Community Verified Land Ownership Using Self-Sovereign Identity and Blockchain: A Framework for Underdeveloped Regions

Secure land rights are fundamental to economic development and social stability, yet in many developing regions formal land titles are incomplete or absent. Decentralized solutions using blockchain have been piloted to create tamper-evident land registries, but they can suffer from the "garbage in, garbage out" problem where inaccurate initial records become permanently recorded. This paper proposes CoVO (Community-Verified Ownership), a novel framework that integrates self-sovereign identity (SSI) with community validation to produce trustworthy land ownership records. Local validators (neighbors, elders, or community land committees) use their Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to issue cryptographic attestations (Verifiable Credentials) for a claimant's land. These attestations are aggregated by a community notary, who issues a final Ownership Credential or optionally a non-fungible token. The blockchain serves only as an immutable audit layer for signatures, timestamps, and revocations, while sensitive data remains off-chain. By weaving together social consensus and cryptographic proofs, CoVO generates land titles that are both locally trusted and globally verifiable. The framework addresses the critical need for secure property rights documentation in regions where formal registries are weak or nonexistent, potentially unlocking trillions of dollars in "dead capital" while preserving community autonomy and cultural practices around land ownership. Key contributions include: (1) A decentralized credential-based trust network for land administration, (2) Integration of community governance with cryptographic verifiability, (3) Privacy-preserving design that keeps sensitive data off-chain, and (4) Analysis of technical, socio-economic, and legal implications for deployment in underdeveloped regions.