Dimitra AMA Summary: with Tag Ventures
First off, we want to give a big thank you to the Tag Ventures team and the Vietnamese Blockchain Community for all of the amazing questions and participation. We are very grateful to have a chance to speak with Tho from Tag today, and to see everyone’s curiosity. We hope that you will join us for future AMA’s and if you have further questions, feel free to join our Telegram group or reach out via email to our team.
In this AMA with Tag Ventures, our CEO Jon Trask shares some valuable insights into how Blockchain enhances agriculture and how the Dimitra platform differs from traditional ERP systems and more.
Q: We will start our AMA with segment 1: Warm up. First, could you please introduce your team and Dimitra?
A: “Dimitra Incorporated is an international company with a mission to deliver agricultural technology (AgTech) globally to farmers via the blockchain. Think of Dimitra as the operating system for Ag-Tech and the DMTR utility token drives the Dimitra ecosystem. Our overall team is located globally in over 60 countries.”
Q: That’s great! Thank you for the introduction Mr. Jon. What are the competitive advantages of Dimitra compared to other projects?
A: It is very exciting, we have recently signed a partnership with Innolite Vietnam to begin exploring agricultural projects in the region. We are a very comprehensive system that starts at the farm with farm registration, then focuses on aspects of soil preparation, planting, harvesting and then the final supply chain taking products to market or to export. No other system is as comprehensive as ours for the extended agriculture chain.
Our platform technically starts with blockchain, and then adds mobile devices, machine learning, IoT devices and many other emerging technologies.We are excited to explore these opportunities. I had a meeting a few days ago to discuss platform use in the coffee industry. Great Vietnamese Coffee.
Q: Yes, I love Vietnamese coffee! Now please share with us some new upcoming events, as well as big partners you have been working with during its development period?”
A: We have many great partners as we’ve been developing the project. On the crypto side we work with Unizen as part of the ZenX labs incubator. We also work with Morpheus.Network and integrate some of their software within Dimitra.
On the agriculture side we are working with governments, agencies and NGO’s in India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Uganda and many other countries. We will be announcing a new contract soon with the Uganda government to provide livestock management and genetics services to Uganda and the other Eastern African Countries. This platform will manage millions of animals and help build the Dimitra ecosystem in western Africa to help with animal health and traceability.
We have recently announced a deal in Brazil with the national fruit association to implement Dimitra to help solve supply chain challenges from farm to export. This organization manages 85% of the fruit exported from Brazil and Brazil is the world’s third largest fruit producing country. We expect this will generate years of work for us in Brazil. We are proud of what the team has built and the existing partnerships. Now working with Tag Ventures, we look forward to exploring opportunities in Vietnam.
Along with this answer, segment 1 of the AMA has been closed. I think people have had a better overview of Dimitra. Now we will turn to segment 2: Answer the closed question from Twitter. First of all, I would like to thank you to Tag’s members who have sent many questions about Dimitra to us.
A: Our project is global. We have divided the world into key regions: SE Asia and Oceania, South Asia, Europe, MENA, Africa, North America and Latin America. We have a regional director leading each region and then country sales partners in over 60 countries at the moment. Today we work with NGO’s, government agriculture and livestock ministries, not-for-profits to deliver our platform to specific groups which match its capabilities.
We do not sell to individual farmers at the moment. Next year, our SaaS model will come out and individual farmers will be able to license it. Once the SaaS model is completed in 2022 the platform will be available in all of the common App Store, Google Play, etc. Today a farmer would have to be a member of one of the farming associations or organizations with whom we work to receive the enterprise version.
A: I think AgTech has a bright future in a blockchain world. Agriculture and food is one foundation of life and will evolve as technology evolves. Decentralized services of blockchain align well with the regional needs of farming.
Farming and food is one of the largest economic verticals in the world and it is led by smallholder farmers. Over 570 million farms in the world are smallholder farms. They have great need for technology, privacy, financing, insurance. All of these can be delivered (and more effectively) with Blockchain. Another correlation is community. Agricultural communities have existed for centuries. Blockchain, social media and technology is all about community and is delivering new means of community to agriculture. Farming represents 1/3 of the world’s population and feeds 100% of the world’s population. I would guess every member of this group is somehow connected to a farmer.
