ChromaWay Expands Effort to Put Latin American Land Records on the Blockchain

Swedish startup ChromaWay is expanding a project aimed to make land ownership more transparent by putting records on a blockchain.

With the launch of its LAC PropertyChain initiative, announced on Tuesday, the company hopes to strengthen blockchain standards, governance and protocols for land transactions in Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay.

The initiative complements the LACChain initiative, a consortium of institutions across Latin America and the Caribean aligned with the Washington, D.C.-based Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The advance also marks the second phase of a land registry project, which began in 2019 and is funded by the IDB. The project focuses on smart contract-based conveyancing solutions and storing collected data on a blockchain.

For the effort, ChromaWay has teamed up with a number of regional departments including Peru’s National Land Registry (SUNDAR), Paraguay’s Supreme Court of Justice Property Records and Bolivia’s National Public Registry (DDRR), to name but some of the agencies. Four regional governments in Peru are also participating.

“We are very enthusiastic about the pilot and the opportunity that the IDB initiative gives us to experiment with blockchain technology to streamline processes, further improving data security, and strengthening the transparency of land transactions,” said Manuel Augusto Montes Boza, the national superintendent of SUNARP, Peru’s public registries department.

The project will utilize ChromaWay’s different open-source blockchain-related technologies, including a public platform for decentralized applications, Chromia, and its smart contract language, RELL.

“ChromaWay technologies have matured immensely since our initial work with property transactions in Sweden more than four years ago,” ChromaWay CEO Henrik Hjelte said in a press release.