Verifying Land Rights, Rightsholders, and Property: Our Veridian + Cardano Prototype Is Ready!
We’re thrilled to announce that Landano’s Project Catalyst Fund 12 project — Implementing the Cardano Foundation Identity Wallet in Landano — is successfully complete. After nearly two years of design, building, problem-solving, and testing, we have a working prototype that does something genuinely new, and we’ve made it open to everyone.
This is a small step with big implications. Here’s what we built, why it matters, and where it goes next.
Why this matters
Implementing real-world solutions on the Cardano blockchain has never been more important. And the insecurity of home and property is only growing, as climate, political, and economic pressures combine into a worsening global problem of housing and tenure security. Landano was founded to take on both challenges at once — and this project is a real, working piece of that mission.
Expanding land rights security around the world works best when anyone, anywhere can reliably prove three things, without depending on a central gatekeeper:
- Who you are — your identity, attested by someone with the authority to confirm it.
- What you own — the link between you and a specific piece of land, recorded on-chain.
- What you control — that the wallet tied to your identity is genuinely yours.
We built, demonstrated, and openly released a working prototype that performs all three checks, end to end — using the Cardano Foundation’s Veridian identity wallet, KERI/ACDC credentials, and Cardano-native NFTs.
While we designed it with low-documentation, low-institutional-trust environments like rural Africa in mind, the result is built for broad applicability across many regions and use cases.
Here’s a short video explaining the project, and showing it in action:
The Mendix application can be found on our public Github repository:
https://github.com/landano/mendix-veridian-prototype
What we built: three foundational use cases
The prototype proves out three fundamental use cases, each an essential building block of a working decentralized identity (DID) verification system connecting Veridian, a Mendix-built application, and Cardano NFTs:
1. Identity credential issuance. An authority — in our demo, a local Chief — issues an identity credential to a user, such as a landowner or other rights holder. The Chief approves it directly on their own device, and the private key never leaves their hands.
2. NFT ownership verification. A third-party verifier can confirm that a user holds the Cardano NFT representing rights to a specific parcel of land or other real property — with ownership proven by a fresh cryptographic challenge, not just a database lookup.
3. Wallet balance verification. Because real transactions usually involve a transfer of funds alongside a transfer of rights, the prototype lets a party confirm that a claimed Cardano wallet balance actually exists — so both sides can transact with confidence.
Together, these three checks make up the backbone of trustworthy, self-sovereign identity verification for real-world assets.
Open source, and ready to build on
We’ve released the prototype as an open-source Mendix plugin under the Apache 2.0 license, so developers across both the Cardano and Mendix ecosystems can accelerate their own DID projects rather than starting from scratch.
That’s the part we’re most excited about. By offering an adaptable, open framework, we hope to draw more real-world asset projects onto Cardano — a robust alternative for teams seeking the right open identity platform, at a moment when many other digital wallet efforts are struggling with adoption. It’s a meaningful reason for the 300,000+ active Mendix developers to build on Cardano.
You can find the code, fork it, and make it your own here: github.com/landano/mendix-veridian-prototype
Tested, and proven
We didn’t just build it — we put it through its paces. Each of the three use cases was tested multiple times, along with a regression test of a previously issued credential. In total, 15 test instances were run, and every one passed — a 100% success rate.
You can dig into the test results here.
Stakeholder Feedback
We also gathered outside perspectives. Feedback from potential users and interested parties is always best practice for any new product, and this prototype plugin is no different. We invited roughly 70 stakeholders — Mendix developers, blockchain security experts, and property rights and real estate professionals — to watch the prototype in action and share structured and open feedback.
Responses were collected over two weeks in June 2026. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, affirming the successful operability of all three use cases.
Just as valuably, reviewers reinforced our attention toward what matters most for the road ahead: staying aligned with Veridian as it matures, hardening the system for real-world conditions like poor connectivity and lost-wallet recovery, sharpening the security and trust model around the custodial wallet, and demonstrating the concept’s reach beyond land rights. We’re grateful for every one of those insights — they sharpen both our own next steps and those of anyone who builds on our work.
What comes next
This prototype is deliberately a foundation, not a finished endpoint. A few capabilities were intentionally out of scope, and stand out as natural next steps:
- Property transfer via smart contract, with identity verification and on-chain metadata updates.
- Presentation flow, in which a Chief’s representative presents an ACDC credential to a verifier via IPEX Disclose — a core function for real transactions.
- Root-of-trust bootstrapping beyond the Chief, such as anchoring to a government registry, to support broader scalability.
From here, we’ll spread the word throughout the Mendix community, and we’d be delighted to see this evolve into a polished, production-ready offering on the Mendix Marketplace — available to any of those hundreds of thousands of builders who need decentralized, trustworthy identity verification for their own projects.
With gratitude
This success was not ours alone. We owe a strong and heartfelt thank-you to Fergal O’Connor, Identity Solutions Lead Architect, and Javier Franco, Senior Technical Program Manager, both of the Cardano Foundation, for their significant contributions of thought, resources, and problem-solving. And our sincere thanks to Project Catalyst for making the work possible.
At Landano, we believe property rights should be accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or who they know. Today, we’re one real step closer to making that a reality.