Ligue 180: Hyperledger Fabric’s Role in Answering Women’s Calls for Help in Brazil
Read the case study here.
In Brazil, four women are murdered every day because of their gender. In 2025, the country recorded a record 1,518 victims, the highest number since femicide became a distinct crime under Brazilian law in 2015. Behind each statistic is a woman who might, at some point, have called for help.
Many did call. Ligue 180 (Dial 180) is Brazil’s national hotline for women experiencing violence. In 2024, the hotline handled over 750,000 interactions. With over 2,000 interactions per day flowing through multiple channels, including phone, WhatsApp, and email, and complaints routed to hundreds of organizations across Brazil’s protection network, the system depends on humans using a patchwork of legacy databases.
But the sheer scale of the operation creates risk. Documents can be misfiled. Records can be lost in handoffs between agencies. Data can degrade as it moves through systems that were never designed to talk to each other. And in systems handling evidence of serious crimes, there’s an additional risk that records could be deliberately altered or suppressed. For women considering whether to proceed with a report, the system’s integrity is as important as its existence.
Brazil’s Ministry of Women looked to its technology partners, BrBPO–Metasix Tecnologia, to see if an enterprise technology designed to make business transactions error- and tamper-proof could do the same for the records of women reporting crimes against them. Together, they evaluated blockchain platforms against the specific requirements of a government system that handles sensitive victim data.
Hyperledger Fabric, an LF Decentralized Trust project, stood out for several reasons. Its permissioned network model provided the controlled access and governance this system required. Its support for private data collections meant sensitive information could be shared only among authorized participants. Certificate-based access ensured that organizations could join the network only with verified digital credentials.
And, as an open source platform under LF Decentralized Trust, it provided something especially important for a public-sector client: vendor independence. No single private company controls the platform, its pricing, or its future direction, which is a critical consideration for government infrastructure designed to operate indefinitely.
The Hyperledger Fabric solution now connects to the existing patchwork of government databases and communication channels and adds an immutable blockchain layer on top to guarantee the integrity of every record passing through. The system currently sustains one to two million transactions per month.
Following the implementation of blockchain on the Ligue 180 platform, the annual average of complaints rose from approximately 90,000 to 148,000 in just one year. While multiple factors likely contributed, including the August 2024 restructuring of Ligue 180 as an independent service and heightened public attention to femicide, the pattern suggests that system credibility played a role.
Women who might previously have stayed silent came forward because the system gave them confidence that their reports would be handled reliably.
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The LF Decentralized Trust team worked with member BrBPO as well as Metasix Tecnologia and Brazil's Ministry of Women to document the goals and impact of deploying a Hyperledger Fabric-based platform for Ligue 180. The case study delves into architecture, governance, and performance and lays out what’s next. This includes an expansion as Ligue 180 transforms from a federal hotline into a connected national protection network, with 16 states already integrated and eight more in negotiation. Future plans include adding smart contracts for rule validation, integrating external data sources, and providing development support for Hyperledger Fabric 3+.
Read the full case study here.