On 22 April 2016, at a signing ceremony in the Georgian Ministry of Justice, the country’s National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR), the bitcoin blockchain and earns a reward, which makes rewriting history very expensive.">mining company BitFury and the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto agreed to put property records on a blockchain. Ten years later Georgia still has registrars, notaries and a government database. What changed is smaller: fingerprints of registry transactions are written to the Bitcoin chain, at least according to the last detailed profile of the system, from December 2020. Most of what you need to know about the blockchain land registry sits in the distance between that signing and that result.
The pitch of 2015 to 2018 was simple. Put land titles on a ledger nobody can edit, and fraud, lost files and bribed clerks go away. Governments in Honduras, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Rwanda and Georgia tested versions of it, and start-ups in Ghana raised money on it. As of October 2026 we found no country that has replaced its land register with a blockchain. Meanwhile the idea moved from the registry to the investor, as “fractional real estate” tokens, and the best-known name of that market, RealT, announced in July 2026 that it was winding itself down after the City of Detroit sued it.
This lesson follows our lesson on blockchain in healthcare, where the same limit appeared: a chain can prove that a record has not changed, not that it was right in the first place. Here we look at what each land project actually did, what a property token really gives you, and why a notary, a title company or a conveyancer is still part of every sale. Facts are as of October 2026.
Why land registries looked like the perfect blockchain use case
Our overview of what blockchains are used for puts land titles near the top of the list, and it is easy to see why. A land register is a list of who owns which parcel, who holds a mortgage on it and what rights others have over it. Banks lend against it and courts settle disputes with it. If that list can be altered quietly, every mortgage and every sale built on it is at risk.
What a land register really does
In England and Wales, HM Land Registry keeps the register and the state stands behind it. The registry calls its guarantee its “core function”: if a mistake in the register causes a loss, the owner is compensated. Its blog said in February 2017 that around £55 million had been paid out over ten years because of forgeries. In the United States, the county recorder files deeds, and private title companies search the history and insure the buyer against hidden defects. In France and Italy, the notary drafts or authenticates the deed and the state registry publishes it.
In each system the record is only the visible end of a longer process: checking who the seller is, whether they really own the parcel, whether a spouse or a bank has a claim, whether the boundaries match the map. A database that records a transfer does none of that by itself.
The promise: a record no clerk can alter
The appeal was strongest where registries are weak. When Bitland pitched its project in Ghana in 2016, it cited a figure of up to 78% of the country’s land being unregistered, according to IBTimes UK in August 2016. In Honduras, Factom’s president Peter Kirby told Reuters in May 2015 that the country’s database “was basically hacked”. In such places a tamper-evident history, shared between banks, courts and owners, sounded like a fix for corruption as well as for paperwork.
What a blockchain can prove, and what it cannot
A blockchain is good at one thing that matters here. Once a record is written and buried under later blocks, changing it without everyone noticing is impractical. Our guides on why a blockchain is immutable and how a blockchain works explain the mechanics: each block carries the hash of the one before, so editing an old entry breaks every link after it.
A tamper-evident history of the record
For a registry, this means you can take a document, compute its hash (a short fingerprint that changes completely if a single character changes), and write that hash into a public chain with a timestamp. Years later anyone can recompute the hash of the registry copy and compare. If it matches, the document is the same one that was registered on that date. Nobody needs to trust the registry’s own server for that check.
That is a real gain against one kind of fraud: an insider who edits the database after the fact. It also helps with disputes about dates, because the timestamp is outside the registry’s control. Whether the chain is open or permissioned is a separate design choice, covered in our guide to public and private blockchains.
Garbage in, garbage out: forged deeds and fake sellers
What the chain cannot do is check that the first entry was true. If a forger sells your house with a fake identity, and the registry accepts the deed, the blockchain will faithfully record the forged transfer and protect it from later correction. The physical world is outside the ledger, which is the same oracle problem our lesson on blockchain in supply chains met with food and diamonds.
Four Australian lawyers tested this in the Property Law Review in July 2017. Lynden Griggs, Rod Thomas, Rouhshi Low and James Scheibner ran the blockchain idea against four common land fraud scenarios. It would have prevented fraud in two and not in the other two. Their conclusion on a registered entry is blunt: “blockchains can play no role in testing or checking the veracity of that entry”. They also found the technology a poor fit for mortgages, easements and joint ownership, the rights that make real titles complicated.
