distributed Ledger
private network by the city council. Nowadays, the land is not a liquidated asset. By using
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the platform, land assets can a liquidated using the cryptocurrency, which maps with the
land record created by a seller on the platform. Hence, the scope is wide and there can be
many use cases of the platform to create a model can different user volume levels while
maintaining an ideal transaction processing.
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