A Blockchain Solution for Securing Real Property Transactions: A Case Study for Serbia

Abstract

The origins of digital money and blockchain technology goes back to the 1980s, but in the last decade, the blockchain technology gained large popularity in the financial sector with the appearance of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. However, recently, many other fields of application have been recognized, particularly with the development of smart contracts. Among them is the possible application of blockchain technology in the domain of land administration, mostly as a tool for transparency in the developing countries and means to fight corruption. However, developed countries also find interest in launching pilot projects to test their applicability in land administration domain for reasons such as to increase the speed and reduce costs of the real property transactions through a more secure environment. In this paper, we analyse how transactions are handled in Serbian land administration and how this process may be supported by modern ledger technologies such as blockchain. In order to analyse how blockchain could be implemented to support transactions in land information systems (LIS), it is necessary to understand cadastral processes and transactions in LIS, as well as legislative and organizational aspects of LIS. Transactions in cadastre comprise many actors and utilize both alphanumeric (descriptive or legal) data and geospatial data about property boundaries on the cadastral map. Based on the determined requirements for the blockchain-based LIS, we propose a system architecture for its implementation. Such a system keeps track of transactions in LIS in an immutable and tamper-proof manner to increase the security of the system and consequently increase the speed of transactions, efficiency, and data integrity without a significant impact on the existing laws and regulations. The system is anticipated as a permissioned public blockchain implemented on top of the Ethereum network.

Smart Contract Application for Managing Land Administration System Transactions

“…Using BCT for preserving the validity of data through resolving issues of problematic boundaries by requiring interested parties to consent to change is proposed for solving this common problem in Turkey [56]. In the case of Serbia, managing transactions of real estate on the blockchain is proposed in [57]. Authors propose using permissioned public blockchain for managing transactions and storing all relevant documents on the blockchain network, and transactions that are happening on the blockchain network can also be used as an initial source for other tasks that should be performed after transactions are reregistered, such as taxation.…”

Blockchain Smart Contract to Prevent Forgery of Degree Certificates: Artificial Intelligence Consensus Algorithm

“…Without the consensus algorithm, Blockchain nodes in P2P Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networks without servers cannot be guaranteed to have the same data. Thus, the consensus algorithm is necessary in the Blockchain environment, but the scalability and processing speed of the Blockchain are affected by the consensus algorithm [13][14][15][16][17]. Today, research and development of consensus algorithms continue to be carried out to speed up processing without affecting the scalability of the Blockchain in various areas, and new consensus algorithms continue to be released daily.…”

An Optimized Method for Information System Transactions Based on Blockchain

“…When a block b is still being propagated, another conflicting block b′ finds and it is propagated. Thus, a blockchain split will be generated [6]. Among them, block b′ is generated by nodes in the network that do not know block b.…”