How Blockchain Is Transforming Rural Property Rights Trading in China

Background

The national rural revitalization strategy calls for deepening rural collective property rights reform and protecting farmers' assets, which requires establishing a rural property rights trading market. Anhui province, a pioneer of agricultural reform, and its Huangshan city have drafted a construction plan for a municipal rural property rights trading center, expanding market functions, standardizing valuation and transaction verification, and offering diversified services such as land contract rights, forest rights mortgage loans, policy consulting, assessment, mortgage disposal, agricultural insurance, and dispute arbitration.

Overview

To explore solutions for the challenges of rural collective property rights reform, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) leveraged its self‑developed Gongyin Xi Chain and partnered with the Huangshan Rural Property Rights Trading Center to build a blockchain‑based rural property rights trading platform. The platform focuses on transaction management and fund management, achieving automated, supervised, efficient, and transparent operations. Since launch, the platform has processed over 6,000 rural property rights transactions, serving nearly 3,000 corporate clients and about 4,000 rural households, with land transaction area exceeding 100 million mu, other transaction area over 280 million m², and total transaction value surpassing 150 billion yuan, enabling mutual benefits for farmers, trading centers, governments, and banks.

Challenges Addressed

Traditional rural property rights trading suffers from information asymmetry, difficult fund supervision, and weak digital infrastructure. The blockchain alliance‑chain platform records key data such as bid guarantees, registration fees, contract payments, and refunds on‑chain, supports transaction accounting and refund queries, and utilizes bank‑custodied accounts for fund supervision, achieving traceable, supervised, and statistical capabilities.

Innovation Highlights

Technical Innovation

Leveraging ICBC’s API open platform to provide lightweight, standardized, and aggregated financial services to customers.

Integrating regulatory authorities as blockchain nodes and using smart contracts to automate complex processes such as fund management and project bidding, reducing manual intervention and improving efficiency.

Model Innovation

The blockchain platform offers a comprehensive trading venue for various rural property rights participants, covering policy consulting, supply‑demand matching, bidding, property registration, mortgage financing, and certification. It implements a “six‑unification” management model with three‑level linkage, unified standards, hierarchical trading, and full‑process supervision, achieving transparent, fair, and online circulation of resources, assets, and funds.

Process Innovation

By recording asset and ownership information on‑chain, the platform enhances efficiency in identity verification, ownership confirmation, and fund supervision, reduces manual review workload, and realizes full‑process digital management of rural property rights transactions.

Application and Impact

The blockchain‑based rural property rights trading platform has established an efficient service mechanism, digitizing the entire transaction workflow and creating win‑win outcomes for farmers, trading centers, governments, and banks. It helps farmers understand property types and values, expands transaction channels, and protects rights; enables trading centers to supervise transactions and analyze data for improved efficiency; allows governments to monitor and verify land use and transactions, promoting the conversion of rural resources into assets; and assists banks in acquiring customers and extending services to rural areas, thereby powering the rural revitalization strategy.

Since its deployment, the platform has handled more than 6,000 projects, involving nearly 3,000 enterprise clients across multiple cities and about 4,000 rural households, with land transaction area exceeding 100 million mu and other transaction area over 280 million m², achieving a total transaction value of over 150 billion yuan. It was selected as a 2021 Anhui Province FinTech empowerment demonstration project for rural revitalization.