  Since its first introduction in late 90s, the use of marketplaces has
continued to grow, today virtually everything from physical assets to services
can be purchased on digital marketplaces, real estate is not an exception. Some
marketplaces allow acclaimed asset owners to advertise their products, to which
the services gets commission/percentage from proceeds of sale/lease. Despite
the success recorded in the use of the marketplaces, they are not without
limitations which include identity and property fraud, impersonation and the
use of centralised technology with trusted parties that are prone to single
point of failures (SPOF). Being one of the most valuable assets, real estate
has been a target for marketplace fraud as impersonators take pictures of
properties they do not own, upload them on marketplace with promising prices
that lures innocent or naive buyers. This paper addresses these issues by
proposing a self sovereign identity (SSI) and smart contract based framework
for identity verification and verified transaction management on secure digital
marketplaces. First, the use of SSI technology enable methods for acquiring
verified credential (VC) that are verifiable on a decentralised blockchain
registry to identify both real estate owner(s) and real estate property.
Second, the smart contracts are used to negotiate the secure transfer of real
estate property deeds on the marketplace. To assess the viability of our
proposal we define an application scenario and compare our work with other
approaches
