A birth certificate of a child was registered on the blockchain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The news was made public a few days ago by the local media website Istoe Dinheiro, which reveals that Waldyr Mendonça Junior and Monique de Medeiros Gonçalves have recorded on the blockchain the birth certificate of their son Álvaro de Medeiros Mendonça, born on 8 July in Casa de Saude Sao Jose, Rio de Janeiro.
The initiative is part of a Growth Tech project, in collaboration with IBM and the hospital where Álvaro was born.
His father Waldyr is a sales representative and said that the new blockchain-based registration procedure was much faster.
“A process that took less than five minutes to complete”.
Actually, another similar registration was made in 2016 by economist Fernando Ulrich, who revealed on his blog that he recorded the birth of his daughter Alice on the blockchain. But that procedure was not legally recognised at the time, so it was not valid as a birth certificate.
Last year another Brazilian blockchain enthusiast, Edson Neto, recorded the birth of his daughter Maria Julia in Bahia on the blockchain, although he had to resort to a collaboration with a registry in order to validate the document.
Whereas, in the case of Rio de Janeiro a few days ago, the procedure was simple and immediate, because the platform used for the process was ready-to-use. The Notar Ledger by Growth Tech was used, allowing operations to be carried out in a virtual environment as if they were in a notary’s office.
IBM Brazil’s blockchain chief technician, Carlos Rischioto, explained that the registration procedure involved three stages: the “live birth declaration”, produced by the hospital itself, the creation of a digital identity of the child on the platform, carried out by the father, and the automatic sending to the register (hospital’s partner) which produced the final certificate which was delivered to the child’s parents.
This technology is still being tested and Rischioto stated that the objective is to “bring speed, efficiency, transparency and to eliminate more and more bureaucratic steps in business processes”.
