Hello everyone in the Autonomi Community!
I’m @Edmund_Sutcliffe and the founder of the REGRU Marketplace, an online marketplace where customers will buy products and trace them all the way back to the verified regenerative farms they originally came from.
The Problem(s)
- Agriculture, the production of food and fibre form the Earth’s land and seas, is responsible for the majority of ecological destruction that happens in the world today.
- Customers are unconscious of the impact of the purchases and how they affect the way agriculture is practiced
- Farmers are not financially incentivised or rewarded by the current supply chain to regenerate and restore their land and rivers, often having to sell their products as undifferentiated into commodity markets
My Solution(s)
- A marketplace where every product is traceable back through the supply chain, the different processes and transformations, all the way to the farm
- The farm is verified that they are regenerating their land through direct measurements (Ecological Outcome Verification by the Savory Institute)
- Training and support are provided to the farm to help them continue regenerating their land and staying profitable
- Improvement over perfection
3 Main Types of Users
- Farms - producing the original products (livestock, crops, etc)
- Businesses - processing these into value added products
- Customers - purchasing these products from the businesses or direct from farms
Business Model
- There are transaction fees on the marketplace
- These pay for the Measurements, Training and Support, ensuring they are free at the point of use for the farmer and that we are growing together
- Farmers also receive a bonus from ongoing transactions as their original product is processed and sold by others, enabling them to benefit as the foundation of the supply chain
Practical Considerations and Questions
- Traceability - Initially I thought NFTs were the answer to track all the products but it seems it might be possible to accurately and verifiably track the products through Autonomi’s immutable data? This would definitely be preferable as even with using a L2 solution or similar, using NFTs with a platform of this level of complexity could rapidly become financially unfeasible. Would really love to hear everyone’s thoughts on how to do this!
- Payments - Most people using this marketplace will not be well versed with crypto, or at all, and so it needs to be completely easy to use and very much ‘Web2’ for most people using fiat currency etc. Autonomi and crypto would very much be the secret sauce that makes it all work. Any thoughts or advice would be very welcome!
I will have a thousand other questions about this to be sure.
Thank you for this amazing opportunity!
11 Likes
I don’t know how traceability is done or your particular requirements around this. Can you explain the problem/needs in ways a dumb programmer can understand. Asking for a friend 
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I’m not even a dumb programmer so you’re ahead of me there!
This might help. I want to be able to trace all the information about a product, through the app. So going forward
- Farmer lists a cow for sale. Information about the animal and farm are encoded into it.
- Abattoir purchases cow. Information about the sale, time etc are encoded into it.
- Abattoir turns cow into quarters, a hide, and many other products. Information about the processing, when it was done etc is encoded.
- A Butcher buys the quarters which have the information about the cow and farm they come from. Purchase information is encoded.
- Butcher turns the quarters into steaks, mince, burgers etc.
- Customer buys these products and can see the whole journey back to the farm and verify that the farm is regenerative.
All this is to happen on the marketplace app. All these steps and sales will happen on the marketplace. Does that make sense and answer your question?
This could be achieved through NFTs, metadata, hierarchical links etc but how would one do it on Autonomi?
2 Likes
I would create some kind of custom blockchain that has a information field for every transaction concisting of numbers/letters representing different things like type of cow, what it has been fed, what country/farm it comes from and so. A code of number and letters on food packages would corespond to the info for every transaction on the blockchain.
You could have different blockchains for consumers and B2B or others.
I am just thinking out loud.
From a quick read (thanks) answering your question seems a straighforward yes it can be done. For example:
- Farmer creates an identity from a private key they own and only they can sign information with this key. Some body/process can certify that this farmer is who they say they are (business name, Co’s house ref etc.). So when the farmer signs into the app, data they create is known to be from her.
- Theres an append only record of things which only this farmer can write to. Birth of a cow, sale of that cow etc.
- Similarly for anyone else in the chain. I bought this cow, slaughtered, processed, sold on to…
All this can be recorded in an immutable traceable chain of actions. Registers support this using GraphEntry or a custom structure based on that can be used. (Dumb programmer’s decision 
that you don’t need to know about other than it is traceable and immutable once an entry is added, a correction could be added but no entry can be erased. Ideal for audits, and all this data can be public so long as you know the address which the farmer shares on some public forum.
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Hi @happybeing , thank you so much for your help, it’s fantastic to know that it is possible to handle the traceability element within Autonomi.
My next set of questions is about payments.
How could they be handled within Autonomi right now?
Is Arbitrum One fully integrated into the network?
How could I manage fiat currency, crypto and transaction fees?
Thank you for your patience with my dumb questions!
2 Likes
I haven’t thought about this at all so can’t say much, but it would all be done separately from Autonomi APIs because all payment handling is on the arbitrum-one network.
On a traceability side, I would seek for a solution, where we can fully use Autonomi types potential. GraphEntry looks promising, where each entry can be a separate product (a cow, a quarter, a steak, a hamburger), and input/output relations are the division/ingredients: a cow has feed as an input, and 4(?) quarters + hide as outputs, a hamburger has a patty, lettuce, tomato and bread as inputs, etc.. Also, each product has it’s own properties – age of a cow, fertilizers used for growing a lettuce (or should it be input?), does farmer regenerate soil? does butcher use green power? does a restaurant employ disadvantaged people? what country does the company pay taxes in? etc.
On a payment side, I would not try to feed crypto down people’s throats, but just record payment info on Autonomi. Could be a bank receipt, but also a blockchain transaction id, why not.
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