Exploration of the Potentials of Blockchain in Helping Assure Public Trust in the Registration of Eligible Citizens and Transfer of Ownership of Public-Funded Houses in Ethiopia

Abstract

As a concept, “trust” is abstract and generally subjective. When there is mistrust between two entities, a third party trusted by both entities is usually involved to build the bridge of trust. This paper [8] sets out to explore the possibility of adapting blockchain technology to serve as 
the “trusted third party” between untrusting entities. As a case for study, there exists an issue of mistrust between the Ethiopian government (specifically Addis Ababa City Government) and the constituent public in the transparency of the process of registration of eligible city residents 
and transfer of ownership of public-funded condominium houses for registered, lucky lottery winners in successive rounds. In order to address this problem, the paper expounds the concept of trust first and goes on to explore blockchain technology in relation to its fundamental work in bitcoin. It compares four blockchain platforms, namely, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and Multichain, and selects one for prototype implementation based on pre-defined evaluating metrics. The metrics used for the comparison are the platform’s customizability, maturity, performance / scalability, security, consensus algorithm, and relevance to the problem under study. The selected blockchain platform is then used for a prototype Proof of Concept (PoC) demo implementation to serve as the main element for assuring public trust in the transparency of the process for registration of residents and transfer of ownership for Addis Ababa Housing Project. Based on the results of the exploratory and comparative analysis, Multichain blockchain platform is selected and the Trust Assurance application prototype system is implemented in the cloud on AWS (Amazon Web Services).  The Multichain-based PoC demo showed that the Housing Project data records can be made available publicly, that the system can’t be taken offline without turning off all nodes in the distributed peer-to-peer blockchain computing network, that the project data can’t be deleted or modified at will, that timestamps are an inherent part of every record, including who published them, and that the chronology of records can’t be altered. With the full consent of a Citizen’s Board and the Government’s goodwill in cooperating with the Board, the results of the PoC demo indicate that the public could trust the Housing Project data records if an enterprise-grade blockchain system is implemented in accordance with the procedures set out in this paper.