Georgia: registry documents fingerprinted in Bitcoin
Georgia is the blockchain land registry that holds up best, because it promised the least. The system built with BitFury after the April 2016 agreement is a layer added behind NAPR’s existing registry. According to a New America profile dated 15 December 2020, NAPR “uploads an immutable hash, or digital receipt, of a land transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain”. The front-end application that citizens use was left unchanged, the profile says, and the back end is built from open-source components.
The same profile lists the services covered: property sales and purchases, new title registrations, demolition, mortgages, rentals and notary services. It says NAPR “currently uses” the system. That is the latest dated description we could confirm. We found no official figure for the number of titles anchored and no 2025 or 2026 statement from NAPR on whether anchoring continues, so treat the scale as unknown.
Note what the Bitcoin chain holds: a fingerprint, not the title. Who owns a plot in Tbilisi is still decided by NAPR’s registrars on the documents they receive, as before. The chain makes later tampering with those records visible. It does not make the original decision more accurate.
Rwanda: a blockchain pilot for sale transfers, not a blockchain register
Rwanda is often cited as a country that “put its land registry on blockchain”. The sources do not support that. What exists is Ubutaka, a land transaction platform built by Medici Land Governance (MLG). In November 2018 the Rwanda Land Management and Use Authority and the Rwanda Information Society Authority signed a memorandum with MLG, and a pilot for voluntary sales started in Gasabo district in April 2021, according to The New Times of 2 November 2021.
The process described in that article by Athanase Akumuntu, a business analyst at the Ministry of Environment, is mostly ordinary e-government. The seller starts the transfer on the Irembo portal and pays the fee by mobile money or card. A notary checks both parties against the national ID agency and the land registry, collects signatures and fingerprints, and sends the file to the Land Administration Information System (LAIS), where the registrar approves it. Only after approval are the transaction details written to a blockchain for later verification, which the article says takes seconds.
So the register of record is LAIS, a conventional government system, and the blockchain stores a copy of approved transfers. We found no figure on how many transfers Ubutaka has processed, no confirmation that it went beyond Gasabo, and no statement in 2025 or 2026 on its status. Ledger Insights, reporting on the launch on 29 April 2021, also described it as a platform to be “integrated with Rwanda’s existing land registry infrastructure”, not a replacement.
Ghana: Bitland’s promise and no verifiable result
Ghana’s place in this story comes from start-ups, not from the state. Bitland, launched in 2016, planned to survey land and record title transactions on OpenLedger, a platform built on BitShares’ Graphene technology, with an official opening in Kumasi that October. IBTimes UK reported on 31 August 2016 that it had collaborative projects in 28 communities, an initial coin offering run with the Danish exchange CCEDK and OpenLedger, and plans to expand to Nigeria in January 2017. Other outlets gave different technical details at the time, so even the chain it used is not settled.
After the launch coverage the trail goes cold. We found no published result of its token sale, no count of deeds recorded, no closure notice and no regulatory action. There is also no sign that Ghana’s Lands Commission ever treated Bitland’s records as official. The honest status in October 2026 is “no verifiable outcome”, which is different from saying it failed or was a fraud: we simply have no evidence either way.
A second Ghanaian start-up, BenBen, came through the Barclays Accelerator. A Barclays profile of 2 February 2017 described a system to turn paper land titles into digital records, with Barclays Ghana as first client, a letter of intent signed by the chairman of the Lands Commission, a pilot in two Accra neighbourhoods and a longer-term goal of “smart mortgages”. The only figures in that profile are the company’s own. We found no evidence that the Lands Commission adopted BenBen as the official register.
Pilots that did not become the register
The projects that governments sponsored directly tend to follow one path: an announcement, a demo that works, and no change to the live register.
Honduras and Factom, 2015
In May 2015 the Austin company Factom announced, through Reuters, a deal to build a blockchain land title registry for Honduras. Factom’s own chief architect later said the government had not committed and that the deal had been reported too early. By late December 2015 SiliconANGLE reported that the project had officially stalled, with Kirby saying it was “political in nature” and that government systems move slowly. No operating Honduran blockchain registry is known.
