Banks tested alongside Elo and credit cooperatives.
The testing group of the Drex pilot project, which includes Caixa and Banco do Brasil (BB), managed to carry out a sale of a tokenized property. In addition to completing the delivery and payment on the same network, the operation also dealt with the complexity of handling credits from different financial institutions.
In this case, a situation was simulated where a hypothetical Caixa client purchases a property from a seller whose financing was with BB. From there, the transfer of the property's encumbrance to Caixa was made, the financing was settled, the amounts were passed to the seller, and the remaining balance was financed to the buyer in their Caixa wallet. In all steps, the transmission of the deed was made digitally on the decentralized network on which Drex is being built.
Besides Caixa and BB, the cooperative consortium SFCoop (composed of Ailos, Cresol, Sicoob, Sicredi, and Unicred), Elo, and the National Operator of the Electronic Property Registration System (ONR) also participated in the tests of this use case.
Gabriel Queiroz, Innovation Manager at Elo, explains that each validating entity, both financial institutions and the ONR, had 'nodes' (computers responsible for validation, transmission, or data storage on a blockchain) in the network, and all documents and processes were tokenized, including the property deed. 'We simulated so that each client had a wallet in these institutions and did everything from start to finish to see how it would occur and what gains we would have,' he assesses. 'It's a quite promising flow in terms of efficiency gains.'
Now, the tests will focus on introducing a privacy tool so that transactions of this type can occur without visibility from anyone outside the agents participating in the operation and the Central Bank (BC). The privacy solution adopted for this use case is Harpo, developed by SFCoop.
The private initiative consortia participating in Drex are expected to deliver the results of their tests this month. Everything will then be condensed into a report that the Central Bank will publish later. Drex is in its second phase, during which tests of use cases are occurring where the Brazilian financial system could gain efficiency through the use of blockchain and tokenized assets.
During an event in São Paulo, Rogério Lucca, executive secretary of the Central Bank, said that Drex will have a third phase focused on solutions for tokenizing guarantees so that banks can increase access to credit for their clients and reduce spreads.
In a statement sent to Valor, SFCoop said that although the tests occurred in a controlled environment, the results indicate the viability of concrete transactions when the Drex network is opened for operations with real assets. 'The initial experiments indicate potential gains in efficiency and cost reduction, even without regulatory changes that could allow for more disruptive innovations,' said the cooperative consortium.
BB stated that it understands that the future of the real estate market will be impacted by tokenization. 'We had several design proposals during the execution of the use case 'real estate transactions' in the Drex ecosystem. The integration between the participating institutions and the ONR, representing the registries, contributed to the maturation of the prototype produced in the second phase of the pilot,' the bank pointed out.
BB also stated that the development has shown promise regarding the use of Drex in this market, as the designed flow took advantage of both the characteristics of blockchain – such as the transfer of information, documents, and values – and complied with current regulations and standards.