Colombia enlists Ripple Labs to put land deeds on the Blockchain

by Arthur · August 1, 2022

Colombia’s government has launched a partnership with Ripple Labs, the company behind the cryptocurrency XRP, to put land titles on the blockchain, part of a plan to correct land distribution efforts so unfair they have led to decades of armed conflict.

The project, built by blockchain development company Peersyst Technology and Ripple, will permanently store and authenticate property titles on Ripple’s Ledger – its public blockchain.

This will help eliminate red tape and hopefully make land distribution more equal, said Ripple Labs and Peersyst Technology Decrypt.

Why would Colombia’s government want to do this? Because land ownership in the South American country is among the most concentrated in the world.

Colombia’s civil war, the longest war in the Western Hemisphere, from 1964 until a peace accord in 2016, was rooted in the unequal distribution of land, with left-wing guerrilla groups taking up arms against the state.

“Land is everything in Colombia,” Peersyst Technology CEO Ferran Prat told Decrypt. “This is what led to armed groups like FARC start a war with the government.”

“The bottom line is that land is important in Colombia, so a system is needed to ensure that land cannot be taken unjustly,” he added. “Putting the information into a public blockchain that can’t be altered or changed will help.”

Many landowners in Colombia still do not have papers to verify ownership of parcels they live in, Ripple Labs added. The project will start by certifying more than 100,000 land judges.

“With the public blockchain, once the transaction is recorded, it can never be deleted,” added Antony Welfare, a senior advisor at Ripple Labs. “That’s the most important part. If the government system is blown up, the owner of land will still be in a blockchain because it is held around the world in different nodes.”

Ripple is a blockchain that is trying to compete with Ethereum. It was originally launched to help banks and other financial institutions move money quickly and without fees (while they are very green) – and still do – but developers use the ledger to build applications.

The company behind the blockchain, Ripple Labs, is controversial: In 2020, SEC hit it with a $1.3 billion lawsuit, alleging that it had raised that amount in unregistered securities offerings since 2013. The lawsuit is still ongoing.