Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of King Saud University –

Computer and Information Sciences
journal homepage: www.sciencedirect.com

A Blockchain-based Land Title Management System for Bangladesh

Kazi Masudul Alam ⇑, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, Anisha Tasnim, Aysha Akther
DGTED Lab, Computer Science and Engineering Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna, Bangladesh

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Bangladesh is a small country with a large population. Its increasingly developing economy further makes
Received 10 March 2020 land a lucrative source of fixed capital. On the other hand, land titling is a cumbersome and lengthy pro-
Revised 20 September 2020 cess, where different government bodies process different sets of documents, and bureaucratic loopholes
Accepted 10 October 2020
encourage fraudulent activities by organized people. As a result, the current model suffers from good gov-
Available online xxxx
ernance. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based solution that offers data synchronization and
transparency, ease of access, immutable records management, a faster and cheaper solution.
Keywords:
Considering the technological knowledge and capacity of the people and the government, we introduced
Bangladesh
Land title management
a phase by phase Blockchain adoption model that starts with a public Blockchain ledger and later grad-
Transparent governance ually incorporates two levels of Hybrid Blockchain. We provide detailed smart contracts design of the
Hybrid Blockchain public Blockchain and implement a prototype system using Ethereum. Our experimental setup uses local
Smart contract and live Ethereum test networks to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system. Our analysis shows
Ethereum that the proposed model reduces the number of required travels, the overall cost of information process-
ing as well as provide easy access to vital information. As a result, Blockchain adoption can improve the
land title digitization effort of Bangladesh.
Ó 2020 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an
open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction land record management officials, law enforcement individuals,

and even inside the judiciary process (Rahman and Hossain, 2020).
Bangladesh has a robustly growing economy that is investing Various loopholes in the current procedures are exploited by
heavily towards the vision of digitization by 2021 (Bank, 2019). the land sharks in collusion with the authorities of position and
Though it has a landmass of around 1,47,570 square kilometers, power to falsify documents and later claim false ownership or
it has to manage a large population of 164 million people forceful land grabbing that finally leads to the highest number of
(Worldometer, 2020). Furthermore, the ongoing economic devel- civil disputes in the judiciary system. Many of these cases take
opment is pushing the conversion of agricultural lands towards months or years even decades to get resolved through the journey
lucrative non-agricultural lands. Land is considered as a great from local courts to the supreme court. The amount of time and
source of capital that ensures enhanced livelihood as well as money that gets wasted in the process is unbearable for the com-
investment opportunities. As a result, ownership of any land piece mon man of the country (Khan et al., 2009; Rahman and Hossain,
is heavily contested. Moreover, Bangladesh follows a century-old 2020). Though the government has started the procedure of record
model to manage land-related records that started in the era of Bri- of rights (ROR) digitization, it is still in the phase of development
tish India, later continued throughout the Pakistan period, and still and their use case is limited to archival activities only. Bangladesh
practiced even after the formation of the new republic. In this cur- is divided into 8 divisions (Bibhag), 64 districts (Zila), and each Zila
rent model, ownership of a piece of land is ensured by various is further divided into Upazilas. The government initiated an E-
types of physical documents such as Deed, Parcha, Registration, Mutation system as a pilot program on some Upazilas but it is just
Mutation, etc. that are managed by different branches of the gov- an online application system yet to be integrated with different
ernment. To make things worse, bribery is abundant among the branches that can provide real benefit to the common people of
the country (Saif and Hawlader, 2019). So, it is very important to
find a sophisticated mechanism that can be easily integrated with
the ongoing digitization efforts as well as can incorporate current
⇑ Corresponding author. land related transactions (e.g. transfer, purchase, sale, gift, mort-
E-mail addresses: kazi@cseku.ac.bd (K.M. Alam), anik1531@cseku.ac.bd gage, inheritance and partition deeds) with higher level of integrity
(J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman), anisha1513@cseku.ac.bd (A. Tasnim), aysha@cseku.ac.bd
and authenticity.
(A. Akther).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2020.10.011
1319-1578/Ó 2020 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Please cite this article as: Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al., A Blockchain-based Land Title Management System for Bangladesh, Jour-
nal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2020.10.011
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

