Dimitra Community AMA Summary 1.26.22
Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today! We are excited to get together and have Jon Trask, our CEO and Founder answer some community questions. My name is Cassandra and I have been in the company’s communication coordinator role for the past 5 months and am pleased to be facilitating this AMA today.
Now, let’s get started! Jon, can you please give us a brief introduction about Dimitra?
Dimitra is an international company with a mission to deliver elegant and simple agricultural technology (AgTech) globally to farmers via blockchain.
Think of Dimitra as the OS or Operating System for Ag-Tech and the utility of the DMTR token drives the value within the Dimitra ecosystem. Dimitra has team members in over 68 countries and we hope to have this number reach over 80 countries in 2022.
In a nutshell, we are on a mission to help with food security, food traceability, increase food sustainability and more sustainable farming methods, and improve the lives of small farmers across the world.
Amazing, can you tell us about some of Dimitra’s achievements since launching?
Absolutely, we’ve had a momentous year. Dimitra has listed on Kucoin, Uniswap, Gate.io and Bitmart. We’re honoured and excited to be working with some of the top exchanges in the world.
In addition to this, Dimitra has won large contracts with: the Brazilian Fruit Growers Association which, to provide some context, is the 3rd largest fruit producing nation in the world, in India for 1.3 million farms and a 2nd deal for 350k farms, in Bangladesh for 1 million farms, in Uganda and, we just announced a deal with Nepal for 400k farms. We also expect to have more country announcements in 2022 and other crypto partnerships.
If you missed our year end recap, here is a comprehensive list of what we accomplished in 2021: https://dimitratech.medium.com/dimitra-2021-year-end-recap-d7b44b6766d5
I am very grateful for what we’ve achieved and none of it could have happened without the help of our amazing internal team, our developers, our Ag and Crypto partners, and most importantly the farmers across the world and the associations that work with the farmers.
What is new for Dimitra in 2022? Do you have any new announcements? Can you tell us about them?
I’d be happy to tell you about them and so far this year has been great!
We just announced a partnership with 3 NGO’s in Nepal to work with over 400,000 farms. Dimitra is going to provide new and innovative technology solutions for Nepal’s agriculture sectors in Tea, Cardamom, dairy, cereals, fish, fruits, vegetables, seed production and more. We’re going to help Nepalese farmers improve crop delivery to international export markets and to improve profitability for Nepalese farmers. Dimitra is also going to help Nepalese farmers develop more sustainable farming methods.
We also just announced our Agricultural CeDeFi Lending Platform, which is aimed at making microloans available to 570 million smallholder farmers around the world. Here is the article about this new initiative: https://dimitratech.medium.com/agricultural-cedefi-dimitra-lending-and-insurance-platform-32e1ee0b8435 This is going to be a game changer!
We also just announced a partnership with Ocean Protocol earlier this week. This partnership is about leveraging our advanced technology platform with Ocean which has an amazing data marketplace solution. All the farmers on our platform will be able to opt in if they would like to sell their data via the Ocean marketplace and earn extra revenue. Imagine the potential this could bring to farmers and nations by potentially selling their valuable agricultural data. This will also potentially help to offset costs of our projects in countries and put money back into farmers’ hands and will accelerate the exchange of vital datasets. Something like this has never been done before and it will empower farmers and bring Dimitra to the world in a new and novel way.
Stay tuned for many new and exciting announcements in 2022, and we look forward to sharing them with the Dimitra community!
I’ve heard Dimitra is getting into agricultural lending, can you briefly explain what this will look like?
Yes I’d be happy to. By utilizing a CeDeFi strategy to provide capital and insurance to operations in the agricultural industry, we have the ability to provide farmers access to new avenues of funding. This will also enable Ag-based centralized financial institutions to make an entry into the crypto market and share the risks and rewards by combining exciting new crypto concepts and solutions.
We’re going to help accelerate the world’s largest economic sector and also provide new opportunities globally within agriculture. We are going to partner with leading DeFi lending and insurance companies to provide these solutions to the farms and farmers who need the loans the most.
That’s a pretty heady description so perhaps I’ll add a little more about how it will work. Farmers who apply for the loans must be members of a farming cooperative or NGO, government, or an organization that we currently do business with. The Dimitra CeDefi loan program is not presently available to every farmer in the world, as it is currently in the trial phase. A farmer will have the ability to submit a loan application online and to help get their farm back on track through our Dimitra My Finance module. Once the evaluation of the loan application goes through, which is approved by smart contract, funds will be transferred automatically as USDT or another stable coin, and our local in-country partners will help with the conversion.
By partnering with local banks, lending institutions, or mobile money platforms — farmers can have increased access to loans throughout the platform. Banking the unbanked allows underserved communities to benefit from increased economic options and reduced banking fees and data costs.
How is the SaaS release coming along? Is it still on target for Q1 of 2022?
Thank you for the great question.
Yes, we are still on track to launch our SaaS model in Q1 of 2022 . Currently, we are beta testing and undergoing final improvements.
We will be piloting the SaaS model in March in India and South America. We are also adding different languages and will have English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Marathi to start. We are so excited to get this out to the world and our amazing team is pushing forward.
Version 2 of our SaaS will be published globally late this year after several months of customer feedback as we want to make sure it’s the best it can be.