A: We initially started using blockchain to manage identity and secure a farmers personal, business and family identity. Then we started thinking about how Blockchain communities mirror farming communities and how crypto is reliant on economic utility systems. We designed our entire platform around economic utility being a driver of the Dimitra ecosystem….”
Farmers have a need for financing, insurance, advice, technology all delivered through a blockchain based ecosystem. We have designed the platform to deliver all facets of this utility. We have outlined many of the features here: https://dimitratech.medium.com/why-dimitra-54bf7a662956
Blockchain has significant advantages over traditional structures. Blockchain is a great conduit for privacy for one — immutable records, protected ledgers. We can also share important information across a community. Aggregating data for machine learning through a blockchain ledger allows us to use analysis from thousands, even millions of farms in a region to help the entire community learn and improve their operations.
Nobody can see what the farmer down the road is doing because of blockchain but can benefit through the comparison of performance data being analyzed by machine learning and then shared with the greater community. Isn’t that much of what blockchain delivers? Transparency with privacy? Community separated by thousands of miles? The knowledge of the masses being applied to each unique case? I love how blockchain fits so well with AgTech.
A: Beyond all of those features we have designed our tokenomics to be a catalyst not only for our development but for the entire ecosystem. We are involved in projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
When our platform is used by livestock farmers for example, we need sensors which can be bought with Dimitra tokens. One of our projects alone has millions of cattle. The government wishes that each animal requires a sensor for food security, animal health and food safety. This drives hundreds of millions of dollars of demand for the system.
In some ways we are similar to an ERP system which keeps records for businesses. In some ways we are very different. Let me describe some similarities and differences.
Every ERP system helps record events and translates that to money in a ledger. We take that to another level that Microsoft Dynamics 365 doesn’t consider. We start at a farm and load information about that farm like soil conditions, equipment, crop or livestock goals. We then analyze that with machine learning and provide advice to a farmer to help them meet their goals. We then add in satellite imagery, farmer observations, soil analysis, weather information, topographical information, research from universities and agricultural research organizations.
Then our machine learning evaluates that and provides reports to help the farmers, the governments and farming association produce more crops, have healthier animals, all while reducing farming impacts on the environment in a very regenerative and sustainable manner.
For centuries we have been growing our crops with the goal of increasing output. Now we can achieve that but can also use science to start offsetting the impacts of food production on the environment.
A:Yes, our roadmap includes the development of a Defi based loans and insurance platform. We are in discussions with several projects and finance groups about how to deliver this to small farmers around the world. Our design is taking shape on how to deliver this globally at scale. At the moment the design itself is hush-hush but we will release more on this in early 2022.
When we are ready, we would love to come back and share a sneak peek with your group.
You all can learn more on our telegram channel https://t.me/dimitraofficialgroup
A: We have been audited by Certik, a link to our certificate can be found on our website or here: https://www.certik.org/projects/dimitra
A: Our roadmap is extensive, we’ve signed contracts providing for 18 million users. At the moment we are working on:
- a satellite soil project in India with millions of users
- a livestock project in east africa
- a fruit project in brazil
- the development of a SaaS model
- the Dimitra financial system
Each of these will be replicated globally across many countries.
A: The coin plays many roles:
1. Farmer points system provides incentive for farmer to use the system properly
2. Funding of IoT devices and services for project extension
Many more are listed in this medium article https://dimitratech.medium.com/why-dimitra-54bf7a662956
A: We look for feedback in many facets of development. We have an incubator program for new farm-tech and invite members of our community to be involved in selection. We take feedback daily from our social media channels and feed that into our dev teams for consideration.
A: We have so many partners and are developing more everyday. A great example that provides us reach is the IICA https://www.iica.int/en
I am a member of the advisory board helping shape technology direction for this group? This keeps us advised on what great technology is being considered as well as great connections as the board of the IICA are the ministers of agriculture in over 30 nations.
A: We have started signing sales partners in SE Asia and have 5 or 6 already working in the region. We think that it is an exciting market.
A: Our users are primarily farmers and many are not crypto-savvy. We have over a million users now and onboarding users everyday.
We also have a Dimitra Impact Fund which funds projects based on need and alignment. We bring other investor partners including governments into our projects exposing them to the power of crypto.
Thank you for having us to Tho and the Tag Ventures team for having us for this AMA. This has been a great experience. We appreciate you. Thank you all for your great questions, have a great day.
