SMARTLAND WHITEPAPER
OVERVIEW OF SMARTLAND
This team which is part of the Binance Masterclass Project is focused on re-imagining the real estate industry taking specific African countries as case study.This will render the industry to be more open, transparent, and stress-free. The instant project concentrates on property right ecosystems which is not limited to registries, land titling, and helping various real estate stakeholders to understand the great impact of blockchain on the ancient and promising industry. Moreover, real estate is all over and around us. Speak of your home, retail shops down the street and large corporations. There are three major stakeholders in the real estate industry. They include property seekers, service providers, and institutional owners.
PREAMBLE Land registration generally describes systems by which matters concerning ownership, possession or other rights in land can be recorded with a government agency to provide evidence of title, facilitate transactions and to prevent unlawful disposal. Registration of land titles or instruments is carried out in each state land registry through computerization by using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Land Information System (LIS). These methods has actually aided and enhanced the former traditional method in the registry. The focus of this technology solution is land registration systems which include deeds recording and title registration. A deed recording could be said to be a system of giving publicity to land transactions and helping to prevent concealed dealings. In other words, deed recording notify the public of a claimed or vested interest in land and establishes priority against other possible claimants to the same interest. Meanwhile, there are numerous problems and challenges affecting the documentation process during land registration. These problems affect other sectors in the country including the court system, real estate, investment etc.
PROBLEM STATEMENT “Landowners/buyers among other stakeholders face a huge problem of verifying the authenticity of land titles and registration of the same which eventually lead to loss of money and property due to poor database management, complex validation process, costly fees, delay, shams etc.”
VALUE PROPOSITION (the core values you are delivering to your audience and their needs you are satisfying): Usage of the dApp This is where it becomes interesting; the simple model of the dApp can actually be utilized in so many special ways:
- The main design is for validating the ownership of a property before proceeding to transaction stage.
- At the transaction stage, the dApp will prevent defrauding the buyer as the digital land title/NFT will be transferred automatically immediately the buyer pays. This will eventually stem the crowding of the court with legal cases. In other words, there will be fewer cases in courts or opting for arbitration since breach of contracts would be reduced to the barest.
- Tenants can also verify the authenticity of a landlord’s title before renting an apartment to avoid been ejected or thrown out as a result of lack of real ownership.
FOCUS OF STUDY/PROJECT
The project started by providing a technology tool that proffers a lasting solution to the real estate industry from the ground up. The technology solution addresses the issue of land title registration at state's or federal land registries all over the country.
MARKET STRUCTURE
Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, roughly $27,200...
FEASIBILITY STUDY
Real estate is a unique asset class. It is tangible and is one of the most stable asset classes from time immemorial. Although, real estate is dealt with physically, the transaction ecosystem foro real estate is virtually in the dark.
COMPETITION
The technology solution does not have any competition in terms of geography. Virtually all blockchain innovation in this area of ownership and governance deals focuses on fractional ownership of land. Meanwhile, the main focus of our project is to provide a solution to the land registries of the states in the countries of our case study and provide an efficient transfer of land in the real estate ecosystem.
SMART CONTRACTS
The token standard that was used in this project is the ERC721 tokens. It is the perfect token because it is indivisible and not interchangeable, hence its uniqueness. They can only be traded in whole unit
Web3.js
Web3 Provider: The SmartLand dApp uses Metamask as its web3 provider. This is to enable users to be able to interact with the dApp, hence it is Metamask-compatible. As popularly used, the Metamask web3 provider will also be used by the users to sign transactions with their private key. This is another advantage the blockchain provides, it prevents another person from forging a users transaction.
A boilerplate code is provided in the front-end code to require users to install Metamask if they don't have it installed already.
Talking to the smart contracts: Web3.js needs the contract address and ABI to be able to talk to the contract. After deploying the smart contract on Ethereum or BSC SmartChain, the contract gets a fixed address on the blockchain (Ethereum or SmartChain) where it will be hosted forever. On the other hand, the Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the representation of the contract's methods in JSON format that instructs Web.js how to format function calls in a way the contract will understand. The compiler provides the ABI when the contract is compiled. This and the address mentioned above would be copied and saved. The ABI can be accessed on a JavaScript file later in the project. After the above steps, the contract address and ABI is instantiated on web3.js.
Calling contract functions: Web3.js will use two methods to call functions on the contract, 'call' and 'send'. 'call' is used for view and pure functions. Hence, it only runs ont he local node and does not create a transaction on the blockcahin. 'send' on the other hand will create a transaction and change data on the blockchain. This make the web3 provider, MetaMask in this instance, to pop up for the user to sign a transaction.
The web3.js made use of jQuery to parse and display the details of a title on the UI.