Dimitra x Kucoin JP AMA Summary: June 8th, 2023

8 min readJun 14, 2023

On June 8th, 2023 our CEO Jon Trask and our Chief Digital Currency Officer Mike Meurin had the opportunity to join an AMA in the Kucoin_JP Telegram Channel. Here is the summary:

Jon Trask: Hello everyone. Thank you for having us here today. My name is Jon Trask, and I am the CEO and Founder of Dimitra Incorporated. I’ve built, developed, and implemented enterprise software solutions focusing on the blockchain, supply chain, traceability, finance, and agriculture. I have held several C-level positions with major multinational corporations. I love working with technology, building cool stuff, and, most importantly, I am on a mission to help farmers across the world with Dimitra.

Mike Meurin: Hi everyone. Thank you for having me here today. My name is Mike Meurin, and I’m Dimitra’s Chief Digital Currency Officer. I’m involved in all things crypto and blockchain focused at Dimitra. I’ve worked in blockchain and crypto since 2017. I started in custody. Before this, I was involved in data center technologies and end-user computing. In addition, I was a pro-studio music engineer/producer for 20+ years and worked at studios like Sony Music Studios in New York and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Jon or Mike, can you give the audience some information about Dimitra:

Dimitra is a blockchain-based agricultural technology company that is on a mission to bring elegant and useful technology to small farmers around the world at a very low cost. Dimitra does three main things with our data-driven approach. We help small farmers 1) increase crop outputs, 2) reduce their expenses, and 3) mitigate their risks from our data-driven approach.

Mike, we’ve heard you spent some time in Japan. We would love to hear a bit about your experience here.

Thank you for the great question. I’ve had a connection with Japan for a long time. I first came to Japan when I was sixteen and played badminton for Canada as a Junior and visited much of Sapporo. I lived and worked in Okayama in my early 20s as an English Sensei and School Director. I was fortunate to visit places like Shodoshima, Shikoku, Hiroshima, and Kobe and participated in interesting cultural festivities like Hadakamatsuri in Kurashiki. Most recently, I spent three months in Tokyo and visited Osaka, Hakone, and many of the zen gardens in Kyoto. Japan is a fascinating place for me, and I hope to return soon! I miss the sushi/sashimi and Onsen’s!

Can you provide an overview of your tech stack?

Dimitra’s tech stack consists of the following:

Mobile
Satellite technology
GPS
Drones
Track and Trace
IoT sensors (on the ground usually monitoring ground-level data)
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (around 50 reports)
Blockchain (DMTR is an ERC 20 token and so on Etherscan and have tested writing certificates to Polygon).

The true power of Dimitra is combining all these tech elements with our vast amounts of agricultural data and providing actionable data-driven insights. Dimitra works with 50 crops in 18+ languages, and we have contracts with 17 countries.

Can you discuss the DMTR token and how the token utility works?

Yes, the DMTR token is an ERC-20-based utility token. Please consider the DMTR as the gas within our ecosystem that drives everything.

I’ll explain DMTR’s utility in 2 parts.

PART 1:

First, we have built five mobile applications, and they are called:

Dimitra Connected Farmer
Dimitra Connected Coffee
Dimitra Deforestation Compliance Solution
Dimitra Livestock Guru Cloud and Commercial

These are all downloaded as mobile applications onto a user’s phone.

PART 2:

How the Utility of the DMTR Works:

When farmers want to use any of these applications, such as our Connected Farmer, they can pay for their licenses with DMTR tokens. If they want extended AI reports, they can buy with DMTR tokens. We are building a marketplace, and people can sell and buy goods in the market with DMTR. We’re also interested in providing farmers with insurance and loans, which will be done using DMTR tokens.

A concrete example of utility with the DMTR token would be our Indonesian coffee farmers buying their Dimitra Connected Coffee licenses with Dimitra tokens.

Here is an article on Cointelegraph that explains this exact use case.

Here are two articles about DMTR Utility:

https://dimitratech.medium.com/dmtr-token-utility-63af9992fd11

https://dimitratech.medium.com/empowering-global-growth-with-dimitra-efe1960a5d2b

If people in the audience would like to know more about DMTR tokenomics, feel free to visit our website here to learn more.

Jon, we saw that you recently won an award, can you please tell us a bit more about that?

Yes, of course! It was recently announced that we won the 2023 Government Blockchain Association Annual Achievement Award for the “Social Impact” Category. I was absolutely thrilled, and It is a great honor to receive this award because, at Dimitra, social impact and sustainability are more than just ideas to us. They are at the core of our goals and built into our platforms and what we work towards every day.

Can you tell us about your Sponsorship Program?

Aid programs have historically had issues with corruption and aid not getting to the farmers or people in need. It’s unbelievable but these things happen. For example, in Haiti billions went missing because of corruption .— https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/world/haiti-foreign-aid.html )

Therefore, I wanted us to make a difference and create a sponsorship program where people could sponsor farmers and know that they were sponsoring the people who needed our systems, with the whole process being transparent. Perhaps the easiest way is for the audience to walk through our explainer video here.

