UK’s Property Regulator Enlists R3’s Corda for Blockchain Land Registry Solutions
R3 CEO, David Rutter announced on Thursday at London’s CordaCon annual gathering, that the U.K. government has selected R3’s Corda to develop blockchain land registry solutions.
The U.K. government‘s HM Land Registry (HMLR), which safeguards land and property ownership worth over £4 trillion, including approximately £1 trillion of mortgages, aims to explore how to make the house buying process in the UK faster, simpler and more transparent.
The appointment comes as part of the second phase of HMLR’s research and development project, entitled ‘Digital Street’. The HMLR’s website states:
“The point of Digital Street is to give HM Land Registry a space to break away from the constraints and current ways of thinking”, it adds “We wanted to explore how we could use technology to revolutionise land registration and conveyancing.”
For this second phase, R3’s Corda will be focused on developing Proofs of Concept (PoC), based not only on its own findings, but also on further distributed ledger technology (DLT) research that it will undertake with Corda on board.
The research and development (R&D) contract with Corda looks to explore the potential of blockchain technology. HMLR is keen prove that automation can benefit from integrating smart contracts, for example in moving funds and automatically updating the land register.
Back in December 2017, chief executive and chief land Registrar Graham Farrant posted a news release on HMLR’s website, explaining how the new business strategy will shape its direction for the next five years. Farrant stated:
“By 2022 we aim to digitise and automate 95% of our daily transactions to help simplify, speed up and improve the efficiency of registration.”
HMLR outlined that the R&D they are doing on blockchain technology is to verifiy that it is capable of improving the buying and selling process, by improving transparency, enabling users to sign an agreement and deliver the transfer digitally.
Currently, the UK conveyancing process may require a buyer to prove their identity to the lawyer and again to the mortgage company, HMLR aim to utilise DLT to remove this duplication of ID verification. Processing 1.8 million applications per month, the U.K.’s HMLR states that it’s vision is:
“to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.”
In addition to the buyer and seller, the blockchain land registry solutions will involve all participants in the land registration process, including the lawyers, conveyancers and mortgage providers.

R3 has been popular within the financial world, with many of the worlds largest institutions enrolled as members and testing use cases of its blockchain technology. Back in May, HSBC completed the world’s first ‘commercially viable’ blockchain trade finance transaction on the Corda platform.
A BCTech Report in June revealed that RBS has been leading a consortia of banks to develop an enterprise blockchain standard platform entitled Cordite, developed from the coding of R3‘s Corda, in order for the banking industry to launch crypto tokens on one network.