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IDB starts blockchain project for land registries in Latin America

Key facts: The IDB works with the blockchain startup ChromaWay and the Bolivian company IT Jalasoft.

Similar projects are carried out in Australia, Canada and India.

About this project

After years of talking about it, the IDB, or Inter-American Development Bank, is testing for the first time a blockchain for land registries.

Next month, the international financial organization will embark on a two-year project to place the land registry and loans in three Latin American countries in a blockchain.

The IDB, the largest source of financing for development in Latin America and the Caribbean, has been optimistic about the use of blockchain-associated technology for land registries, despite the high costs of blockchain projects. , with sometimes uncertain returns.

The organization is working with the blockchain startup ChromaWay and the Bolivian IT services company Jalasof, t to test the technology in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay, with the aim of extending the test to other parts of South America.

Eirivelthon Santos Lima, director of the IDB’s environment, rural development and disaster risk management project in La Paz, Bolivia, said “We need to work with our governments in Latin America to show them the potential of blockchain-focused technology and its uses, “and later added:” The topic is very abstract for them and the best way to teach them about this technology and make them interested is to show them how it works from scratch”.

Hopes and wishes

The IDB hopes that the ChromaWay blockchain can help ease the burden of efforts to restore property titles in Latin American countries, which can cost between USD 50 million and USD 100 million per project, Lima added.

These projects generally involve the bank, which collects farmers’ legal information and technical information to create an adequate record of land ownership, in those cases where it had been sold informally.

Through its Research and Development arm, IDB Lab, the bank is investing USD 600,000 for the project. Phase One will explore how to connect land records to the blockchain in a way that generates more confidence, as well as deciding what type of blockchain to use.

The bank will depend on the standards for blockchain technology developed by IDB Lab and LAC-ChaiN, an alliance to promote the use of blockchain in Latin America and the Caribbean. You will also use the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) specification for verifiable claims and decentralized identifiers.

Partner History

The IDB chose ChromaWay because it noted the startup’s work in tracking property titles in Sweden and similar projects running in Australia, Canada and India.

“We’ve had up to 32 steps in the process to claim a property in Sweden, which could take up to three months between the buyer’s bank, the seller’s bank and real estate agents,” said ChromaWay chief executive Henrik Hjelte.”We digitize this process and shorten the online connection time in a few minutes”.

ChromaWay will apply several of its blockchain-related technologies to the project. This includes Postchain, which the firm describes as a blockchain rooted in relational databases, and Rell, a programming language for blockchain and smart contracts. The bank also has the option of implementing the project in the ChromaWay public blockchain, known as Chromia.

Unlike a pure blockchain, ChromaWay technology also includes database capabilities, such as organizing and setting parameters in the data represented, the firm said.

“It’s basically a root based on a mathematical way of representing data,” said Hjelte. “In this way, the same Social Security number cannot exist for more than one person, and the same property cannot be sold twice”.


Also published on Medium.

Published inCryptocurrencies
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