Blockchain-Based Land Registration for Trusted Property Records: System Design and Functional Validation in Nigeria

Land registration depends on reliable records, verifiable ownership histories, accountable administrative decisions, and legally recognized procedures for creating and transferring property rights. Paper-centred processes can make record search slow and expose registries to risks associated with document loss, unauthorized alteration, fragmented information, and competing claims. Blockchain technology offers a possible technical layer for maintaining tamper-evident transaction histories, while smart contracts can encode selected procedural rules. This paper presents the design and reported functional validation of a blockchain-based land registration system developed for the Ebonyi State, Nigeria, context. The project adopts a permissioned Ethereum architecture, Solidity smart contracts, and a hybrid data model that combines on-chain transaction references with off-chain application and land-record data. A Node.js/Express service layer and React interface are described as the application components. The development process follows a Waterfall system-development life cycle, informed by observation, interviews, examination of records, and questionnaires described in the project report. The documented functional tests cover authentication, title issuance, ownership transfer, duplicate-title detection, payment processing, and dispute filing. All six cases are reported as passing; the payment case records a two-minute completion time for a stated ₦8,000,000 transaction. These results provide preliminary evidence of functional workflow coverage, but they do not establish statewide operational effectiveness, statistically significant processing-time improvement, resistance to adversarial attacks, or legal validity of blockchain records as conclusive proof of title. The paper’s contribution is a locally contextualized system architecture and an evidence-conscious functional evaluation that identifies both the value and the limits of blockchain-supported land administration. It concludes that blockchain can strengthen auditability only when combined with authoritative source-data validation, accountable registry governance, privacy controls, security testing, institutional adoption, and a clear legal framework.