Bitcoin mining firm BitFury, the Republic of Georgia’s National Agency of Public Registry and prominent economist Hernando de Soto are slated to announce Friday a collaboration to develop and pilot a blockchain land titling project, according to a report by Forbes.

The partners will sign an MOU at the Georgian Technology Park, a two-million-square-foot privatized land plot in Georgia that the San Francisco-based BitFury took over to design a special technology zone in which one of its mega data centers is located.

The magazine noted that in many areas of the world, people do not have legal title to their assets such as homes and vehicles, representing an estimated $20 trillion in “dead capital,” according to de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru.“

We are launching the property rights registration project for Georgian citizens so that they can register property on the blockchain,” said BitFury CEO Valery Vavilov to Forbes.The blockchain, he said, would add security to the property data to make it incorruptible and allow the public auditor to conduct real-time audits.

It would also mitigate friction in registration and reduce costs of property rights registration, something people could do through their smartphones. “Blockchain will be used as a notary service,” he said.Using blockchain, “the Republic of Georgia can show the world that we are a modern, transparent and corruption-free country that can lead the world in changing the way land titling is done and pave the way to additional prosperity for all,” said the Georgian public registry agency’s president, Papuna Urgekhelidze, in a statement quoted by Forbes.

Just more than a quarter of the world’s population have a legal title that is effective and public with respect to their control over an asset, said De Soto to the magazine. When owned property is “not adequately paperized or recorded, they cannot fill the functions of creating capital and credit,” he said, adding that it also creates problems for business.Currently, buying or selling land in the Republic of Georgia is a one-day endeavor in which the buyer or seller needs to go to a public registry house and pay between $50 and $200, depending on how fast they wish to notarize the transaction.

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