Water Ledger, an Australian-grown project based out of Queensland, has launched its pilot project in the far north of their home state.
Built as a blockchain solution for the trading of water rights, the pilot project is being undertaken to evaluate blockchain’s potential to improve Australia's legacy, highly inefficient water markets.
Currently in Australia, trading in water rights and licences is a complex, slow and fairly opaque process. In New South Wales alone, more than 38,000 water licences are in circulation, but individual ownership is difficult to determine. While there is a central register of licence ownership, it is not free to access, and fees must be paid for every search. The ultimate effect is that finding out the owners of every water licences currently issued in NSW would cost approximately $558,600. The cost of searching registers throughout the country would be greater still.
