Programmable Cadastral Institutions: Land Rights and Sovereign Data for Informal Settlements

Informal settlements house roughly a billion people, most without any legal claim to the land they occupy. Titling programmes built on de Soto's formalisation thesis have a mixed record, and blockchain land registries have often repeated centralised assumptions under a decentralised label. This talk presents programmable cadastral institutions, a framework being developed through an Ethereum Foundation PhD Fellowship 2026 with partner organisation the International Center for Community Land Trusts. Fieldwork is being planned with the Development Action Group in Cape Town, with comparator desk case research on Puerto Rico, Brazil and India. It sets out a brief for how community governance, adjustable verification thresholds, and legal recognition combine with sovereign relational data, so land claims sit in household-controlled stores with only minimal, unlinkable evidence of events reaching the chain, never a public map of who holds what.

Speakers: Charlie Fisher, Clara G

Track: Rights, Freedoms, and Governance