(MENAFN- Trend News Agency) BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 1. Georgia's Ministry of Justice has signed a memorandum of understanding with Hedera, a major blockchain platform, to explore the introduction of distributed-ledger technologies across public services, Trend reports, citing the ministry.

Justice Minister Paata Salia met with Hedera representatives to discuss potential areas of cooperation, including the possible migration of National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR) data to a blockchain network. According to the ministry, such a move would strengthen property-rights protection and increase transparency and the reliability of state registries.

Officials also briefed the company on Georgia's existing smart-contract service operated by NAPR and its development prospects. Real-estate tokenization - converting physical assets into digital tokens - is among the areas under consideration. The ministry confirmed that the next phase will include forming joint working groups with experts from the Ministry of Justice and NAPR to advance technical cooperation with Hedera.

The National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR) initially collaborated with the private sector to integrate blockchain into the land registry system, starting a pilot in April 2016. This project did not replace the existing registry but added a layer of security by using a private, permissioned blockchain, which was then anchored to the public Bitcoin Blockchain through a distributed digital timestamping service. This anchoring mechanism allows citizens to verify the authenticity of their land certificates and property transactions. Due to these reforms, the World Bank's Doing Business 2016 report recognized Georgia for the ease of property registration, ranking it third globally. More recently, NAPR launched the Smart Contract service, which allows Georgian citizens worldwide to remotely execute and register immovable property sales and mortgage agreements using AI-integrated electronic identification, a service that typically takes an average of 30 minutes per session.

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