Transparency, fairness and efficiency of government systems are some of the areas that are prime for blockchain disruption in public governance. Writing for the WEF Global Agenda section, Matthew Van Niekerk, co-founder and CEO of blockchain-as-a-service outfit SettleMint, highlighted how blockchain adoption could improve public procurement and land registries. According to Van Niekerk, public procurement is one of the main avenues of corruption and wastage in government. As part of the report, the SettleMint CEO argued that the closed-off nature of the process encourages illicit interaction between public officials and private businesses. Van Niekerk surmised that blockchain adoption could facilitate …

An Australian senate committee has published a report calling for a blockchain-based national land registry, better clarity over laws relating to smart contracts, and continued efforts to establish international standards for distributed ledger technology. The Select Committee on Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre’s second interim report offers 23 recommendations spanning blockchain, consumer data and corporate taxation. Five recommendations deal specifically with blockchain and digital assets, including that the Council of Financial Regulators Cyber Working Group takes into account international data standards. The committee recommended National Cabinet consider supporting a blockchain-powered national land registry as a pilot project for …

The United Nations has released a blockchain-powered solution to help the Afghan government manage property ownership issues in the country’s urban areas. According to a Dec. 2 announcement, the U.N. Human Settlements Programme, or U.N.-Habitat, will present its new digital land registry solution to the Ministry of Urban Development and Land in Afghanistan in December 2020. The U.N. first launched its blockchain project for sustainable urban development in Afghanistan in 2019. Now, with its new blockchain-enabled digital land registry tool, the U.N. wants to help Afghanistan address major challenges in urban informal settlements — otherwise known as slums or shanty …

The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) is implementing three different blockchain pilot projects to test if blockchain technology is able to solve some of the problems of land titling and registries. On Oct. 28, blockchain startup ChromaWay reported that it is collaborating with IADB on a two-year project in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay on an initiative called “Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain): The Future of Land Titling and Registry.” Chromaway, which has experience in tracking land titles in countries such as Sweden, Canada, India, and Australia, will run the pilots together with Bolivian IT services company, Jalasoft, with the intention to eventually …

Why have blockchain pilots in real estate abated somewhat? Those projects bump up against the fundamental inconsistency of blockchain and existing state system, and it seems they cannot confessed to this. First, there is no such thing as the use of blockchain for real estate. There are plenty of different concepts and ideas, and as you will find below, some of them are useless. And when you consider probably the most ultimate idea — i.e., a title token — you understand that none of the existing projects could offer a complex solution to address issues with inheritance, lost private keys, …

The United Nations is working on blockchain solutions for sustainable urban development in Afghanistan, according to a report from tech news site The Sociable, published on July 2. Stephane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General reportedly told The Sociable that the United Nations Office of Communication and Information Technologies (UN-OICT) is developing blockchain solutions for land records and services transparency as part of the UN’s “City for All” initiative. The UN’s “City for All” program began in 2016 with a charter set to continue through 2020 and aims to advance 12 of Afghanistan’s cities, including the capital, Kabul. The initiative …

The World Bank has become the latest source of criticism over blockchain technology, this time urging caution over its role in land rights, Reuters reported on March 27. Speaking at the ongoing 20th Annual Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington, D.C. this week, Aanchal Anand, a Land Administration Specialist in the bank’s Global Land and Geospatial Unit, cautioned against the phenomenon informally known as “blockchain hype.” “Tech can look big and flashy, and like it can solve all our problems ... but the Big Mac burger never matches up to the one in the ad,” Reuters quoted her as …

The government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is set to complete a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a blockchain-based land registry system by summer 2019, ZDNet reported October 15. The new PoC is expected to be completed by the NSW Land Registry Services – together with Stockholm-based blockchain startup ChromaWay – by early 2019. The NSW state government is said to have given its official mandate for the Registry to shift to the new blockchain-based eConveyancing system by July. The NSW Land Registry Services maintains the system that defines the legal ownership of both public and private land …