Abstract:
Blockchain has been on the rise since its advent in 2008 and is finding its way into all kinds of
use cases. In civil contracts management, the record keeping of documents is a decades old
system which requires storing of information on paper. This paper based information can easily
be tampered with and destroyed. Thus, this decades old system provides several loopholes for
bad agents to escape from accountability.
Since these paper based documents can easily be tampered with, a rigorous system must be put
in place to verify the truthfulness of these documents. In usual arbitration proceedings, this is
done by allowing both parties to cross-examine the evidence submitted by the party they
oppose. This process makes arbitration proceedings all the more cumbersome.
Nowadays, new technologies are continuously being adopted in different industries to make
processes more efficient, and with much success. Blockchain is one of such technologies, that
has caught the world by storm.
A blockchain is a way of storing data, such that the data cannot be tampered with and can never
be deleted. This property of blockchain has given it opportunities for various uses from banking,
medical record keeping, supply chain management, electronic voting, copyright management,
etc.
In this design project, blockchain has been used to streamline the record keeping process and
secure it using the fool-proof immutability of the blockchain. A smart contract has been
developed which allows stakeholders of a project to share documents through the blockchain.
The smart contract permanently saves the documents on the blockchain and retrieves them on
demand.
A user-friendly interface was also developed to help users navigate the system. This allows for
a tamper-proof storage system which can also be leveraged by the arbitrators to resolve disputes
efficiently. The proposed system can reduce record-keeping costs as well as provide novel
support for BIM models to be uploaded directly on the blockchain. The developed prototype
promises to make the whole process more transparent and efficient.