Sweden’s Lantmäteriet, from 2016
Sweden’s mapping and land registration authority sponsored a trial from 2016 with the blockchain company ChromaWay, the telecom group Telia (for identity checks) and the consultancy Kairos Future, using smart contracts to speed up property deals. ChromaWay’s chief executive Henrik Hjelte told Bitcoin Magazine in June 2016 that a deal taking about three months could be cut to a few days, a claim the trial never had to prove at scale. An academic paper by Anetta Proskurovska and Sabine Dörry in Environment and Planning A in 2022 gave the verdict: “This project has not moved beyond the proof-of-concept phase.” We found no closing statement from Lantmäteriet itself.
The UK: HM Land Registry’s Digital Street test, 2019
The British test is the most useful for English readers because it was done on a real sale. On 6 March 2019 a semi-detached house in Gillingham, Kent, completed after 22 weeks, against the six the buyer and seller had expected. In April HM Land Registry re-ran the same transaction on a prototype built on Corda, with the conveyancers Mishcon de Reya and MyHomeMove, the payment firm Shieldpay, the identity provider Yoti and HMRC. The demonstration ran “end to end, in less than 10 minutes”, on a copy of the Land Register rather than the live one.
Asked on the blog why blockchain mattered, a Land Registry staff member replied in June 2019: “We’re not saying that Blockchain is the answer.” The registry’s stated aim was to structure its data so it could work with whatever platform the industry adopted. We found no later move to put the live register on a blockchain.
Fractional real estate: what a property token actually gives you
The second wave of property tokens left the registry alone. Instead of recording titles, issuers put a building in a company and sold tokens representing shares in that company, often for a few dollars or euros each, with rent paid out in a stablecoin. A smart contract handles transfers and payouts.
The token is a share, not the house
This structure matters more than any technology choice. The deed names the company. The token is a record of your share of the company, and your rights depend on the company’s articles, the offering documents and the law of the country where the company sits. If the company does not hold a clean title, or stops paying the property tax, the token keeps working perfectly while the asset behind it decays.
France, 2019: a Boulogne-Billancourt mansion sold through tokens
France held what CMS Francis Lefebvre called the first real estate transaction in Europe using a blockchain. On 25 June 2019 the “AnnA” mansion in Boulogne-Billancourt, valued at €6.5 million, was transferred by a notarial deed drawn up by Screeb Notaires into a simplified company, SAPEB AnnA. The platform Equisafe split that company into about 100 digital shares recorded on a shared electronic register (the French “DEEP”), which were transferred to the developer SAPEB Immobilier, assisted by Valorcim.
Legally, then, the building went through a notary exactly as usual, and what moved on the blockchain was company shares. The 117th Congress of French notaries in 2021 drew the same line, with a heading that reads “La tokenisation n’est pas une dérivation du droit”: tokenising something does not take it out of the law. The report added that offering such tokens to the public is a public offer of financial securities, and that tokenised shares of a simplified company must not come with a trading platform.
Dubai: a government-run pilot in dirhams
Dubai shows the version where the land authority itself takes part. On 25 May 2025 the Dubai Land Department (DLD) launched a pilot of tokenised property investment on the Prypco Mint platform, with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, the Central Bank of the UAE and the Dubai Future Foundation’s real estate sandbox, and Zand Digital Bank as banking partner. The minimum was AED 2,000 (about $545), payments were in dirhams only, no cryptocurrency was used, and only holders of a UAE ID could take part.
According to Gulf News on 10 February 2026, the pilot facilitated more than AED 18.5 million (about $5 million) of tokenised property investment from investors of more than 50 nationalities, and a resale marketplace was due to open on 20 February 2026 in the Prypco Mint app. The difference with earlier projects is that the registry that holds the title is the one running the scheme.
