Dimitra x ICO Pantera AMA: November 2nd, 2021
Did you miss our latest AMA hosted by ICO Pantera with Dimitra’s CEO, Jon Trask? Check out some of the questions asked here. Thank you to ICO Pantera and the Korean community for hosting this AMA on November 2nd, 2021. We appreciate all of the questions that were asked and are grateful to have had the chance to share our project with your community.
Q: What made you combine agriculture and blockchain?
A: A few years ago, we were working on a project in Africa regarding identity.
The identity of farmers, businesses, individuals. This included financial information. This data contains a lot of private information where trust of the network is the most important feature for our government customers.
Blockchain became a great enabler to deliver trust to the users and the governments. This project has continued to grow to include unique identity of animals including the registration of their medical history, health, vaccinations. It also includes logistics and export, and then finally crops.
Q: What profit model does Dimitra generate revenue through?
A: We have paying contracts with world governments, NGO’s and not for profits, with licensing fees determined by numbers in a few categories:
1) number of users
2) number of animals registered
3) number of hectares of land analyzed
We also sell IoT sensors to track animals, Genomics analysis, Satellite analysis, market and commodity services and next year we will be adding loans and insurance.
It is a volume business. Typical licensing contracts are in the millions of USD and sensors can be 100’s of millions. We also provide a platform for other software company’s to deliver their services to our customers.
Q: The high gas cost of ERC-20 is felt as a burden when using tokens. Is there a reason why you made DMTR Token based on ERC-20?
A: We agree that gas costs are high, and it was a concern that we wrestled with when starting the project. This was a decision about selecting a network that could be trusted by world governments. To our customer, trust was more important than any other factor initially.
ERC-20 is simple, established and trusted. We looked at several alternatives but as we talked to our customers (who in some cases are just learning about blockchain) they were concerned about, trust, data integrity, security, longevity and solid business fundamentals.
World governments are risk averse and require a great deal of education regarding the benefits and risks of blockchain. They look for compliance, also acceptance by large global corporations. Our initial blockchain was designed on Quorum, a derivative of Ethereum by JP Morgan. Their adoption played a large role in convincing a few customers.
Q: I wonder how Dimitra is used in the farmer platform ecosystem and what kind of positive impact do you want to have on the ecosystem in the future?
A: We are looking to put our technology into the hands of as many farmers as possible to help them Increase their yield, reduce their costs and mitigate their risks.
Smallholder farmers are very underserved in the technology world and are unlikely to buy technology as it is such a large cost as part of their budget.
We know that we can greatly impact a farmers lively-hood through the adoption of Dimitra. Their governments know that they can help improve outputs addressing a number of challenges like, employment, poverty, feeding their communities and increasing GDP.
We want to gain the adoption of 100 million farmers in the world. We are making great strides with over 1 million users and contracts to onboard over 15 million.
Q: Will Dimitra have a product that can be loaned out to help poor farmers bid on crops and livestock? If yes, do you need some form of collateral? Also, do you have insurance products ready for them?
A: We have a market that allows farmers to sell their products and buy their supplies. We are working with a number of lenders who provide crop loans to farmers to help them get their seed and fertilizer. Each lender has their own criteria to guarantee their capital.
We are looking into insurance platforms now and hope to have that running in 2022. There is big demand for crop insurance in the world. It is very critical to farmers as so much of their income is based on one harvest that can be affected by so many disasters.
Q: What is the advantage to holding $DMTR tokens?
A: There are many advantages. Firstly agriculture is largely untouched for crypto investors. It is one of the world’s largest business verticals. Everybody eats!
We have a great article that outlines some of the reasons an investor would consider Dimitra token: https://dimitratech.medium.com/why-dimitra-54bf7a662956
Q: Recently, many projects have been issuing NFTs. We are gathering a lot of fans while stimulating scarcity. Do you have any intention to issue NFT for the Dimitra project?
A: We are considering NFT’s as a tool to provide crop certificates and crop loans.
We have a very exciting project in development trying to solve some of the management of loans and rights to products. NFT’s may be a great fit to solve this challenge.
Q: I want to know if Dimitra is developing the mainnet. Do you have any plans to expand your platform by creating your own ecosystem?
A: We are building out an ecosystem to allow other developers to build on the Dimitra Platform.
Our ecosystem provides for software and hardware providers to be able to reach the Dimitra users. The ecosystem is important from a scale perspective. So many great ideas and companies who are delivering components of what the farmers need.
We need a community of developers to build the future of agriculture. We see the Dimitra ecosystem as the operating system for agriculture. We’ve already got some great partners in Morpheus, and Unizen and are adding more as we speak.
Q: It will be an important variable for farmers around the world to use the platform well and collect reliable data. Is there any difficulty using the platform? Is it easy for farmers who are old or lack knowledge to use it?
A: Our platform is mobile based for farmers. We consider language, usability and literacy with each implementation. User experience is a key to success.
We partner with governments, NGO’s and not for profits to deliver training to large groups of farmers and also rely on our partner ecosystem to show advantages to farmers.
Q: The role of nodes and their participants in the blockchain is a very essential element. So, how does Dimitra’s node form and what about compensation plans for node participants?
A: We have staking and nodes within our existing operations. Staking is up to 13% APY and nodes can be substantially more. We have several types of nodes depending on whether they are fulfilling just the blockchain functions or if they are also providing analytics and storage capabilities. You can learn more in our whitepaper here:https://dimitra.io/token