The key problem with the current system is that information is  Considering the current pace of land records digitization, tech-
fragmented in multiple government offices that are not synchro- nological knowledge of general people, the capacity of govern-
nized very well and corrupted people can conspire to modify legal ment or necessary training of officials, required policies, and
documents. In this case, a centralized system will not be sufficient laws, we propose a phase by phase Blockchain adoption archi-
to handle various frauds related to land titling (Rabbani, 2020). tecture for Bangladesh land title management.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) such as Blockchain can pro-  In our proposed model, the first phase is a public Blockchain,
vide some important solutions to this problem. DLT is a database where regular capable people are miners but the process is gov-
model, where several nodes are connected in a peer-to-peer net- erned by the authority. The second phase is a small scale Hybrid
work, and each node stores the complete copy of the ledger. Any Blockchain where the private ledger is managed by public and
modification to the ledger is agreed upon by the majority (e.g. private trusted institutes and key details are shared with the
Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake) of the connected nodes, which public ledger. PKI is initiated in the second phase of the devel-
makes it extremely difficult to falsify by any single node or group opment. The final stage is the Full Hybrid Blockchain implemen-
of nodes (Suciu et al., 2018). tation when the government is ready to increase the scale of the
The inherent nature of a land title is attached to its earlier his- system.
tory of ownership and how it has been changed over time. This  We have designed and developed smart contracts for the public
chain of documents preserves the integrity of land ownership, Blockchain of the land titling system.
which matches the fundamental building block of Blockchain. In  We have implemented a prototype system using the Ethereum
the case of Blockchain, every newly added block maintains a chain Blockchain. Our experimental results demonstrate that the pro-
with its previous block and it can be traced back to the root node posed system reduces the number of required travels whereas
(Narayanan et al., 2016). This property can be applied to the land improves data accessibility, cost of operations, and reliability
ownership transfer scenario. On the other hand, once a new block over the current model.
is accepted by the peer-to-peer Blockchain community, it is very
difficult to change the previous blocks that again make it immuta- The rest of the paper is organized as Section 2 describes the
ble. This property of Blockchain is further useful to handle the doc- existing land management system and digitization efforts of Ban-
ument falsification possibilities by people of authority. Also, every gladesh. Section 3 presents state-of-the-art works on the related
node present in the Blockchain network maintains a complete copy topic. Section 4 describes the phase by phase Blockchain adoption
of the full ledger which ensures transparency (Ahram et al., 2017). model. Section 5 details smart contract models for the proposed
The application of other DLT technologies such as Tangle and Hash- public Blockchain. Section 6 describes the public Blockchain imple-
graph is still not proven in this domain (Suciu et al., 2018) whereas mentation process using Ethereum. Section 7 details the experi-
Blockchain has already been proposed in similar applications mental setup, results, and discuss the necessary measures.
(Thakur et al., 2019; Shang and Price, 2019). As every country Finally, in Section 8 we concluded the paper with possible future
has its own cultural and historical model of land title management, directions.
it is important to find an appropriate solution for the land ROR
maintenance of Bangladesh using modern technology such as
Blockchain. 2. Existing land title management system of Bangladesh
Blockchain is changing the technology landscape since its
inception by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 (History/of/bitcoin/- Any person who has the right to own an immovable property
wikipedia, 2018). Though early version (i.e. Blockchain 1.0) of its can be an owner of a piece of land in Bangladesh. The ownership
applications was limited to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin but is stored in the record of rights (ROR) or other public documents
further upgraded versions of Blockchain, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 have that are maintained by different bodies of the government. Land
shown tremendous opportunities in the last decade. In these new record management is a critical part of the land administration,
models, smart contract plays a pivotal role, which is a small script which includes preparation of ROR through survey, mapping of
that ensures data related policies are verified before a successful land plots, registration of deeds during rights transfer, and mainte-
mining operation (i.e. new block creation) is conducted in the nance of various types of land-related documents. Ministries of
Blockchain ledger (White paper ethereum/wiki wiki github, government that are involved in land administration and manage-
2018). As there are millions of smart contracts that are deployed ment are the Ministry of Land (MoL), Ministry of Law, Justice and
in the public Blockchain ecosystems, it is important to focus on Parliamentary Affairs (MLJPA), and Ministry of Establishment
the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts (Almadhoun et al., (MoE). ROR is prepared by the Directorate of Land Record and Sur-
2018). Also the growing adoption of 5G technologies open the pos- vey (DLRS) under MoL. Deed based right transfer is managed by
sibilities of increased IoT and AI incorporation in the Blockchain MLJPA and modification of ROR (i.e. Mutation) is conducted by
domain (Salah et al., 2019; Chaer et al., 2019). Smart contracts in Upazila administration under the jurisdiction of MoE (Ministry of
the age of 5G, IoT and AI can be further helpful to improve the land land, 2020).
titling model of Bangladesh. General people of Bangladesh are unaware of the complicated
Currently, Bangladesh uses a paper-based traditional and cum- procedures of ROR transfer that involves dozens of documents
bersome land management policy, where different departments managed by different government offices and a long time period
struggle to synchronize their documents which results in versatile to finalize the process. As a result, middlemen arrives in every
types of frauds. Also, the system takes a couple of months to com- scope of administrative and legal loopholes and apply bribery to
plete the ROR transfer. Court cases or bank lease is also difficult to falsify documents to harass common people. This in turn causes
identify while registering an ownership handover. In order to solve legal tangling for years and is the main source (around 80%) of civil
these problems, we propose to incorporate Blockchain that ensures disputes in Bangladesh (Rahman and Hossain, 2020). The complete
transparency, immutable record management, easier synchroniza- process of land titling can be divided into 4 stages: original docu-
tion, and wider accessibility as an inherent property. The main con- ment verification, deal by buyer and seller, payment completion,
tributions of this paper are the following: registration process. Fig. 1 describes the workflow of the existing
land ROR transfer process. ROR can be transferred through dona-
 Describe the existing land titling system with current progress tion or inheritance as well. Since purchasing procedure creates
and problems. more difficulty, we base our discussions on this model.
2
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 1. Existing land title management system of Bangladesh.

2.1. Buyer and seller deal tition deed) for the property. This document states the distribution
plan to the predecessors of the original owner and if anyone else
The first step is to initiate a deal between the buyer(s) and the could have any claim to the property.
seller(s). In this step, price and other relevant agreements are
made. The seller should provide original documents to the buyer 2.2.2. Bia records
for the verification process. The buyer communicates the land Land administration separates records of ownership and
office and other government offices that manage different govern- records of revenue. There are 11 administrative offices in each
ment records related to the piece of land. Upazila (sub-district). Bangladesh is divided into 64 districts
among which excluding the 3 hilly districts, 61 districts have land
2.2. Document verification registration facilities. Each Upazila is divided into small plots.
These plots are known as Mouza and are given numbers called
For the land record verification process, it requires to check var- Mouza numbers. It is also known as Jurisdiction List Number
ious government documents along with court cases to ensure fair- (Acuity, 2020). A set of important documents to be checked before
ness. The most notable documents are Bia Deed, Khatiyan records, land registration is called Bia Records. Bia Records include all the
Mutation document, Non-encumbrance certificate, etc. Among transaction history of a property. Every time a piece of land is
other important documents, buyers should collect Land tax paper, handed over to a new owner, a new Bia Record is created. A com-
NID (National Identification) of the landowner, etc. If any of these mon practice is to check records back to 25 years. But checking the
papers are determined to be illegal then there is a high probability complete history of a piece of land is the safest procedure. Any
of fraud or harassment. As a result, ideally, the process should stop piece of land is usually under government lease. So the govern-
there and further ramifications with the government should start ment keeps historical records for the property. It includes a CS
to resolve the issues. (Cadastral Survey – conducted in British period 1888–1940), a SA
(State Acquisition Survey – conducted in Pakistan period 1956–
2.2.1. Deed 1962), a correction of SA record RS (Revisional Survey – started
One of the core legal documents for ROR transfer of any land in 50 years after the CS and is more authentic), and a BS (Bangladesh
Bangladesh is the ownership document which is called the Deed. A survey/City Jarip – started in 1970-continue) (Ministry of land,
valid deed in the name of the seller should have the following 2020). CS and RS vary from property to property as they are two
properties: state on the document that it is a deed, description of methods of the same survey where CS is the older version. It is rec-
the surroundings of the property in the deed, contain valid signa- ommended to verify most of the documents to transfer land ROR.
tures of a prescribed number of witnesses and should be handed
over to the current owner. A new buyer should check the authen- 2.2.3. Mutation Khatiyan
ticity of the document with the help of a lawyer. For that buyer The replacement of the title of the previous owner with the new
needs to visit the local sub-registry office, where an original copy owner is known as mutation (i.e. ownership change) and is kept as
of the existing deed is stored. A very important issue that should Khatiyan. This document must be provided for land registration
be checked if the property has been received by the buyer as an and property transfer. Otherwise, the previous owner can claim
inheritance. In that case, there should exist Bantan Nama (i.e. Par- ownership or transfer ownership to anyone else. A mutation is
3
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

