Inter-American Development Bank to Pilot Land Registries on Blockchain

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

Next month, the global organization will embark on a two-year project to put land registration and lending in three Latin American countries on a blockchain.

The IADB, the largest source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean, has long been bullish on blockchain for land registries, despite the high costs of blockchain projects with sometimes uncertain returns.

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

The IADB hopes that ChromaWay's blockchain can help ease the burden of efforts to reestablish proper land titles in Latin America countries, which can cost $50 million to $100 million per project, Lima added.

These projects usually involve the bank collecting the legal information of farmers and urbanites and technical information about properties to create a proper record of land ownership where land was sold informally.

Phase One will explore how to connect land registries to the blockchain in a way that creates more trust as well as what kind of blockchain to use.

The bank will rely on standards for blockchain technology developed by IDB Lab and LAC-ChaiN, an alliance to promote the use of blockchain in Latin America and the Carribbean.

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 deploying the project on ChromaWay's public blockchain, known as Chromia.