Inter-American Development Bank is testing blockchain for cadastral registration

Next month, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will launch a two-year project to use blockchain to register land in three Latin American countries.

IDB, together with the startup ChromaWay and the Bolivian IT company Jalasoft, will test the technology in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay, and then it is planned to deploy the project in other regions of South America.

“We need to work with governments in Latin America to show them the potential of this technology. For them, this is a very abstract question, and the best way to teach this technology and interest them is to show how it works, ”said project manager Eirivelthon Santos Lima.

The ChromaWay blockchain is expected to help simplify the restoration of land ownership in Latin America. As part of the project, the bank collects legal information from farmers and city dwellers, as well as technical information about the property, in order to create a proper registration of land rights.

The bank will rely on standards developed by IDB Lab and LAC-ChaiN, an alliance to promote the use of blockchain in Latin America and the Caribbean. IDB will also use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification for validated applications and decentralized identifiers.

ChromaWay previously worked on a blockchain to track land rights in Sweden, as well as similar projects in Australia, Canada, and India. For the IDB project, the startup will use several of its technologies, including the Postchain network and the Rell programming language. The bank can also deploy the project on the ChromaWay Chromia open blockchain.