always followed by a Duplicate Carbon Rashid (DCR) which can be  Land sharks again can falsify documents with bribing officials
obtained from the AC (Assistant Commissioner) of a land office. It is and sell to land uneducated people and gain unlawful money.
a validation for up-to-date rent receipts for the ownership of the In return, two owners (lawful ROR, and new buyer with false
property. The current owner has to pay the due land tax of the documents) get into a lengthy judicial fight.
property as well.  An original landowner can make a pledge deed (Binah Dalil)
with multiple potential buyers and can receive advanced partial
2.2.4. Non encumbrance certificate payments from multiple buyers. Such cases are common in the
This certificate assures that the property is free from any legal civil court.
liabilities or monetary concerns. In many cases, people take bank  A greedy landowner can sell a land multiple times with full pay-
loans and purchase land and that becomes an asset-backed by a ment if the registration and mutation (change of ROR) are not
mortgage. So it is important to check this certificate to avoid future completed.
conflicts related to mortgages.  Sometimes after the registration is completed, a buyer doesn’t
pay the due agreed amount.
2.3. Payment  If anything goes wrong, there are only two solutions: a mutual
understanding or otherwise a police case. Any police case that
A buyer can pay the total price of the land before the registra- goes through the judicial system causes further waste of money
tion period or can sign a pledge to pay partially and complete and time (months/years).
the payment within the coming 6–12 months. By this period, the
buyer should complete the total payment and next the seller initi- 3. Related works
ates the registration procedure. If any of the parties break the
pledge then law enforcement should be placed or any dispute The Blockchain revolution started with the advent of cryptocur-
can be settled mutually as well. rency. As time passed, it is now the age of different domains of
smart contract enabled Blockchain applications. Though the world
2.4. Registration process is getting accustomed to different domains of smart contract-based
Blockchain initiatives such as finance applications, asset processing
If all the due payment is completed and the registration fee is settlement, payment processing, internet-of-things applications,
also submitted then the buyer can apply for registration at the cor- healthcare applications, media royalties, passport issues, voting
responding deed registry office by presenting the receipts of the mechanisms, supply chain management, 5G incorporation, AI
registration fee paid. A certified registration-related document based solution we are still in their early stage of adoptions
can be obtained within weeks for the new buyer’s record. The orig- (Bodkhe et al., 2020; Akram et al., 2020; Mistry et al., 2020;
inal sale deed/certificate requires a few months to be obtained. The Tanwar et al., 2019). There are very few applications other than
change of ROR ownership must be registered in the Land Revenue cryptocurrencies that are widely used by mainstream users. As a
Office. The property is recorded under the name of the new owner, technologically backward country, the Bangladesh government is
who is responsible for paying the land taxes (i.e. Khajna) from the putting efforts to digitize many of its services such as land-
day it is transferred. related ROR archiving to ensure transparency. As a result, it is
the right time to investigate the opportunities that Blockchain
2.5. Ongoing digitization efforts can bring to reduce some of the key existing problems of Bangla-
desh land title management. In this section, we study the state of
In Bangladesh, the first pilot project of digital land record man- the art practices in this field.
agement started in 2011. Since then there has been some progress In the study of Graglia and Mellon, 2018 authors report require-
but not significant enough to consider as a workable digitization ments and procedures to adopt Blockchain technology for real
effort. While scanning of archival documents such as maps, Khati- state and land registries. They describe a conceptual framework
yan, etc. are ongoing, most of the digitization is limited to online- of gradually integrating different levels of Blockchain solutions
based application submission. People can get GPS based mapping, for land registries. The Republic of Georgia started land titling in
apply for E-Mutation or RS Khatiyan paper, can pay land tax online, 2016 using phase by phase Blockchain implementation to reduce
and also can apply for compensation claims against their land corruption and mismanagement for their land ownership reg-
acquisition in some places (bdnews24.com, 2020). istries. With the success of the pilot project, a more integrated sys-
tem was initiated in 2017. As of 2018, a total of 1.5 million land
2.6. Problems of the existing system titles were published on the Blockchain that ensures the security
and immutability of the data (Shang and Price, 2019). Their system
The current land titling system is a lengthy procedure that takes supports land purchases, registration, and mortgage features. The
many months to complete and involves many departments that overall time required to handle land titling operation is greatly
manage an important piece of document. As a result, there is no reduced according to their reporting. In Vora et al., 2018 authors
centralized view of a piece of land. On the other hand, most of present a electronic health record storage model using Blockchain
the population is not aware of the land titling related steps and for Healthcare 4.0 solution. They intend to preserve the privacy of
can easily forget to collect an important piece of document. Such the patients as well as provide easier access to required data using
a system empowers opportunists, frauds, and middlemen to mis- this model.
use bureaucratic loopholes with the help of government officials. Sweden started experimenting with Blockchain-based land reg-
Here we list some critical issues: istration in 2017 to streamline their existing system. Their main
motivation was to reduce the required number of physical docu-
 Sometimes powerful land sharks create false documents with ments, necessary steps, and overall expense. Though their experi-
the help of middlemen, government officials and forcefully grab ment demonstrated impressive result it has to go through
the control of a piece of land. It takes the rightful owner a very various bargaining agencies to be practically implemented
long time (sometimes years) to retain the ROR through the judi- (Future, 2018). Andhra Pradesh a state of India employed a few
cial process. startups to pilot land registry systems using Blockchain to ensure
transparency in governance. They had secured 100,000 land
4
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

