Page 60 - U4SSC Blockchain for smart sustainable cities

Case 7. A land registry for Georgia

Land is one of the fundamental attributes of a In the mid-2000s, President Mikheil Saakashvili
city; however, there are serious issues with the launched a series of reforms to reduce
ownership of land across the world. In 2017, bureaucracy and increase transparency. In 2004,
nearly 70 per cent of the world’s population the National Agency of the Public Registry (NAPR)
lacked a “legally registered title to their land”, replaced the two agencies and legislative reforms
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and in 2015, “land and environmental defenders simplified the property registration process. A
were being killed at a rate of more than three a land registry database was created, including
week”. Land disputes directly affect the growth property titles and satellite photographs. This
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of smart and sustainable cities because: 84 was a step forward; however, it did not address
1. Without a defined and transparent process the lack of transparency or trust because records
for land title management, governance of could still be changed by government employees
property rights becomes a challenge and cor- and it was difficult to hold anyone accountable
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ruption could occur. for data manipulation.
2. Economic growth is stifled because land Starting in 2016, the NAPR and the Bitfury Group
cannot be used as collateral for loans or developed a blockchain-based land registry.
transactions, and it is difficult to divide large The custom-designed, private, permissioned
plots of land into smaller plots, creating blockchain is implemented on the Bitcoin
“dead capital”. blockchain. To minimize the data written to the
blockchain and to ensure privacy, full details
The Republic of Georgia has a history of poor of ownership are stored in the NAPR database
governance such that people do not trust and not on the blockchain. A distributed digital
the bureaucracy or politicians. Maintaining timestamping service allows NAPR to verify
the land registry was the task of two agencies and authorize the essential information about
– the Bureau of Technical Inventory and the the citizen and the property, establishing proof
State Department of Land Management – with of ownership. The NAPR also provides an
overlapping functions. The lack of transparency application programming interface (API) and
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bred corruption as records could be changed guidelines for stakeholders who want to use it to
without tracking. verify the data.

Figure 12: A land registry for Georgia

50 U4SSC: Blockchain for smart sustainable cities