The Chinese city of Suzhou in East China has introduced blockchain technology into its housing lottery system, in an effort to make the housing lottery process more transparent and tamperproof, according to a local report.

The blockchain-based system for housing lottery was co-developed by a local government-backed blockchain research institute and a local notary office. The lottery system adopts the random algorithm of cryptography to sort all the candidate numbers randomly. Lottery result will be displayed in real time on a large screen and broadcast live on the network. Meanwhile, the lottery results will be updated onto the blockchain in real time to ensure that the results cannot be tampered with. In this way, the process of house sale lottery could be fairer, more transparent and traceable.

The rampant speculation in properties and surging housing prices has urged the country to roll out limits such as lottery-like registration system for sales of new residential properties in most first- and second-tier cities with Suzhou included. According to the housing lottery rules, purchasing orders must be generated by lottery software provided by authorized notaries and the results should be published immediately.

Real estate developers are prohibited from setting up preferential lottery conditions for their stuff or contacts. With the adoption of blockchain technology, the practice is expected to guarantee transparent and fair distribution in a real estate market where demand highly overtakes supply.

The Suzhou implementation is the latest use case in which blockchain is being adopted in the real estate sector in China. It is believed blockchain will come to more ordinary people’s view in future with its increasing adoption in various industries.

Of late, apart from traceability system, Alibaba is broadening its blockchain reach to its “Future Hospital”, where blockchain technology will provide various services in identity authentication, financial payment, mobile payment of medical insurance, trading platforms and logistic distribution; Last week, metropolis city Shenzhen began issuing China’s first electronic subway invoices using blockchain last week.

China has been among the countries actively adopting blockchain technology on both the public and private levels. Investment guided by the Chinese government into blockchain technology has stood at over 40 billion yuan (roughly $5.82 billion) in 2018 alone. The country’s banks and insurance industry have also taken the lead in embracing blockchain technology to simplify and secure their business. More blockchain use-cases in various sectors are expected to be seen.