RealT: from Detroit rentals to voluntary liquidation
RealT, run by the brothers Jean-Marc and Remy Jacobson and operating since 2019 according to its own website, became the best-known platform for US rental houses: buy-ins from about $50, homes mostly in Detroit, rent paid out in stablecoins, and buyers mostly outside the United States, since US residents were barred from investing. RealT markets this as “fractional, tokenized ownership” and says token holders are the legal owners. In the structure described by its offering documents as summarised by analysts, each property sits in its own company (at first a series of a Delaware limited liability company), and the tokens are interests in that company. The deed is meant to name the company, not the token holders. In early July 2025 the City of Detroit sued RealT over 408 properties, asking for code compliance on all of them, in what Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett called “the largest nuisance abatement lawsuit” in the city’s history.
The investigation by Outlier Media, reported by Michigan Public, found that investors had paid more than $2.72 million in tokens for 39 east-side Detroit homes whose seller had agreed to receive $1.1 million, while the deeds still named the seller. Of 25 properties RealT offered in January 2025, Wayne County deed records named RealT as owner for only three, and 21 were behind on property taxes. A RealT spokesman blamed “title issues” and the seller. These are the city’s allegations and journalists’ findings; no court has ruled on them.
On 22 April 2026 a judge approved an agreement putting a special fiduciary, Charles Bullock, in charge of RealT’s roughly 700 properties, with a goal of 210 brought up to code by October 2027 and a little under $640,000 in the city’s escrow account, according to Michigan Public. On a 2 July 2026 investor call, Jean-Marc Jacobson said “We are entering voluntary liquidation” and “We are going to sell every asset, all of them”, Outlier Media reported on 16 July 2026. He blamed financial and legal troubles; Bullock disputed his account of their dealings. Detroit’s Corporation Counsel said at the time that RealT had not filed anything in court, and under the April agreement the fiduciary keeps the final say over whether Detroit properties can be sold. His progress report to the court is due at the end of October 2026. A collective action by French investors has also been reported in the French press; we found no ruling in it.
Nothing in this went wrong on the blockchain. The tokens moved and the payouts ran. What failed, according to the city, were the deeds, the taxes, the repairs and the tenants: the legal and physical layers that a token cannot see.
The rules: securities law, not crypto law
For a US reader the starting point is the SEC. A token giving a share of rental income from a property managed by someone else is very likely an investment contract, so it must be registered or sold under an exemption. The SEC acted early on property-backed tokens: on 29 September 2017 it charged Maksim Zaslavskiy and his REcoin project, promoted as “The First Ever Cryptocurrency Backed by Real Estate”, alleging that the real estate team investors were promised was never hired and that the business had no real operations.
In the European Union, MiCA does not cover crypto-assets that already qualify as financial instruments, as our guide to MiCA explains. A property token that gives a share of a company and its rents falls under securities rules (MiFID II and the prospectus rules), supervised by the AMF in France or Consob in Italy. In the UK the question goes to the FCA, whose rules on securities and financial promotions are the starting point.
What a notary, title company or conveyancer still does
Every case above leaves the same person in the loop: the professional who checks the parties and the deed before the registry accepts it. Blockchain projects tried to automate the record. None removed the check.
France: the acte authentique and the publicité foncière
In France a property sale is published at the land registration service (service de la publicité foncière) only if it results from an authentic act. Article 710-1 of the Civil Code, as the Ministry of Justice recalled in an answer published on 7 June 2016, requires the act to be “reçu en la forme authentique par un notaire exerçant en France”, a principle already in article 4 of the decree of 4 January 1955. The notary checks identity, capacity, title history, mortgages and planning rules, collects taxes and is liable for errors. That is why the AnnA sale still began with a notarial deed.
Italy: the notaio, the atto pubblico and Notarchain
In Italy, transcription in the property registers can only be made on the basis of a court judgment, a public deed or a private agreement with an authenticated or judicially verified signature (article 2657 of the Civil Code). In practice a notary drafts or authenticates the sale. Article 8-ter of decree-law 135/2018, in force since 13 February 2019, defines distributed ledgers and smart contracts, says a smart contract meets the written-form requirement once the parties are identified under rules set by the Agency for Digital Italy, and gives storage on a distributed ledger the effect of an electronic timestamp under the EU eIDAS regulation. It does not remove the notary from a property sale.
