The government of Colombia has partnered with Ripple Labs, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP, to put land titles on the blockchain. This is part of a plan to rectify land distribution efforts that are so unfair that they have led to decades of armed conflict.
Collaboration with Ripple Labs
The project, built by blockchain development firm Peersyst Technology and Ripple, will permanently store and authenticate proprietary titles on XRPL.
This will help cut red tape and hopefully make land distribution more equal, according to Ripple Labs and Peersyst Technology. The Colombian government is doing this because land ownership is among the most concentrated in the world.
Unequal Distribution of Land
Colombia’s civil war was the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere, from 1964 to 2016. It was caused by the unequal distribution of land, with left-wing guerrilla groups taking on the state.
Country is everything in Colombia. This has led armed groups such as the FARC to go to war with the government.
– Said Ferran Prat, CEO of Peersyst Technology
“Because land is so important in Colombia, a system is needed that ensures that land cannot be taken illegally,” he added. “It will help to put the information in a public blockchain that cannot be changed.”
Many landowners in Colombia still have no papers to certify ownership of land parcels they own, Ripple Labs added. The project will begin certifying more than 100,000 land allocations.
“With the public blockchain, once the transaction is committed, it can never be deleted. That is the most important. If the government system is blown up, the owner of the land is still in a blockchain because it is held in different nodes around the world,” said Antony Welfare, of Ripple Labs