Smart Contract-Based Automation of Lease and Mortgage Transactions in Blockchain-Enabled Land Governance

Abstract

Land governance systems increasingly require secure and efficient management of lease and mortgage transactions in addition to ownership registration. However, existing digital land record systems rely on fragmented, manual workflows that result in delayed updates, limited transparency, and weak inter-agency coordination. This paper proposes a permissioned blockchain-based framework that automates the end-to-end lifecycle of lease and mortgage transactions using smart contracts modeled as deterministic state machines. The framework encodes operational clauses such as deposit handling, rent compliance, collateral locking, repayment tracking, and mortgage release, while preserving statutory authority through endorsement-based approvals by land registrars and financial institutions. A hybrid architecture combining on-chain smart contracts with off-chain document storage ensures auditability, privacy, and regulatory compliance. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed system achieves scalable throughput, predictable latency, and complete enforcement of governance constraints under concurrent workloads. The results indicate that smart contract automation can significantly reduce administrative delays and prevent invalid state transitions without compromising legal oversight, making the approach suitable for realworld land governance applications.