Airchains, a Web3 software and infrastructure firm based in India, has announced a partnership with the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) in the eastern state of West Bengal, aiming to release 500,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to enhance land mutation, a legal process that involves registration and transfer of land ownership.
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Fast facts
- The NFTs will be deployed on a chain created via Polygon’s Supernets in hopes of replacing traditional bureaucracy in New Town, a planned smart city in West Bengal, Airchains said in a statement on Tuesday. Polygon Supernets is a service that assists entities in launching customizable blockchains.
- In India, land ownership faces several challenges, such as forgery, tampering of records, unauthorized access, evasion of tax payments, and illegal transfers, Airchains said in the statement.
- “Our objective is to streamline the process of buying and selling land, eliminating the inherent challenges associated with such transactions,” Debashish Sen, chairman of NKDA, said in the statement. “To accomplish this, we have identified NFTs as the perfect solution, as they enable the physical tokenization of properties, simplifying the entire procedure.”
- The NFTs will allow landowners to transfer ownership rights and enable the digitization of proof of records. Landowners may acquire physical copies of the NFTs through QR-code printout cards. Additionally, blockchain can enable fractional property ownership, opening up new mutation opportunities.
- The land records will live on a custodial wallet managed by the government, said Ankur Rakhi Sinha, co-founder of Airchains. The project is scheduled to go live in two weeks.
- New Town joins Pune, a state in west India, in attempting to improve its real estate industry with Web3 technology. Pune is reportedly in the final stages of adopting blockchain to record real estate transactions to reduce fraud.
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