records using this procedure on a test basis. This state is a popular spending, lengthy and weak bureaucracy, familiarity of public
destination for other FinTech related initiatives such as Blockchain- key infrastructure, necessary policies and laws from government,
based vehicle registration (Haridas, 2018). Subsequently, the Uni- etc. Though the government has been working on digital land man-
ted Arab Emirates (UAE) and Dubai have taken the initiative to agement system for a decade, it is evident from the current pro-
become the world leader in adopting Blockchain technology gress that it will take a very long time to incorporate further new
through the ‘‘UAE Blockchain Strategy 2021”. In their ongoing pro- technologies such as Blockchain. Hence, we propose a phase by
jects, they are working on different sectors such as energy and phase incremental adoption of Blockchain technology in the land
water, transport and logistics, economic development, tourism, title management process (Fig. 2). In the first phase, we introduce
safety and justice, municipality and land, health, social service, Public Blockchain with simpler and easier GUI for mobile devices.
smart districts (UAE government launches blockchain strategy, Fortunately, Bangladesh has over 160 million mobile subscribers
2021). and over 103 million internet subscribers (Commission, 2020).
Thakur et al., 2019 conducted a comprehensive study about Later a smaller footprint of the Hybrid Blockchain will be intro-
existing land records management system of India, how it can adopt duced that will eventually materialize to the Full Hybrid Block-
Blockchain technology to improve the current system and possible chain overtime. The following sections provide details on their
questions that need to be addressed to move in that direction. They design procedure.
provide a model of Blockchain-based land titling system for India
but fall short of describing the smart contract scenarios, public key 4.1. Phase 1: public blockchain
infrastructure (PKI) and type of architecture (i.e. public, private,
hybrid) to be adopted to implement that. As recommended by the The first obstacle in the adoption of Blockchain technology for
authors of Graglia and Mellon, 2018, it is not practical to move an land title management in Bangladesh is the digital illiteracy of
old model to Blockchain without laying out an incremental policy the mass people. Since people are well versed with mobile devices
for real-life adoption. In Mukne et al., 2019 authors present another and the internet these days, it is a wiser move to incorporate sim-
land title management system for India using permissioned Block- ple mobile internet based UI to create timestamp blocks of regular
chain such as Hyperledger Fabric and store documents using Inter ROR handovers in the public ledger. The buyer and seller will be
Planetary File System (IPFS). The authors mention that the biggest identified using their national identification number (NID) or birth
challenge is to move existing land records to the Blockchain system. certificate number (BCN) and the land will be identified using divi-
In Hasan and Salah, 2018, authors present an Ethereum based digital sion, district, thana, JL No, Plot No, Khatiyan No, etc. The related
asset (e.g. file, book, image, video, or music) exchange system with a hash will be generated and stored in the public ledger for regular
proof-of-delivery mechanism using a viable PKI model. In this paper, land ROR operations initiated by the government. This public led-
the authors present implementation details and algorithm models ger is a timestamp manager of ongoing or previous ROR handover
to reproduce the proposed system. Table 1 compares closely related activities. We know that a significant amount of land is unregis-
land title management systems that are described from an academic tered and handed over without any due procedure (Rahman and
or government perspective. Hossain, 2020). Such ROR handover creates judicial burden
Land management of Bangladesh follows a complex procedure overtime.
that involves different departments, where each department han- People voluntarily participate in this public ledger transaction,
dles some important parts of the required documents. Again any which will be enforced by government officials. Any regular regis-
dispute or mortgage-related issues need to be checked through tration must be logged with due identifiers using a small fee with
court or financial institutions. As there is no faster communication the presence of land office officials. Similarly, ongoing disputed
channel among different government or private entities, land une- cases or loaned/leased land will also be added to the public ledger
ducated people get scammed by middlemen and land sharks and by the relevant government or private institutes. It is expected
very often get tangled into the lengthy judicial process. We pro- unregistered lands will also be logged in the public ledger as the
pose a hybrid Blockchain-based land titling system to solve this benefit of having such a simpler application outweighs the mere
information availability and transparency problem. The introduc- fee. Only government officials or notary registers are allowed to
tion of third-party PKI will ensure that certified parties are write in this public ledger to curb fraud entries. The important
involved in deal-making in the presence of an arbitrator. As blocks issue in this model is that regular common people are with limited
are immutable, history blocks are chained together, and each node computing capabilities, hence mining the public ledger can be an
of the peer-to-peer network keeps a full copy of the entire blocks, issue. Since land is limited and the number of transactions is fur-
transparency or availability of information is inherent. Since land is ther limited, so the size of the public ledger can be managed by a
limited, title handover is lower in number as well as few critical willing group of public. Also, the person who acts as a public miner
identifier information is sufficient enough to represent land or will be benefited from the transaction fee disbursed by the deal
related parties, interested public nodes can store the public ledger handshaking and searching operations. In the public Blockchain,
for a share of incentives. Later, government-approved private or new buyers can easily check the history of a particular land and
public institutes will work as heavy-duty miners of the private led- its current status using a small fee. Before any land ROR is officially
ger of the proposed system. It will take some time to introduce a getting a new title owner, the land officer will check whether a rel-
Full Hybrid solution, hence we introduce a three-phase Blockchain evant public block was created on the Blockchain. This is to ensure
adoption plan. We provide a detailed design of the public Block- that the parties involved in the transaction get enough motivation
chain along with required smart contracts and implemented the to log into the public ledger. Since the digitization is a slow pro-
system using the Ethereum. Our experiments demonstrate obvious cess, it is important to initiate public ledger logging for future
improvement over the current manual land titling process. incorporation of second phase operation. Any startup approved
by the government or a government body such as A2I can take
the initiative to build this public Blockchain.
4. Proposed Blockchain-based land titling system architecture
4.2. Phase 2: hybrid blockchain
The key obstacles to incorporate Blockchain technology in Ban-
gladesh are inadequate digital literacy and government funding, The first phase introduces people with Blockchain technology
proper training of the officials, transparent government budget and its benefits. It encourages the government to incorporate
5
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Table 1
Comparison of Blockchain-based land title proposals

Shang et al. (2019) Thakur et al., 2019 Mukne et al., 2019 Proposed System
Country Georgia India India Bangladesh
Challenge Corruption control Transparent Digitized Archive digitization ongoing
ownership
Digitization Level Land database available Land database Land database available Digitization is sloth
available
Proposed model Incremental two phase Single phase Single phase Incremental three phase
Blockchain Public Public or private Permissioned Blockchain Phase one public, next two phases
Architecture hybrid
PKI N/A Certificate authority OAuth Multi-party
IPFS N/A N/A Enabled Enabled
Project Bitcoin as a layer Conceptual study Hyperledger Fabric Ethereum as a layer at public phase
implementation prototype
Government Initiated Assigned startup Academic Academic Academic
Experimental Result Phase one successful now moves to phase N/A Prototype Compared with benchmark
two

Fig. 2. Proposed incremental Blockchain adoption model for land title management of Bangladesh.

advanced technology into its land digitization process. As bureau- trusted communication channel to agree or disagree on a potential
cracy is difficult to move and technology is high paced, the first deal. This multi-party PKI will ensure that the officer responsible
phase prepares people and government for second phase Hybrid for the deal-making is also included in the transaction procedure.
Blockchain and later the ultimate solution that is Full Hybrid It will help to audit transactions if required. Fig. 4.
Blockchain-based land title management. In our model, we pro- Trusted public or private organizations will work as the key
pose PKI based trusted communication among involved parties: miners in the second phase. Permissioned nodes of the private led-
buyer, seller, and land office in the second phase of hybrid Block- ger will have the high-end capacity to complete the mining opera-
chain following (Hasan and Salah, 2018; Hasan and Salah, 2018). tion. Whereas, there will be some trusted monitors such as public
As the digitization effort of the land record system is ongoing from universities, courts, post offices, banks to provide important key
the government side, at this phase slowly some public offices and information passage to the public ledger of the mass miners. The
private offices will join the Blockchain mining effort. Private Block- fee that is collected by the government will be shared with the
chain ledger will be introduced on a small scale that will gradually trusted nodes participating in the private ledger as well as with
incorporate the available history data of the public Blockchain. This the public miners. The advantage of this model is that the private
is like a digital survey from the government, where PKI will be Blockchain will ensure that more data related to any land such as
incorporated. People have to contact Certificate Authority (CA) to a digital map, digital Khatiyan, deed, Parcha, mutation documents,
collect individual public–private keys (BCC, 2020). Since mass peo- etc. can be linked to the mined block or modified later when more
ple will be educated on the benefits of new technology and expe- documents will be gradually digitized by ongoing government
rienced some benefits already, it will be easier for the efforts. This private ledger is more of an official record of the gov-
government to educate people about the importance of PKI. In ernment similar to the status of RS, SA, etc. surveys. At this phase,
Fig. 3 we describe how buyers, sellers, and land office will use a documents so far digitized will be accessible through the API

6
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 3. Off chain communication exchange protocol among buyer, seller and arbitrator land officials.

Fig. 4. Full Hybrid Blockchain (Phase three) architecture of land titling system for Bangladesh.

