Coords & Spatial Identity

Every land parcel needs a precise, permanent address. Landblock uses Coords — a spatial identity platform — to provide immutable coordinate references for every record on the protocol.

What is Coords?

Coords is a spatial identity platform built by the same team as Landblock. It solves a fundamental problem in land administration: how do you refer to a physical location in a way that is permanent, verifiable, and independent of any government, mapping provider, or naming convention?

Coords provides two types of spatial identifiers:

• L1 URIs — Immutable coordinate references derived directly from latitude, longitude, and altitude. They are checksummed, self-verifying, and tied to no external service.
• L2 handles — Human-readable, mutable aliases that resolve to an L1 URI. A national parcel number, a cadastral ID, or a short location handle can all be registered as L2 aliases pointing to the same immutable L1 reference.

The Coords specification is open (CC0 licensed), meaning anyone can validate a Coords L1 URI without relying on any cloud service or external dependency.

How Landblock uses Coords

Landblock does not store raw coordinates on-chain. Instead, every spatial unit (parcel) in the protocol is anchored to a Coords commitment — a cryptographic hash of its L1 URI. This means the on-chain record proves that a specific coordinate was registered, without exposing the exact location publicly.

The full L1 URI is always emitted in the associated on-chain event, so any independent auditor can reconstruct and verify the spatial record from chain data alone.

On-chain validation of L1 URI format is handled by an open, trustless smart contract that implements the Coords checksum spec — no API call, no cloud dependency.

Why this matters for land records

Traditional land registries reference parcels using national cadastral IDs, street addresses, or GPS coordinates — all of which can change, be reassigned, or mean different things in different systems. Coords L1 URIs are permanent by design: derived purely from geometry, they cannot be reassigned or revoked.

For cross-border verification and federation, this is essential. A Landblock registry in one country can verify a spatial claim from another country without needing to understand either country's internal parcel numbering system — because both ultimately reference the same immutable coordinate space.

National parcel IDs (such as SUNARP numbers in Peru, or cadastral IDs in other jurisdictions) can be registered as Coords L2 aliases, linking familiar local identifiers to permanent global coordinate references.

What's coming

The Coords roadmap includes an XREF system — a cross-reference layer that maps GPS coordinates, Plus Codes, What3Words references, and national parcel IDs to a single Coords identifier. When available, Landblock will integrate this to make parcel lookup seamless across address systems.

Polygon boundary support (for full parcel geometry) is also on the Coords roadmap. In the interim, Landblock stores parcel boundary geometry as a GeoJSON file on IPFS, with the content hash anchored on-chain.

The formal integration between the two projects — including API contracts, versioning policy, and fallback behaviour — is planned as a Phase 5 architectural decision.