The Italian notaries tried the technology themselves. Their national body presented Notarchain at its 52nd congress in Palermo in October 2017 with IBM as partner: a chain where the data is managed by notaries who verify the identity of the parties. At launch the notaries also offered to deposit software source code through it, in a shared repository with the copyright society SIAE. We found no public report on its use after a 2022 essay by the notary Enrico Damiani in the review Osservatorio notarile. We also found no verified Italian equivalent of the French AnnA sale.
United States: title search, title insurance and the county recorder
Most US states have no notary in the European sense. The buyer’s side orders a title search, a closing or escrow agent handles the money and papers, and the deed is recorded at the county. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau explains that owner’s title insurance, which is optional, protects the buyer if someone later claims the home over something that predates the purchase, such as a former owner’s unpaid taxes, and that most lenders require a separate lender’s policy.
Blockchain pilots in the US stayed at the edge of this system. In South Burlington, Vermont, the city clerk agreed with the start-up Propy on four levels of integration. At level one the city simply receives a paper deed that mentions where the transaction sits on Propy’s blockchain, and the clerk does nothing extra. Level four, Propy replacing the city’s land records software, was a goal, not a result: when GovTech reported on the pilot, the city had not yet received a single deed through Propy.
England and Wales: the conveyancer and the state guarantee
In England and Wales a solicitor or licensed conveyancer runs the checks and HM Land Registry registers the transfer and guarantees the title. The Digital Street test kept both roles: the conveyancers were partners in the prototype. Where the state already compensates owners for forged transfers, a blockchain adds little that buyers can feel.
Before you trust a tokenised property or a “blockchain title”
This is not advice on whether to invest. It is a list of questions whose answers decide what you actually own.
- Find out who is named on the deed today, and check it yourself at the land registry, county recorder or cadastre, not on the platform.
- Read what the token is in law: a share, a membership interest, a loan, or a “digital copy” with no rights at all.
- Ask which law governs the company and where you could sue if rent stops.
- Ask who can sell the building, who decides on repairs and who can evict tenants, and whether token holders vote on any of it.
- Check how you exit: is there a regulated resale market, and how often do tokens really change hands?
- Look up the issuer on the SEC’s EDGAR database, the FCA register, or the AMF and Consob lists, and read their warnings.
- Count the taxes: rental income, capital gains and property tax still apply, whatever the token says.
Blockchain land registry projects: what is live and what closed (October 2026)
| Project | Country | Started | What it does | Status as of October 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAPR with BitFury | Georgia | April 2016 | Hashes of registry documents anchored in Bitcoin | Described as in use in December 2020; no later official figures found |
| Ubutaka (MLG) | Rwanda | Pilot April 2021, Gasabo | Approved sale transfers copied to a blockchain; LAIS remains the register | No figures or status found after 2021 |
| Bitland | Ghana | 2016 | Survey and deed recording start-up, token sale | No verifiable outcome; never the official register |
| Factom | Honduras | May 2015 | Planned blockchain title registry | Stalled in December 2015 |
| Lantmäteriet | Sweden | 2016 | Proof of concept with ChromaWay and banks | Did not move beyond proof of concept (2022 study) |
| Digital Street | United Kingdom | 2019 | Prototype re-run of a real sale on a copy of the register | Test only; live register unchanged |
| AnnA sale | France | 25 June 2019 | €6.5 million building moved into a company split into about 100 tokens | One-off transaction, notarial deed kept |
| Prypco Mint (DLD) | UAE (Dubai) | 25 May 2025 | Tokenised shares of ready properties, dirhams only | Pilot running; resale market announced for 20 February 2026 |
| RealT | United States | 2019 | Tokens for shares of Detroit rental companies | Voluntary liquidation announced 2 July 2026; court-approved fiduciary in charge of Detroit portfolio since April 2026 |
Read down the status column. The only blockchain land registry projects still described as running are those where a government kept its register and used a chain to time-stamp or copy records, or ran the token scheme itself, as Dubai does. Where a company asked investors or citizens to trust tokens instead of the registry, the results were either untraceable or, in Detroit, in court. A later lesson asks the wider question of when an organisation needs a blockchain at all; another applies the same test to music rights and patents.
The next date to watch is the fiduciary’s report to the Detroit court at the end of October 2026, when the judge decides whether to extend his term over RealT’s portfolio.
