Reconciling Blockchain Immutability and Statutory Revocation in Land Administration: An Integrated Conceptual Framework
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33003/fjs-2026-1022-6259Keywords:
blockchain, non-fungible token, land administration, statutory revocation, Hybrid Social Oracle, MQTT, Conceptual FrameworkAbstract
Much of the blockchain-based land administration literature reviewed appears to assume that a registry’s primary value lies in its absolute immutability. This assumption is difficult to reconcile with statutory revocation, such as that provided under Section 28 of Nigeria’s Land Use Act of 1978. This paper develops a conceptual framework that treats lawful mutability as a primary architectural requirement. Drawing on the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), a Systems Integration Perspective (SIP) and the identity-gated consensus literature, the framework integrates a five-component technology stack: a permissioned blockchain ledger; Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial verification; Non-Fungible Token (NFT) title representation; a hybrid social oracle for community attestation; and offline-resilient Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messaging. Revocation is modelled as an append-only event rather than a deletion. A title moves through defined statuses (proposal, notice, appeal and revocation), and the transition to “revoked” requires proof of service, a lapsed notice period, the absence of a stay and signatures from separate statutory roles, while community attestations are recorded as evidence and conflicts place the title on hold. A bounded explicit-state check of the specified transition system found no violation of its safety properties and detected four deliberately injected faults. The framework is a conceptual contribution: it has not been implemented, legally approved or empirically evaluated, and recommendations, future research directions and a validation agenda are set out to guide future work.
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