Yesterday, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced it has contracted blockchain firm ChromaWay to develop a land titling and registry platform in Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay. The initiative titled ‘Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain): The Future of Land Titling and Registry’ will launch on November 2019 and run for two years.
The goal of this project is to streamline land administration in South America.
The region has several indigenous communities which are dependent on natural resources for their livelihood. A report by Land Portal states that in 9 of the 20 countries of South America, at least 20% of the land is legally in indigenous and peasant hands under collective systems.
Despite various systems in place by different countries, indigenous people still face obstacles for adequate recognition of their land rights.
The blockchain initiative, funded by the IDB, will will apply blockchain protocols to land registration and lending in both rural and urban areas. The project will also be aligned with IDB Lab and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) regional blockchain promoter LAC-Chain.
ChromaWay said it would build the solution on its in-house blockchain protocol Postchain and programming language Rell. It may also be deployed to its public blockchain Chromia which leverages the same technologies.
Unlike other blockchain land registry projects, ChomaWay is trying to develop a solution for three different countries, with a focus on sustainable governance and incorporating W3c standards such as Verifiable Claims and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).
“We are especially excited to deploy these solutions in societies where secure land registration systems can have such a positive social and economic impact,” said Henrik Hjelte, ChromaWay CEO.
IDB is the largest source of development financing in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is owned by 48 sovereign states, which are its shareholders and members. This gives an edge to ChromaWay due to the vast reach of its project partner. To meet the required output, ChromaWay will also partner with the technology company Jalasoft.
Sweden-based ChromaWay has already developed similar solutions for other countries. In its home country, the startup partnered with Swedish land registry Lantmäteriet to trial blockchain for property purchase and records.
Meanwhile, ChromaWay is also developing a platform for Stockholm Green Digital Finance for its Green Digital Asset Wallet. Back in 2015, the company produced a platform called Cuber for LHV Bank to transfer Euros as tokens on the Bitcoin network.
Global investing and trading platform Funderbeam is another blockchain solution from ChromaWay to record and track investments in startups.