7
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

provided by the government to the different branches of the gov- certain map. Similarly, Khatiyan detail contains records of rights
ernment or private institutes if they require any piece of digital of a plot. Khatiyan contains the percentage of land any owner
evidence. But, at this stage, the documents are not stored in IPFS. owns. So, we can query the smart contract to find a certain Khati-
As key information is available in the public ledger, mass people yan and see all related details. In the public Blockchain miners are
can easily access more trusted land record data with some little common people. As a result, it is important to reduce the required
fees. This facility will reduce data checking requests in the union smart contract space. A land plot can be uniquely identified using
land offices. the hash value of division, district, Mouza number (i.e. JL no), and
plot number. Similarly, Khatiyan information can be represented as
4.3. Phase 3: full hybrid blockchain the combination of the hash of the Khatiyan number and the hash
of plot information. When a smart contract is deployed into the
From phase one people and government get to learn about the Blockchain, its storage space is almost empty. After the first
benefits of adopting Blockchain technology in land deals. On the deployment, the administrator should add user and plot informa-
other hand, phase two ensures the government takes the right step tion into the Blockchain. Later Khatiyan information will be backed
towards the institutional adoption of Hybrid Blockchain. From by this fundamental information to reflect the ownership.
these learning experiences, it is expected that the mass people,
government employees, and the government infrastructure will 5.2. User account creation
be capable enough to handle phase three Full Hybrid Blockchain.
In this phase, more public and private institutes with high comput- In order to create a user account, a user has to go to the land
ing capacities get involved in the private ledger mining operation office or notary service provider with NID (National Identifica-
to share a part of the fee collected by the government. Private tion)/Birth Identification card and other required documents. Once
Blockchain ensures that trusted nodes can modify the blocks when verification is completed, a new user will be created in the Block-
full digitization of the current documents of the government is chain. The account contains the information of the creator as well
completed. In this final phase of Blockchain, digitized documents to enforce audit possibilities. A user can update his/her password
will be stored in the distributed file system such as IPFS (Benet, when required (Fig. 5). Since the account is associated with an
2014; Akther et al., 2007). IPFS is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system ID, only one account is possible for each user. Once an account is
where any file if stored receives a unique hash key and the data mined, a user receives a wallet that stands empty at the beginning.
blocks are distributed in the file system. The distributed hash table But he/she can buy Blockchain currency from the land office to
is organized as a Merkel Tree DAG. This will ensure that untrusted conduct operations in the system.
nodes can not alter a digitized file from the central place of access.
The public or private organizations participating in storing the IPFS 5.3. New land records mining in public Blockchain
documents will get a share of the fee that is received by the gov-
ernment every time such a document is requested by any user. A legitimate owner can request the land office to record a land
These users can be new potential buyers, the current owners, or against his/her name but he/she needs to provide required docu-
others who are searching for information about a particular piece ments. Later a land official will verify the documents and will
of land. As a result, data lookup service will be available day and assign ownership against the user account using his/her official
night except for the registration system. With this model, the gov- account. This extra information will enable auditing in the future
ernment can easily find unregistered lands and can also reduce the if required. A land that contains an owner is called Khatiyan. In this
undervaluation of land and TAX loopholes. The Full Hybrid Block- case, at first, plot information is added to the Blockchain which is
chain ensures more transparent governance for the land titling later attached to its legal owner participating in the public
process. Blockchain.

5.3.1. Plot (Dag) mining

5. Public Blockchain of proposed land titling system In order to mine a new plot in the Blockchain, the first step is to
take the required plot details (Fig. 6) and calculate the hash. If the
Public Blockchain in the first phase only works as a timestamp hash exists in the current system then the transaction will abort.
logger of ongoing land handovers, current ownership, dispute, or Otherwise, it will follow through the mining steps and will com-
financing events. In our proposed system, every user should open plete a valid transaction.
an account in the central system in the first place. A user can be
an owner/potential owner of the land, designated land official,
judicial officials, finance officials, and notary registers. Whenever
a new block is created in the public Blockchain, it stores related
NIDs of the parties such as buyer, seller, and arbitrator. Any person
can check a particular land’s details and also monitor operations
related to his/her land using a small fee, which will be shared
between the miners and system providers. The following sections
describe different segments of the system in detail.

5.1. Data structure of smart contract

In the first phase, a smart contract contains user detail, plot

detail, and Khatiyan detail in the data structure. User detail con-
tains all the basic user information such as full name, parents
name, address, date of birth, national identifier (NID) or birth cer-
tificate number, etc. Plot detail contains the address of land titles
such as division, district, Upazila, Mouza number, plot number,
etc. Plot number is a unique identifier of a piece of land under a Fig. 5. User account mining procedure.

8
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 6. Plot (Dag) mining in the public Blockchain.

5.3.2. Khatiyan mining

Record of rights of the land i.e. Khatiyan should also be mined in
the Blockchain. There are two types of Khatiyans: new Khatiyan
and mutated Khatiyan. In order to mine a new Khatiyan, the pro-
posed system requires an existing Khatiyan number, plot hash, list
of owners, percentage of each owner in new Khatiyan, etc. From
Fig. 7, we see that the system first calculates a new Khatiyan hash
using current Khatiyan number and plot hash. Later it verifies the
plot hash and the users. If the users and plot exist in the system Fig. 8. Proposed land purchase and registration model.
then Khatiyan hash is checked. If it doesn’t exist in the system then
a new transaction occurs for new Khatiyan generation and after the
mining process is completed new Khatiyan is added to the Block- terms and conditions in real life and should settle for a price. If
chain that tracks back to the older Khatiyan information. the buyer can pay the total amount and registration fee at the reg-
istration time then the process will continue. Otherwise, they set a
pledge (Bayna Dolil) for partial payment and set a date to complete
5.4. Land purchasing and registration process
the pending balance. They should communicate with the land
office after setting the price. The land office verifies the documents
Fig. 8 shows the smart contract to be used for the land purchas-
related to the property. If the seller has the legal ownership, land
ing process. The Buyer and the seller must agree to each other’s
office logs into their account and creates an agreement with the
pledge and rest of the money (convert automatically to land cur-
rency) with two different dates since the buyer can’t complete a
full transaction at a time. If he/she can pay the total amount at a
time then pledge is set to zero and the rest of the amount will be
set to the price amount with the date. The seller has to agree to
the pledge through his/her account. When he agrees to the pledge,
the property’s sellAble field will be set to False and it can’t be sold
while this agreement is alive. If the buyer accepts the pledge, he/
she has to pay the amount within the fixed date. To pay for this
money, he/she has to go to the land office and buy the land cur-
rency. When this currency is paid to the seller, the seller can’t cash
that until the total price of the land is paid. This currency is kept
secured in Government Land Purchasing Account against the agree-
ment which is the 3rd wallet account. If the buyer failed to pay
the pledge money during the given time frame, the sellAble field
of the land will be set to True and the agreement will be void.
When the buyer completes the pledge, a new contract is created
with the rest of the money and a new date, and the registration
process restarts. Later ownership of the land is handed over with
the new agreement. Otherwise, pledge money will be redeposited
to the buyer’s account and buyable property will be reset to True.

5.5. Record of rights (ROR) transfer

ROR means a piece of Khatiyan information already exists in the

Fig. 7. Mining process of new Khatiyan in the proposed system. system mapped with existing owners. ROR transfer can occur in
9
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

language to write Ethereum code,1 Ganache-cli Ganache-cli, 2020 as

a local test network, Remix (Remix, 2020) as an online IDE that exe-
cutes solidity code, HTML and CSS for the web user interface, web3.js
as the javascript library to interact with remote Ethereum node
using HTTP or IPC connection and Metamask (Metamask, 2020) to
interact with Blockchain from a browser.