Plus, here is an article explaining our sponsorship program in specific.

Do you have any updates for the community?

Yes, we’ve just recently hired a new PR agency to increase Dimitra’s presence globally, and we’ve also hired a community engagement manager who is a long-time crypto veteran. We’re excited about the future!

Can you tell us about your Deforestation platform?

I’d love to! The EU recently passed legislation that if companies import seven core commodities (cattle, soybeans, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, and timber) into Europe, they will need to prove that their products are not linked to deforestation. Traders and agriculture operators won’t be allowed to place commodities and products on the Union market nor export them without prior submission of a due diligence statement.

To address this situation, Dimitra built a Deforestation Certificate solution for farmers, traders, importers and consumer packaged goods companies to ensure every shipment is compliant and meets the regulatory requirements. The solution combines satellite analysis, GPS data, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, and mobile technology, which allows operators to detect deforestation, prove compliance, and reduce the risk of fraud.

And the cool thing about it is this process is entirely dependent on blockchain and the Dimitra token. Dimitra receives a deforestation certificate request from a customer. We take payment for the request in fiat. We pay the necessary government filing fees in fiat. Our treasury immediately converts the balance in DMTR to generate the certificate and process the relevant transactions to the blockchain via the Dimitra DApp. Then we burn the tokens, recording the entire process on our blockchain-based platform for compliance.

If you’d like more information on the solution, please check out this video.

Why use blockchain?

Blockchain creates immutable records that are non-tamperable, time-stamped, and dated. These records provide a record of truth if a transaction has happened, and that record can’t be altered once it’s written to a blockchain.

At Dimitra, we use blockchain in many ways, such as customers paying for their licenses with Dimitra tokens. Another example of how Dimitra uses blockchain would be our Deforestation solution, where the Dimitra Deforestation certificate is written to the polygon blockchain to show whether the land has been deforested and the record cannot be changed.

How does Dimitra make money?

Some of Dimitra’s revenue streams:

Revenue from licensing our platforms (Connected Farmer, Connected Coffee, Livestock Guru platforms, and Deforestation).
Custom software builds — Dimitra does custom builds for features that customers ask us for (there are the out of box versions of our platforms, and then there is the possibility to customize applications).
Revenue generated from buying extra machine learning reports, and eventually we’ll be selling anonymized agricultural data sets via our partners Ocean Protocol and their data marketplace.
Buying things like extra IoT sensors for their farms and having to buy those sensors with DMTR tokens. As we onboard more and more farms, communities, and regions of countries, this will all add up over time.

*** Dimitra is contracted with organizations with 22 million farms + to use our platforms. This doesn’t mean they are implemented or that all 22 million + farms will take our platforms, but the governments we are working with want our platforms to be with as many of their farms as possible. It’s a very exciting time for us :)

COMMUNITY QUESTIONS/OTHER QUESTIONS

As far as we know, Dimitra also utilizes a lot of AI and machine learning technologies, can you tell us more about that? How do you see the latest developments in AI technology: From @Nitai1516

Great question @Nitai1516! We have been building AI capabilities into Dimitra since we started in 2021. I spoke with our head of data science yesterday, and we now have over 50 AI reports, and this number continues to grow weekly.

Three concrete examples of how we use AI would be:

Improving crop performance
Improving Animal Productivity and Animal Health
Helping tackle deforestation across the world

Here is an article that explains these use cases in detail and how Dimitra uses AI in our platforms.

The name is cool and I really like it. What is the origin of your name? From @okuokushima

Thank you for your compliment @okuokushima. Dimitra is a unique name. It was chosen as a nod to ancient mythology. In Greek culture, Demeter, or Dimitra, is the Goddess of Agriculture, responsible for bringing knowledge on how to cultivate the land and credited for producing successful harvests. This idea of providing resources to increase growth for farmers is aligned beautifully with our company, Dimitra.

Here is a medium post that provides a deeper overview of where Dimitra’s name came from.

Is there a Connected Farmer platform for Japan? I’m a farmer, so I’m worried about the weather, etc. If it’s available, I’d like to use it! From @446coin

Hello, @446coin! Thank you for your question. Dimitra has yet to have any customers in Japan. We would love to add Japan and the farmers of Japan to our customer list :). Please reach out to our team, and let’s see how we can work together.

I am very interested in how you support the different styles of agriculture in different countries. I would be very interested in learning more about this. From @sora3052

Thank you for your question @sora3052! Agricultural use cases differ from region to region with countries and can be very different from country to country. Dimitra currently works with around 50 crops in 18 languages, which will increase over time, but it is driven by customer demand. Therefore, we look at the customer’s pain point and their specific issue, and then we start to develop a plan on how to work together to solve the problem and build concrete next steps. This continuously varies from country to country as farming associations and farming cooperatives differ in every country. The key is to have everyone aligned and committed to the program’s long-term success.