Blockchain Is Changing Lives In Africa: STARTUPS FROM CAPE TOWN TO NAIROBI THINK THE BUDDING TECHNOLOGY IS THE FUTURE OF THE CONTINENT.

• Author: Keenan, Jillian

ELSA'S FATHER WAS a businessman. He was always looking for a good deal, and as the owner of a brick factory in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, he had money to invest. So in 2005, when he learned about a 2,000-square-meter piece of land for sale in a part of town where he expected property values to boom, he bought it. The deal was formal: Elsa's father paid 100,000 birr ($3,641) in cash, signed the contracts in front of witnesses, and got a receipt.

But there was one thing missing: a deed. So when Elsa's father unexpectedly died just after the deal closed, her family was thrown into crisis.

"As soon as [the previous owner] found out my father died, she changed her tune," says Elsa, who asked that her surname not be published while the court case is ongoing. "We've spent the last 10 years going in and out of court."

The long duration of the trials only raised the stakes, since it turned out Elsa's father was right: The property's value did skyrocket. The protracted legal battle has already cost the family more than 50,000 birr ($1,820) in legal fees, and even though courts have ruled in their favor several times already, the series of appeals seems endless. In the meantime, Elsa can't capitalize on her dad's investment: She can't build on the property, sell a portion of it, or even put Up a fence.

"If there were a land registration, none of this would have happened. We wouldn't have spent 10 years in court," she says. "But I don't want to give up, because it's my father's land."

Elsa's is not an isolated case. Across the continent, in Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, and elsewhere, courts are clogged with land disputes and other crises that could be easily resolved with little more than better platforms for record keeping. But if Africa is a hotbed of questions about how best to store valuable information, it is also rapidly becoming the testing ground for a new answer to this old problem.

BEST AND BRIGHTEST

IN JULY, SOME of the brightest minds in technology, finance, and law from around the world gathered for ACTAI & Bitfury's fourth annual Blockchain Summit. Rather than meet in a traditional hub like New York, Zurich, or Silicon Valley, they convened in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to explore a question: How might blockchain technology transform life in Africa?

For some guests, the Morocco summit was a return trip to the continent. Only a few months earlier, the 2018 Blockchain Africa Conference had attracted people from around the world to Johannesburg.

The back-to-back confabs reflect a larger trend: In 2018, Africa emerged as one of the most hospitable climates for block-chain innovation in the world.

Simply put, a blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger. Originally developed to enable financial transactions and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, blockchain technology is now being applied in a huge range of situations. Virtually any valuable information can be stored on a blockchain: transactions, contracts, even your identity. These records are public and easily verifiable, and since the blockchain hosts data on millions of computers simultaneously rather than on any one central platform, it's virtually immune to hackers. The platform is particularly attractive in African nations, where still-developing infrastructure, weak...