Landano: Decentralized Land Right Records

Landano is a ground-breaking RealFi dApp that notarizes traditional land rights on the Cardano blockchain. These records are legally compliant and enable unbanked Africans to leverage new financial opportunities such as mortgages, lease-to-own, and business loans (e.g. for farming equipment and seeds). We incorporate land administration standards and make all public geospatial and land parcel data available through our Open Cadastral Map initiative.

This session explains how pluralistic legal systems in post-colonial African countries provide an untapped opportunity for hundreds of millions of marginalized and otherwise excluded communities to secure their legitimate claims to land rights. The Landano system is based on pilot projects in Ghana and Mozambique as well as peer-reviewed research into standards-based, legally-admissible record-keeping requirements. Peter describes how we are deploying Landano on a fully decentralized infrastructure that includes minting of land record NFTs on the Cardano proof-of-stake blockchain, W3C compliant decentralized identity (DID)/verifiable credentials, permanent storage on the Arweave network, and decentralized compute using WASM/WASI runtimes.