The United Nations has released a blockchain-powered solution to help the Afghan government manage property ownership bug in the country's urban areas.

According to a December. 2 announcement, the U.North. Homo Settlements Programme, or U.North.-Habitat, will present its new digital land registry solution to the Ministry of Urban Development and State in Afghanistan in December 2020.

The U.Due north. showtime launched its blockchain project for sustainable urban development in Afghanistan in 2019.

Now, with its new blockchain-enabled digital land registry tool, the U.Northward. wants to assistance Afghanistan address major challenges in urban informal settlements — otherwise known as slums or shanty towns — like land-grabbing, inefficient use of land, and insecure land tenure in informal settlements.

Co-ordinate to the U.North., more 80% of properties in Afghan cities "are not registered with municipal or national land authorities, and occupants do non have formal buying documents."

Known as "'goLandRegistry," the new system is designed to record all property documents on a blockchain, as well equally issue occupancy certificates. This will reportedly allow property owners to independently demonstrate the authenticity of occupancy certificates using an open-source blockchain verification tool.

The tool is based on a hybrid blockchain platform run by European startup LTO Network. LTO'southward CEO Rick Schmitz said that hybrid blockchain solutions enable optimized and decentralized data commutation between stakeholders in the land registry process, removing the need for expensive Information technology-overhauls.

"By using Live Contracts, information tin be automatically distributed to different stakeholders and systems to facilitate state-registry transfers, tax automations, provision of credit, etc.," Schmitz said.

Maurizio Gazzola, chief of strategic solutions at the U.North. Function of Data and Communications Technology — a partner agency on the project — said that the U.North. wants to provide its digital land registry solution to more countries:

"The plug-and-play design of the LTO Network's blockchain and the contribution of transaction tokens for the Afghanistan project enabled the evolution of the blockchain anchoring mechanisms and the Open up Source certificate of ownership verification tool that is at present available to any land to utilize as a blockchain add-on to their existing country registry systems."