Land and property registries on a ledger: what pilots in Georgia and Sweden showed

What a land registry really does

A land registry records who holds which rights over which piece of land: ownership, mortgages, leases, rights of way. It usually works together with a cadastre, the official map and description of land parcels. Together they let buyers, banks and courts answer basic questions: who owns this plot, where exactly are its boundaries, and what claims exist against it?

Legal systems approach this differently. In deeds registration systems, the registry keeps copies of transfer documents, and the buyer must check the chain of past deeds. In title registration systems, the state records the current owner and, in many cases, stands behind the accuracy of the register — compensating people who lose out because of an error. The legal weight of the register comes from statute, not from the database that holds it.

Where tampering and delay come from

Problems arise in several places. Records may exist only on paper and be damaged or lost. Officials may be bribed to alter an entry or to backdate a transaction. Transfers can take weeks because notaries, lawyers, banks, tax offices and the registry each check documents in turn. In some regions, many people hold land under customary or informal arrangements that were never recorded at all.

Three ways a ledger can be used

Anchoring the existing register

The simplest approach keeps the official database as it is, but regularly writes fingerprints (hashes) of records or certificates to a ledger. Anyone holding an extract can later check that it matches what was recorded at that time. This makes silent changes harder to hide, without altering who runs the registry.

Tracking a transfer workflow

A second approach records the steps of a property sale — agreement signed, mortgage approved, tax paid, title transferred — on a shared ledger used by the parties involved. The aim is to shorten the process and give everyone the same view of its status.

Making the ledger the register itself

The most ambitious idea is to make the ledger the legal record of ownership. That would require changes to property law and to the role of the registry, and we are not aware of any country that has done this for its national land register.

Why the hard problems are elsewhere

If a parcel was surveyed incorrectly, or an owner was recorded wrongly decades ago, a ledger will preserve that error just as faithfully as a correct record. Land disputes are often about exactly these historical questions, which no technology can resolve on its own.

Property law also needs the ability to correct the register: courts reverse fraudulent transfers, estates pass to heirs, and boundaries are adjusted. A system designed to make entries unchangeable must therefore allow authorised corrections that are recorded as new entries, which brings back the need for a trusted authority. In practice, spending on surveying, legal reform and well-governed registry institutions has tended to matter far more than the choice of database.

Questions to ask about a land-registry project

• Does the law recognise the ledger? If the official register remains elsewhere, the ledger is an integrity check, not a record of title. A project should say clearly which of the two it is.
• How are errors corrected? Courts and registrars must be able to fix mistakes and reverse fraud. A good design records corrections openly instead of pretending that entries never change.
• Who enters the data, and who checks it? The most important control is still the moment when a surveyor, notary or registrar records a transaction.
• What about people without formal titles? Digitising existing records can strengthen the position of those already registered while leaving informal or customary rights invisible.
• Will the records still be readable in decades? Land records must outlast most software, so data formats and verification methods need a long-term plan.

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