6.1. Smart contract development

Fig. 10 represents the class diagram of the smart contract

objects (User, Khatiyan, Plot, Wallet) that are implemented in the
Ethereum platform. User object contains personal information,
address, and NID. This class supports some interfaces to retrieve
specific user’s details, currently owned lands, and whether a user
exists or not. The mining event of User class is new user creation
in the Blockchain. The Plot class contains identifier details such
as division, district, thana, JL no, plot no, etc. and supports func-
tions to check plot existence, finding plot by ID or hash. The mining
event of this class is the creation of a new plot using the hash value.
Similarly Khatiyan class contains identification details, plot hash,
several ownership items, etc. Public functions supported by this
class are related to Khatiyan existence, retrieval of Khatiyan details
using ID or hash value. The mining event supported by this class is
related to Khatiyan creation in the Blockchain. On the other hand,
Wallet class contains user information and validates ownership.
The mining event is related to Blockchain currency payment for
various land titling related operations. Similarly, Khatiyan contains
required identifier information, multiple ownership support, own-
Fig. 9. Khatiyan mutation mining in the public Blockchain.
ership handover mechanism. On the other hand, a Plot object con-
tains location and identifier information. Every Wallet object is tied
to a User of the Blockchain.
Relation of objects in Solidity is maintained using the mapping
the cases: when a seller is selling the land to new potential buyers,
of structures. Mapping in Solidity is a key-value pair where every
when someone gifts the immovable property to a new owner and
structure has a unique field as key and another structure as a value
when land is inherited according to law. This process of ownership
in the respective mapping. Whenever we need a unique field with
transfer is handled by Registry Process and such a Khatiyan is called
combined values, we calculate a hash of those combined fields
Mutated Khatiyan.
using Keccak256 (Keccak256, 2020) hash function and used as
When a user decides to sell land to other users or need to trans-
the key. In order to manage storage space, string/text data type
fer ownership, there is a need to register new ROR for the new
can be represented as bytes32 data type for mining. In that case,
owners. To log this new type of Khatiyan into the Blockchain, des-
retrieved bytes32 type data from Blockchain is converted to string
ignated land officials first check for the previous Khatiyan hash
type for user readability. Any data-heavy write operation in the
along with the other data that are given for new Khatiyan entry
Blockchain requires a lot of gas (a unit that measures the amount
(Fig. 9). If the looked-up Khatiyan already exists then only ROR
of computation effort) and sometimes it can give gas limit error
transfer will start.
and fails to pass the mining process. So, we used a minimal set
of data that is representative enough for land or owner.
5.6. Searching records

As all the data is recorded in the public Blockchain, it can be 6.2. System functionality
easily accessible through the right interfaces. But searching for
thousands of blocks will take a long time. For this reason, in the Our prototype implementation centers around five key func-
public Blockchain, we only store required useful information that tionalities: user creation, plot creation, Khatiyan creation, land reg-
can verify the current status of a piece of land. In order to search istration process, and Khatiyan mutation (ROR transfer). At first, an
a Khatiyan, a user needs to provide necessary required details that administrator adds users and plots using the prototype system.
will be translated to the unique Khatiyan hash and all the historical Later the system admin can create a new Khatiyan using Khatiyan
data about the land will be available for a searching user with a ID, plot hash, and user id along with their percentage of ownership
small amount of fee. Similarly, we can get user and plot details of a Khatiyan. A Khatiyan block stores the information about the
from the Blockchain with the necessary privacy. land and its owner. In order to use Solidity easily, we developed
a hash calculator to calculate the plot hash from input details.
6. Prototype implementation of the public Blockchain Using this hash value an admin can retrieve Khatiyan hash. Khati-
yan hash is used to search details of a specific piece of land in our
Ethereum (Ethereum, 2020) is a decentralized and open-source public Blockchain implementation. Relevant ownership informa-
distributed computing platform that allows creating smart con- tion is also revealed from the Khatiyan details.
tracts and is very popular for the third party distributed applica- As mentioned earlier byte32 based text data storing reduces
tion development. For our public Blockchain prototype storage and gas requirements. Initially, the system stores no Khati-
development, we have used Ethereum to deploy land title smart
contracts. We also used Solidity (Solidity, 2020) that is a scripting 1
Prototype system, https://github.com/dgted/landblockchain.

10
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 10. Class diagram of the smart contract developed for Phase one Public Blockchain.

Fig. 11. Sequence diagram of Khatiyan Mutation action using the Public Blockchain model.

yan. As a result, we have to start with plot information and user entries. A new owner is assigned through the GUI of Fig. 13. Inter-
information to construct a Khatiyan entry. Fig. 12 shows GUI to nal data structure appears like the mapping of Table 2. Fig. 11
create initial Khatiyan entry for multiple owners along with their shows a detailed sequence diagram of a Khatiyan related operation
percentage of ownership. Once there are Khatiyan records avail- using our prototype system.
able for purchasing, a user can sell/donate respective property to We have developed a JavaScript-based hash calculator that is
other users of the system. Such operation will create new Khatiyan equivalent to Solidity’s Keccak256 hash function. A user of the sys-

11
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 13. Khatiyan mutation user interface.

Fig. 12. Storing Initial Khatiyan for Owners.

ing fee. Computational power is also required to run the smart con-
tem can calculate plot and Khatiyan hash using this tool if he/she
tract. Both of our experimental results are presented in Table 3.
has required data to search entries in the Blockchain. A user can
Since one of our goals is to make the proposed solution simpler
search for Khatiyan information by providing Khatiyan hash on
and affordable, we use a less costly approach to store text values.
the search page (Fig. 14). From the search result, one can see the
Instead of using string type, we use the bytes32 representation of
details of the users and the plot of that Khatiyan by clicking on
that data which is much cheaper to store in the Blockchain. In
users’ NID and plot hash respectively.
Table II, four different transactions are given along with their gas
usage and estimated cost in USD. During our experiments, 100
7. Experimental results and discussion gas used to cost about 0.00004 USD, where 1 USD is approximately
around 80 BDT. Gas is converted to Gwei, then to ETH, then to USD,
In this paper, we propose a phase by phase Blockchain adoption and finally to BDT. So, the change of ETH value varies the cost of
model for land titling problem of Bangladesh. Currently, Bangla- operations. Gas usage can be updated depending on how much
desh uses a paper-based traditional and cumbersome land man- data are supplied by a little margin in cost. We present the average
agement policy, where different departments struggle to costs of our operations using our prototype. It evidently provides a
synchronize their works resulting in versatile kinds of fraud. cheaper solution with a high level of transparency, synchroniza-
Frauds lead to judicial litigation that takes months and years to set- tion, and accessibility (Table 4). Required time for each operation
tle, which is the prime cause of civil cases in the country. In order is merely a few minutes which is negligible in terms of comparison
to solve this transparency, synchronization, and accessibility prob- with current requirements of many times of travel and months to
lems, we choose a phase by phase adoption of a Hybrid Blockchain- complete the registration and mutation process (Saif and
based solution. We have implemented a prototype model of the Hawlader, 2019).
phase one public Blockchain using Ethereum. For the deployment
of our smart contracts, we have used two networks: Local Test Net-
work and Ropsten Live Test Network of Ethereum. We have con- 7.1. Discussions
ducted various types of tests on these test networks.
In our experimental setup, we have handled multiple owner- The key advantage of using Blockchain for land title manage-
ship scenarios for a single piece of land. Every write operation is ment is that data is immutable, can be traced back in history that
a transaction in the smart contract and eventually in the Block- resembles the land records matching of Bangladesh. As a result,
chain. Each transaction is packed into a block, and stored in the fraud actors are not able to tamper any of the histories. Also, sim-
Blockchain. All of our write operations are safely guarded by thou- plified access of the public Blockchain using mobile-based GUI
sands of nodes running the actual Ethereum Blockchain. For the ensures easier accessibility for people who are land illiterate. The
local test network, we use Ganache CLI which provides ten dummy number of required travels, required time to complete ROR han-
Ethereum account with 100 ether per account. Deployment of dover, and the cost of searching or other Blockchain operations is
smart contracts is done using Metamask for the local tests. We very negligible compared to the existing scenario of the country.
set a gas limit for Ganache CLI 1000000000. During the initiation In our prototype development of the first phase of public Block-
of Ganache CLI, there are ten accounts, ten private keys, and a lis- chain our experimental setup demonstrates the efficacy of the pro-
tening port. In this case default port is set to 8545 and Truffle is posed model.
directed to write in this port in order to work with Ganache. Once But, in order to deploy a real-life setup, the government needs
we compile or deploy the smart contracts or any transaction to play the main role. As we do not represent any government
occurs, history is visible in the Ganache terminal window. We used entity and this research work is an academic study, it is in the
the Ropsten test network for live Ethereum tests that are managed hands of the government to further experiment with the next
by a large number of volunteers. We deployed the Remix code in phases of the proposed system. We also need to consider scenarios
Ropsten via Metamask. Here Blockchain operation costs some min- such as multiple land titles in a single Khatiyan, Khas land, or lease
12
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

