Making the case for financial inclusion: a b_verify based solution to promote agriculture credit in peru

This report was the result of a working group collaboration, in the Blockchain Labs course (2019) with Inter-American Development Bank (IADB/IDB) and authored by by Eric Peña (MIT Sloan)

Research goal:

One of the more promising use cases of blockchain technology involves the development of secure digital registries for property title and smart contracts. This will continue the development of b_verify, an open-source protocol developed by the MIT Media Lab. Together with IDB experts, the working group will focus on identifying potential applications for b_verify.

Excerpt from Executive Summary:

“This report aims to document the process of use case assessment, business case development and pilot planning of a blockchain-based protocol application for a public sector organization. More specifically, the team focused on building a pilot of the b_verify protocol for a financial inclusion solution on the agricultural credit sector in Peru … The opportunity to use a blockchain based solution in the context of Agrobanco’s situation is clear, however, developing the underlying software infrastructure also involves a non-trivial investment of resources. B_verify provides an opportunity to tackle the challenge of providing Agrobanco with a blockchain based solution without the need to jumpstart a whole network. The effort necessary to create the product is closer to a regular centralized implementation than developing an independent blockchain solution.”