Brazilian financial regulators’ new PIER data-sharing blockchain cost about $250,000 to build and it runs on the Quorum blockchain.

Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) began developing PIER in 2017 and launched it in early April. In total it cost the bank R$1,300,000, roughly equivalent to $252,700 USD, Press Officer Ivone Portes told CoinDesk.

But BCB is confident PIER will pay off. PIER is a unified data clearinghouse for BCB, the securities regulator (CVM), the private insurance regulator, (SUSEP) and eventually the social security superintendency (PRIVEC), replacing Brazil’s paper-based record sharing procedure with a fully digitized bureaucratic trove. 

Tasks like business authorization “that took many hours or days” under the old process “now can take even seconds, since data is available online,” Portes said in an email. 

PIER also makes that data more reliable by pulling it from the source, Portes said. It runs on JPMorgan’s open source Quorum blockchain, an Ethereum-based platform that BCB said is overlaid on a “private IT infrastructure.” BNamericas reported that PIER also utilizes Microsoft Azure cloud computing. 

The blockchain gives each regulator easy access to its sister agencies’ records. That will help them process information – from vetting political appointees, to conducting financial investigations, to authorizing companies – more quickly and cheaply.