Yoti’s Biometric Tech Helps to Facilitate UK’s First Blockchain-Based Home Sale

Yoti is further illustrating the versatility of its digital identity platform with the news that the UK government’s housing department has used it in a trial of blockchain-based home sale.

Part of Her Majesty’s Land Registry’s ‘Digital Street’ R&D program, the blockchain home sale was facilitated in partnership with Yoti, Premier Property Lawyers, Barclays, ShieldPay, and the Mishcon de Reya law firm. Essentially, the idea was to demonstrate how blockchain accounting could be used to establish an irrefutable record of the sale, with Yoti’s biometric technology being used to verify the identities of the participants.

Yoti has already been demonstrating the utility of its mobile selfie-based authentication platform in a number of areas, including customer age verification in the sale of alcohol and confirming users identities when accessing e-government services. By applying facial recognition and document reading technologies to images of users’ faces and their official IDs, Yoti’s system can establish a reliable virtual credential that can be used in a number of other ID applications.

In the case of HMLR’s blockchain-based home sale experiment, Yoti helped to smooth out the usually onerous process of confirming the identities of each and every participating in the transaction, from mortgage lenders to HMLR officials. And the project appears to have been a success, with Stefan, the seller of the home used in the project, attesting in a statement that the process “was really straightforward.”

“It shows how technology like this can help make everything so much quicker and you can see clearly what’s happening at every stage,” he said. “If this is the way forward, it’s going to make everything easier.”