Table 2
Khatiyan mutation database structure.

cated, and counseled about the new lifestyle of managing their

sacred lands with digital records. It is also important that the gov-
ernment finds a better and useful way to securely record and man-
age the PKI as well.

8. Conclusion and future works

Land title management is a cumbersome and lengthy process in

Bangladesh that lacks synchronization among different govern-
ment departments. Land sharks, middlemen, and corrupt officials
take this opportunity to create falsified documents to commit var-
Fig. 14. Khatiyan Lookup Interface.
ious land-related crimes. These create burdens on the judicial sys-
tem of the country with most of the civil cases. In this paper, we
propose a Hybrid Blockchain-based solution that provides syn-
land management using the model. In our experimental setup, chronization among stakeholders, ensures transparency of data,
Ethereum Blockchain took around 1.5 GB storage space, which enables ease of access and manages immutable transaction
would eventually grow larger for real-life public Blockchain adop- records. Considering the immature technological status of the
tion by common people. So not every person can be a public Block-
chain miner. Also in our proposed model, larger data blocks will be Table 4
handled by the private ledger part of the Hybrid Blockchain. Usu- Comparison of proposed system with available benchmark data.
ally, a manual land survey takes 20–25 years to complete. As a
Current Land Mutation Saif and Public Blockchain based
result, the adoption of public Blockchain is a good move in the right Hawlader, 2019 Mutation
direction which will be helpful for the government’s current digiti-
Average 39 days 1–2 visits + 10–20 min
zation effort. It should be noted that the government also needs to Time online operation
devise various policies and laws, consider creating land-related Average 1270 BDT Online operation around 20
Blockchain currency. From the experiments, we see that the Gas Cost BDT + Travel expense
price varies with ETH value which will not be acceptable for the Average 4 Visits 1–2 maximum visits to
Visit verify documents
people. Furthermore, common people should be informed, edu-

Table 3
Cost of Developed Smart Contract Transactions.

Data Type Test Network Avg. cost per Network (Gas) Final Avg. Cost (Gas) Average Cost (BDT)
Contract Deployment Local Test Network 3126421 3084664 116.46
Ropsten Test Network 3042907
Adding new user operation Local Test Network 212470 215650 8.14
Ropsten Test Network 218830
Adding new plot operation Local Test Network 168362 160539 6.06
Ropsten Test Network 152715
Initial Khatiyan entry operation Local Test Network 415996 442408 16.70
Ropsten Test Network 468819
Khatiyan mutation operation Local Test Network 490781 499334 18.85
Ropsten Test Network 507886

