ChromaWay and IDB begin land registration project in South America

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has engaged ChromaWay on a two-year project in Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay on an initiative titled “Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain): The Future of Land Titling and Registry.” The primary goal of the project is to evaluate how blockchain technology can contribute to solving some of the most pressing problems of land administration in South America.

The project, to launch in November 2019, will be closely aligned with IDB Lab, the innovation laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group and LAC-Chain, an alliance to promote the use of blockchain in Latin America and the Caribbean. ChromaWay will leverage its experience on closely related projects that include Sweden, Canada, India, and Australia. ChromaWay will also partner with Jalasoft, a leader in systems development and integration in South America.

ChromaWay will utilize our full open source suite of relational blockchain-related technologies for the project. These include Postchain, blockchain ledger technology rooted in relational databases and Rell, the purpose-designed programming language for blockchain and smart contracts. In addition, the project can be deployed on ChromaWay’s public blockchain, Chromia, which leverages the same underlying technologies.

The project, funded by the IDB, is one of the most extensive efforts to apply blockchain protocols to land registration and lending to date. There are several unique features of the project including designing a solution to meet the needs of three countries (with the goal of extensibility to other parts of South America), a focus on developing a sustainable network governance and support model, and incorporating standards identified by the IDB Lab/LAC-Chain project. The standards include incorporating the Wc3 specifications for Verifiable Claims and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).

Eirivelthon Santos Lima, Project Director from the Inter-American Development Bank’s Natural Resource Economics and Management Division in La Paz (Bolivia), sees the project as “a great opportunity to use blockchain technologies and innovative governance mechanisms to significantly improve land administration, strengthen tenure security, and raise the value of urban and rural land markets through secure, efficient, and more transparent transaction frameworks.

According to ChromaWay CEO, Henrik Hjelte, “Our collaboration with the IDB provides the opportunity for partner countries to take advantage of maturing distributed ledger technologies that have been developed and used in other projects. We are especially excited to deploy these solutions in societies where secure land registration systems can have such a positive social and economic impact.”