The ambitious partnership between Ripple Labs and the Colombian government to put land titles on the blockchain has stalled after the new administration downplayed the project. The outgoing government’s Ministry of Information Technology and Communications had announced the project just two weeks before the newly elected president Gustavo Petro came into office.
Juan Manuel Noruega Martinez, the interim director of the National Lands Agency, said the project is not part of the agency’s strategic priorities for 2022. He highlighted that it’s not one of the projects defined in the PETI. The decision came as a surprise because the new president was thought to be crypto-friendly.
Ripple Labs, through the partnership with Colombia’s National Land Agency, and Peersyst Technology wanted to tokenize real estate on the blockchain. The project would have improved property search processes, create transparency, and cheaper property title management. They aimed to bring about efficient processing of financing and payments. The blockchain project was to make land deeds involved in adjudication claims easier for users to view. It was meant to register properties awarded by court adjudication.
The deprioritization is a setback for Ripple Labs. The project would have put land deeds on the XRP ledger. And Peersyst would have created a certificate with a QR code that users could scan and see the documents associated with the adjudication process. Sources say the initiative was only able to add a single deed to the ledger. Antony Welfare, an executive on global partnerships at Ripple Labs, said a reason for the project to stall could be the wide distribution of the information. He added that it’s not just Colombia that has data but the whole world has it.
