Authors:
Abubakar-Sadiq Shehu
1
;
2
;
António Pinto
3
and
Manuel E. Correia
3
;
1
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
;
2
Department of Information Technology, FCSIT, Bayero University Kano, Kano, Nigeria
;
3
CRACS & INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Self Sovereign Identity (SSI), Smart Contracts, Identity Management, Real Estate and Digital Deeds Validation.
Abstract:
Since its first introduction in late 90s, the use of marketplaces has continued to grow, today virtually everything from physical assets to services can be purchased on digital marketplaces, real estate is not an exception. Some marketplaces allow acclaimed asset owners to advertise their products, to which the services gets commission/percentage from proceeds of sale/lease. Despite the success recorded in the use of the marketplaces, they are not without limitations which include identity and property fraud, impersonation and the use of centralised technology with trusted parties that are prone to single point of failures (SPOF). Being one of the most valuable assets, real estate has been a target for marketplace fraud as impersonators take pictures of properties they do not own, upload them on marketplace with promising prices that lures innocent or naive buyers. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a self sovereign identity (SSI) and smart contract based framework for id
entity verification and verified transaction management on secure digital marketplaces. First, the use of SSI technology enable methods for acquiring verified credential (VC) that are verifiable on a decentralised blockchain registry to identify both real estate owner(s) and real estate property. Second, the smart contracts are used to negotiate the secure transfer of real estate property deeds on the marketplace. To assess the viability of our proposal we define an application scenario and compare our work with other approaches.
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