LEVERAGING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY IN SMART LAND MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Land and real estate, being highvalue assets, it is crucial to have authentic documents to identify and prove who is indeed the owner. However, the existing land registration processes and the use of paper certification in Vietnam and most other countries involve many 
vulnerabilities, leading to many land dispute cases and illegal manipulation of public land. Also, the current titling and transferring ownership procedure is quite laborious since it involves manually storing and safekeeping a large volume of registers in written form. To address this problem, alternative solutions have been proposed, including digitalizing records and storing data in a centralized database. Nonetheless, with such approaches, data transparency and its availability may not be guaranteed since data tampering
and unauthorized fraudulent change could occur in poorly maintained databases, or the system could be suspended for unexpected reasons if the servers are not appropriately backed up. In this study, a system that accelerated the land titling process and met all the required characteristics in terms of transparency and availability of data was developed. The proposed system was implemented on Ethereum blockchain, which kept all of the transactions during the land assets ownership transfer on a distributed network, thereby
decreasing the cases of fraud in the process. The study then analyzed and presented several limitations of the current implementation and finally provided some possible suggestions for future improvement.