13
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

government and general people, we propose a three-stage Block- Hasan, H.R., Salah, K., 2018. Blockchain-based solution for proof of delivery of
physical assets. In: International Conference on Blockchain, Springer, pp. 139–
chain adoption model that starts with public Blockchain and finally
152.
forms into the large scale Full Hybrid Blockchain. We provide a History/of/bitcoin/-wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History/_of/_bitcoin/,
detailed design of smart contracts for the public Blockchain and (Accessed on 07/27/2018).
implemented a prototype system using the Ethereum Blockchain Keccak256, Keccak-256 hash function, https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/
keccak_256.html, (Accessed on 06/24/2020).
testing network. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the Khan, S., Toaha, M., Awal, M.A., 2009]. Automated digital archive for land
proposed solution is cheaper, faster as well as user friendly for both registration and records. The International Technology Management Review 2
land management authority and common users. It is important to (1), 50–65.
Metamask, A crypto wallet & gateway to blockchain apps, https://metamask.io/,
note that this research is an academic endeavor and does not relate (Accessed on 06/24/2020).
to any government bodies. Our observations show that the govern- Ministry of land, peoples republic of bangladesh, https://minland.gov.bd/
ment has to introduce new policies and laws about Blockchain, site/page/fa7fb6c3-4937-4474-b9b2-179b357d0cfb/Land-Administration-
Manual, (Accessed on 01/11/2020).
public key infrastructure management bodies, improve capacity, Mistry, I., Tanwar, S., Tyagi, S., Kumar, N., 2020]. Blockchain for 5g-enabled iot for
train officials, and educate general people to successfully incorpo- industrial automation: A systematic review, solutions, and challenges.
rate this high-tech solution. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 135. 106382.
Mukne, H., Pai, P., Raut, S., Ambawade, D., 2019. Land record management using
Possible future work can be Hybrid Blockchain implementation hyperledger fabric and ipfs. In: 2019 10th International Conference on
and the introduction of land-related currency. Security attacks Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT). IEEE, pp.
simulation and possible deterrence can be another future work 1–8.
Narayanan, A., Bonneau, J., Felten, E., Miller, A., Goldfeder, S., 2016]. Bitcoin and
on the system. An empirical study of a pilot project can be very
Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton
insightful. Another important work would be smart contract secu- University Press.
rity, vulnerability analysis, and proper PKI management. Rabbani, M., Digitisation of land administration, https://www.thedailystar.net/
opinion/perspective/news/digitisation-land-administration-1832794,
(Accessed on 04/21/2020).
Declaration of Competing Interest Rahman, A., Hossain, R., 2020]. The uncomfortable truth about land disputes in
bangladesh: Insights from a household survey. Land Use Policy 95. 104557.
Remix, Ethereum ide, https://remix.ethereum.org/, (Accessed on 06/24/2020).
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan- Saif, A.NM., Hawlader, M.S., 2019. Land e-mutation system in bangladesh: An
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to exploratory study of a2i (access to information) program. In: International
influence the work reported in this paper. Conference on Business, Education, Innovation & Social Sciences (eISBN: 978-
967-16859-3-8). ICBEISS, pp. 154–162.
Salah, K., Rehman, M.H.U., Nizamuddin, N., Al-Fuqaha, A., 2019. Blockchain for ai:
Review and open research challenges. IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 10 -127–10-149.
Shang, Q., Price, A., 2019]. A blockchain-based land titling project in the republic of
georgia: Rebuilding public trust and lessons for future pilot projects.
References Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 12 (3–4), 72–78.
Solidity, Solidity is an object-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart
Acuity, J., Brief guide for purchasing land in bangladesh, https://juralacuity.com/ contracts, https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.3/, (Accessed on 06/24/2020).
brief-guide-for-purchasing-land-in-bangladesh-2/, (Accessed on 03/27/2020). Suciu, G., Nădrag, C., Istrate, C., Vulpe, A., Ditu, M.-C., Subea, O., 2018. Comparative
Ahram, T., Sargolzaei, A., Sargolzaei, S., Daniels, J., Amaba, B., 2017. Blockchain analysis of distributed ledger technologies. In 2018 Global Wireless Summit
technology innovations. In Technology & Engineering Management Conference (GWS). IEEE, pp. 370–373.
(TEMSCON), IEEE. IEEE, pp. 137–141. Tanwar, S., Bhatia, Q., Patel, P., Kumari, A., Singh, P.K., Hong, W.-C., 2019]. Machine
Akram, S.V., Malik, P.K., Singh, R., Anita, G., Tanwar, S., 2020. Adoption of blockchain learning adoption in blockchain-based smart applications: The challenges, and
technology in various realms: Opportunities and challenges. Security and a way forward. IEEE Access 8, 474–488.
Privacy, p. e109. Thakur, V., Doja, M., Dwivedi, Y.K., Ahmad, T., Khadanga, G., 2019]. Land records on
Akther, A., Ripon, K.S.N., Alam, K.M., 2007. Dot: A new distributed data management blockchain for implementation of land titling in india. International Journal of
system. In: 2007 International Conference on Information and Communication Information Management 52. 101940.
Technology. IEEE, pp. 184–188. Uae government launches blockchain strategy 2021 — cointelegraph,
Almadhoun, R., Kadadha, M., Alhemeiri, M., Alshehhi, M., Salah, K., 2018. A user https://cointelegraph.com/news/uae-government-launches-blockchain-
authentication scheme of iot devices using blockchain-enabled fog nodes. In: strategy-2021, (Accessed on 07/27/2018).
2018 IEEE/ACS 15th International Conference on Computer Systems and Vora, J., Nayyar, A., Tanwar, S., Tyagi, S., Kumar, N., Obaidat, M.S., Rodrigues, J.J.,
Applications (AICCSA). IEEE, pp. 1–8. 2018. Bheem: A blockchain-based framework for securing electronic health
Bank, W., 2019. Gdp growth annual – bangladesh, https://data.worldbank.org/ records. In: 2018 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps). IEEE, pp. 1–6.
indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=BD, (Accessed on 04/21/2020). White paper ethereum/wiki wiki github, https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/
BCC, 2020. Bangladesh computer council, certifying authority, (bcc-ca), https:// White-Paper, (Accessed on 07/27/2018).
www.bcc-ca.gov.bd/about/index.jsp, (Accessed on 06/24/2020). Worldometer, Population of bangladesh, https://www.worldometers.info/world-
bdnews24.com, Land documents in five minutes as ministry launches online population/bangladesh-population, (Accessed on 04/23/2020).
system, https://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2019/02/28/land-documents-in-
five-minutes-as-ministry-launches-online-system, (Accessed on 03/27/2020).
Benet, J., 2014. Ipfs-content addressed, versioned, p2p file system, arXiv preprint
arXiv:1407.3561. Kazi Masudul Alam is currently working as an Associ-
Bodkhe, U., Tanwar, S., Parekh, K., Khanpara, P., Tyagi, S., Kumar, N., Alazab, M., ate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in
2020]. Blockchain for industry 4.0: A comprehensive review. IEEE Access, 1–37. Khulna University, Bangladesh. He has received his Ph.
Chaer, A., Salah, K., Lima, C., Ray, P.P., Sheltami,T., 2019. Blockchain for 5g: D. and M.C.S from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He
opportunities and challenges. In: 2019 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps). completed his B.Engg. from Khulna University, Bangla-
IEEE, pp. 1–6. desh. During his graduate studies, he played key roles in
Commission, B.T.R., 2020. Internet and mobile subscribers, http://www.btrc.gov.bd/ the design process of the Social Internet of Vehicles,
, (Accessed on 06/21/2020). Digital Twin Architecture, Haptic E-Book, and Haptic
Ethereum, Ethereum is a global, open-source platform for decentralized EmoJacket. He has authored and co-authored 30 peer-
applications, https://ethereum.org/, (Accessed on 06/24/2020).
reviewed international conference and journal articles
Future, K. The land registry in the blockchain – testbed, https://qz.com/947064/
with the ACM, IEEE, and Springer publishers. He regu-
sweden-is-turning-a-blockchain-powered-land-registry-into-a-reality/,
(Accessed on 07/27/2018). larly reviews journal articles from the top publishers of
Ganache-cli, Fast ethereum rpc client for testing and development, https:// IEEE, ACM, Springer as well as reviews project proposals for international funding
github.com/trufflesuite/ganache-cli, (Accessed on 06/24/2020). bodies. He has received best paper awards in a few IEEE conferences. He was
Graglia, M., Mellon, C., 2018]. Blockchain and property in 2018: At the end of the awarded prestigious academic and research scholarships of NSERC Canada
beginning. Graduate-Doctoral and Ontario Graduate Scholarship-Masters during his graduate
Haridas, S., 2018. This indian city is embracing blockchain technology – here’s why. studies. His research interests include digital twin, cyber-physical systems, block-
Hasan, H.R., Salah, K., 2018. Proof of delivery of digital assets using blockchain and chain, IoT, smart city applications, and machine learning.
smart contracts, IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 65-439–65-448.

14
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, A. Tasnim et al. Journal of King Saud University – Computer and Information Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman received the Bachelor of Science Aysha Akther is currently working as an Assistant
degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in
Khulna University, Bangladesh, in 2019. He is currently Khulna University, Bangladesh. She has received her M.
a full-time software engineer in a Software company. C.S degree from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She
His research interests include bio-robotics, blockchain, completed her B.Engg. from Khulna University, Bangla-
artificial intelligence, and IoT. desh. She has authored and co-authored 10 peer-
reviewed international conference and journal articles
with the ACM, IEEE, and Springer publishers. She was
awarded University of Ottawa Graduate Scholarship
during her masters studies. Her research interests
include social network analysis, IoT, blockchain, natural
language processing, and machine learning applications.

Anisha Tasnim received the Bachelor of Science degree

in Computer Science and Engineering from Khulna
University, Bangladesh, in 2019. She is currently pur-
suing the M.Sc degree in Computer Science and Engi-
neering from Khulna University, Bangladesh. Her
research interests include blockchain, artificial intelli-
gence, and machine learning.

15