Very cool! What else is on the 2022 roadmap?
Dimitra has big goals for 2022.
We hope to have agreements in place with over 20 countries, our SaaS model live, have over 80 country partners in place, and to double our headcount. Over the next 4 years we want to have 100 million farmers using our platform. Currently, the world-wide number of crypto wallets is around 225 million so imagine the impact Dimitra will have.
We are also accepting applications for our Dimitra Incubator, and the winners will be announced in Q2. We’re also finalizing our Dimitra Points Program which is also very exciting.
We have partnered with DroneX and are working on a few very interesting opportunities. We have a project announcement coming soon regarding the use of drones and Dimitra to combat Fall Army worm in a country of immense cultural and biological diversity, it’s known for its beaches and coral reefs. Inland are active volcanoes. Look forward to the announcement coming soon. We’ve also got some work to do with Ocean Protocol on the data marketplace. Hope you all saw the news today:
We’re also going to launch our updated website in Q1, we are going to have some cool videos come out, and we’ve got quite a few publications featuring Dimitra coming up, as well as conferences, AMA’s, and more partnership and project announcements / updates to come. Keep in mind exchange announcements will always come directly from the exchanges, we will never be first to announce. We will have a more detailed roadmap out in the near future. Keep an eye out on social media to see the latest updates!
How exciting! How many farmers are in your ecosystem at this point?
We have 1.3 million farms in India for a soil assessment and remediation project. This might be the largest soil reclamation project in the world.
Agzon Agritech also brings our Connected Farmer app to 350,000 farmers in India.
The scope of our projects with SOJAG in Bangladesh works in 500 villages and supports nearly 1 million smallholder and marginal farmers.
Our Nepalese partnerships with The NMC, the JBS, and Nepal Krishi Care Pvt Ltd. will bring our application to 400,000 farmers in Nepal. We also have Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia coming on board with millions of farms.
We have developed a Integrated Livestock Management and Genetics system for a genetic research center in Uganda which is focused on improving animal health through breeding programs in four countries in East Africa.
Otherwise we have a great partnership with Abrafrutas in Brazil, exploring how Dimitra’s technologies can be used to increase efficiency in Brazilian fruit farming, logistics and export.
Where can we find information on Tokenomics?
We have added some updated information to the website regarding our current metrics. You can find our total circulating supply, as well as our staked and unstaked percentages updated here: https://dimitra.io/token
You can also see our updated metrics live now on CoinGecko here: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dimitra CoinMarketCap will be live soon.
Also wanted to thank you for your amazing support, 81% of our token buyers are staking. Amazing!
And this is our last question, “I’m super interested in the company but as a non farmer, I’m a little confused about the utility of the $DMTR token. Why would I buy it if I’m not a farmer?”
Our token provides a great deal of utility. “Why Dimitra?” is a great resource to help investors understand the utility behind our Token. You can read that here: https://dimitratech.medium.com/why-dimitra-54bf7a662956
With our recent CeDeFi announcement our tokenomics changed drastically. The utility of the Dimitra token to lending can produce significant revenues, trading volume and profit which is all channeled into the token and our staking programs.
As a sneak peek, we have agreed with one of our top partners in Africa to work with a group of 25 banks and lending institutions in 15 countries who currently support millions of farmers. Our lending partner absorbs default risk with special insurance to reduce risk on the loans (this we will convert to DeFi insurance in the future) and implementation is through a network of farming cooperatives with over 50 million farmers.
We are also negotiating similar deals in SE Asia and South America.
THIS IS GOING TO BE HUGE!! Food and agriculture is the largest financial vertical in the world and is almost untouched in the crypto space. Our platform and reach gives us a strategic advantage as we help the farmers taking loans to be successful and with the community buying and staking Dimitra we can deliver millions (and maybe one day billions) in agricultural loans through the platform.
Wow, how exciting! Jon, thank you for all this great information. And a big thank you to the community for sending in these wonderful questions and joining us today. We will now open up the chat, if there are any additional questions feel free to post them and our team will look at answering a few of them!
The monthly release of the tokens, how will you guys take care of possible inflation? And is there any burn planned in the near future?
Great question and there are many components to the answer, I will outline a few.
We have mechanisms to control the release of tokens into the market so that our revenue increases greatly exceed the rate of token release. This is critical to allow for increase in token value.
With DEFI lending we also will have a significant number of the company tokens locked as an enablers to loans, the locked number will continue to grow to exceed the loan revenue.
We don’t have a burn strategy at the moment as our business is growing so quickly, instead we focus on locking at the moment. As we sign contracts and we get into implementation it takes time to realize the revenue. Some of our contracts lead to 10’s or 100’s of millions in revenue over their lifetime.
We have other strategies to aid in community confidence. For example, I am the largest investor in the token, but I cannot cash any of my tokens for two full years from our go-live last fall.
We should expand upon this question further in the future as there are many components to our strategy.
Hi! I want to know how small farmers can use your technologies.
Today, small farmers must belong to one of the farming associations that we have contracts with. Then they can download the app, with a special code provided by their association and start using it.
In the future we will release our SaaS model, that we discussed above, which would be available to every farmer in the world. This is being tested and is going out in limited release this quarter and out to most of the world later this year.
