Executive Summary

Every person in the world has a right to own, rent, or otherwise occupy property. But, billions of people lack documentary proof of their property rights.

Why? Because administrative agencies typically record rights only during major junctures in the life of a property: for example, a first registration, a sale, an inheritance, or an eviction. Understandably, given the high degree of risk involved, administrative agencies require substantial evidence in order to record and provide documentary proof of these major events. The pieces of evidence that administrative agencies require to prove a property claim—let’s call them “monument credentials”— may include things like a survey plan, a notarized will, and a state-issued identity card.

This system has two major flaws:

1. Access: It may be prohibitively expensive or difficult for some people to produce the monument credentials that administrative agencies seek.
2. Accuracy: The evidence that administrative agencies accept may not fully capture the reality on the ground. In other words, there’s a gap between reality and documentation.

As a result, land administration systems end up excluding billions of people.

However, the types of events that trigger documentation—which may only happen a handful of times in a property holder’s lifetime—are far from the only evidence of property claims. In fact, the reality of our property rights is evidenced by a multitude of small, everyday events: where we sleep at night, where our mail is delivered, the knowledge and memories of our neighbors, or the fact that we paid to put a new roof on our house or a fence around the yard.

The reality of our property rights is evidenced by a multitude of small, everyday events.

Until recently, these everyday events have occurred unrecorded, in the analog world, and beyond the sight of administrative agencies that provide us with property documents. But what if we found a way to harness the evidence of these everyday events and use it to supplement the small number of monument credentials currently accepted by administrative agencies?

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized. With the proliferation of smartphones, satellites, and social media platforms, more and more of these small events leave a data trail. Taken together, this data can be used to create a tapestry of new evidence—let’s call it a “tapestry credential”—that property holders could use to obtain documentation of their property rights.

But, without a system for turning it into a credential that administrative agencies can trust and use, this data cannot be leveraged by the people to whom it pertains.

This report argues that a digital identity system—specifically, self-sovereign identity (SSI)—is the vehicle for harnessing this wealth of new data in a way that is trustworthy, secure, and privacy-preserving. That is because SSI is the only model of digital identity that is designed to turn people’s data trails into credentials under their personal control that can be easily verified by any third party.

Why do the rapid innovations occurring in the identity space have the potential to revolutionize the delivery of property rights? Because, at its most basic, property rights documentation is documentation of identity: the identity of the property holder, the identity of the property itself, and the relational identity between the property and its holder.