Factom has announced a deal with iSoftStone to begin researching and implementing Blockchain solutions in 80 urban areas across China. The move comes as China looks for cost-effective and reliable methods to realize its “smart-city” concept - Factom was an excellent choice as it has been successfully experimenting with optimizing land registries using the Blockchain technology.
According to Jack Lu, Factom’s CTO, the scope of the new project is a substantial move from the start-up’s original experiments: the company expects to collect and store data incoming from a variety of streams including pollution and traffic sensors. While the full scope of the project is yet to be revealed, the company is already in progress of designing a custom infrastructure, “Factom China”, to accommodate the project’s grandiose ambitions.
We asked Cointelegraph’s legal expert, Dmitry Machikin to give us an idea of how this project could impact the quality of services to citizens and city governance, including complex issues such as addressing land grievances and other municipal legal issues.
Dmitri Machikin commented:
"The project to transfer the land cadastre into blokchain technology is fully justified from the state and legal point of view. The land registry, including China, refers to a systematic set of documented information on natural, economic and legal status of land. Practically, it is a kind of map showing online (and offline via request) the legal status and boundaries of land. China is the most technologically advanced country in the world, the growth of the infrastructure of this state is accompanied by an active change of lands status. With the introduction of full- length blokchain the time can be significantly saved, reduced to a minimum the economic costs, eliminated corruption factor and various forms of fraud: blokchain remembers everything!
Previously, the Factom company has already stated desire to create a system of land registration through blokchain- technology in Honduras. The project was adopted by the Government and is under implementation."
Oleg Khovayko, CTO of EmerCoin told Cointelegraph:
"On the one hand - well, that blockchain technologies go beyond cryptocurrencies and begin to apply in the real world, in this case - to conduct real estate registry.
On the other, the Factom that critically depend on Bitcoin blockchain, where stores fingerprints of it's directory blocks.
Currently, the latency in the acceptance of Bitcoin transactions can be up to several hours, and it is unlikely that will be fall. Accordingly, the delay in confirming the Factom recording will not be less, that would require a corresponding adaptation of the business process under the technical realities of the Factom-Bitcoin system."