The project, built by Ripple in partnership with blockchain development company Peersyst Technology, will permanently store and authenticate property titles on Ripple’s Ledger—its public blockchain. This will help eliminate bureaucracy and hopefully make land distribution more equal.
As Decrypt.co says, land ownership in the South American country is among the most highly concentrated in the world. Colombia’s civil war, the longest running war in the western hemisphere, from 1964 until a 2016 peace deal, was rooted in the unequal distribution of land, with leftist guerrilla groups taking up arms against the state.
As Peersyst Technology’s CEO says, land is everything in Colombia. Therefore, a system is needed that ensures land cannot be wrongfully taken. Putting the information into a public blockchain that cannot be changed or altered will help in that endeavour.
Many landowners in Colombia still don’t have papers to certify ownership over parcels they inhabit, Ripple Labs added. The project will start by certifying 100.000+ land adjudications. The public blockchain ensures hat once a transaction is recorded, it remains untouchable. If the government’s system fails, the owner of the land will still be the proprietary of the land, given that the blockchain is decentralized.
Ripple is a blockchain that seeks to compete with Ethereum. It was originally launched to help banks and other financial institutions move money fast and without fees (while being very green), but, apart from that, developers are using its ledger to build applications.
Recently, Colombia's financial industry regulator URF (Unidad de Proyección Normativa y Estudios de Regulación) approved a decree to enable Open Banking in the country. It specifies rules for the transfer of consumer data between financial entities, promotes access to that data to facilitate the development of financial services and functionalities, and clarifies the rules under which entities can market financial services via electronic platforms, among others.
In July Ripple partnered with Singapore-based payments institution FOMO Pay. The latter will use Ripple’s crypto-enabled enterprise technology to improve its cross-border treasury flows. On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) uses XRP, the digital asset built for payments as a bridge between two fiat currencies.
The use cases for blockchain technology appear to get broader, as people get used to the decentralisation of information. A small county in US is also trialling a project in which blockchain is used to store land titles. Wise County’s Smart Land Records Project aims to store land titles on a private blockchain-like system, with every change immutably logged.
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