Dimitra X Morpheus.Network AMA | Nov. 23 2021

Morpheus.Network CEO and founder Dan Weinberger sat down to have a conversation with Dimitra Technology CEO and founder Jon Trask to have a partnered AMA. This AMA answered community questions asked through Twitter and Reddit. Morpheus.Network is a supply chain automation platform that includes many different integrations, Dimitra being one of those integrations and partners. Dimitra technology is an international company with a mission to deliver AgTech globally to farmers.

Let’s get some background on Morpheus.Network and Dimitra, how long have we have been working together? What are some of the things we have done together?

Dan: The partnership first happened in 2019, and it has been quite the journey. We’ve done some amazing work together, worked on a ton of projects and proposals. Aside from that we actually got to meet up in Montreal, we did some lunch-and-learns together. Interesting corporations and what we are doing with our technologies. It’s been a really great road together Jon, I’ve conveyed this to a lot of community members, when it comes to Dimitra and what you’re doing, it’s just simply unbelievable. Jon is a fantastic guy and we go back years and I am looking forward to many years of amazing business together.

Jon: It’s interesting some of the things that we were working on, from a supply chain perspective, we did a great proposal on soybean at one point together and although that project didn’t go through, it did form the basis around what we are building in Dimitra and how we integrate with Morpheus, we got some good opportunities from that.

We just signed a contract with one of the agencies in Brazil, the cooperative that essentially manages 87% of Brazil’s exports, and we’re investigating with them how to manage farms to export. That’s going along really well and a big part of that will be Morpheus from a documentation perspective from the port.

Information on the Brazil Partnership: https://dimitratech.medium.com/dimitra-announces-new-partnership-with-brazilian-association-of-fruit-producers-exporters-ff794d1c18d7

This Dimitra deal starts with the crops and fruits and moving those to an export status and Morpheus has some great export management features which we will API into the system for them and feed the info into the Morpheus network to track some of those fruits as they move from Brazil to other countries.

In addition to the Brazil deal, we’ve got a number of deals going on in the world. We’ve got a great project going on in India doing soil analysis with satellites, and we are starting by integrating IoT sensors and farmers’ observations. It’s a very large project with 1.3 million farms.

Dan: The systems we’re building around logistics work hand in hand with what Dimitra is doing with the farms themselves. So, when you’re talking about the export process as opposed to someone trying to figure out how to generate these documents and who to supply them to, we build this all into the platform so it’s completely automated, allowing these exporters to handle their entire system in an automated fashion. It completely revolutionizes global trade.

There are some horrible problems in global trade going on right now, and the systems that Jon implements with Dimitra by helping farmers, and what we are doing with Morpheus is going to help so many of these problems. Consider what is happening in Vancouver with these horrible floods, taking out the rail lines, Vancouver being a major port city for Canada allowing all the containers from China to be delivered all across the country, that’s all shut down right now. A flood like this is a black swan event — like a Covid event — With the mismanagement of ports that we are seeing in places like LA, Long Beach, Shanghai, comparing it to port systems, to port operators in Miami is completely night and day how they are handling their ports. They have no systems in place and they handle the traceability of all these containers coming in and there is a whole backlog of containers.

There is a perfect storm of problems going on with shortages in labor as well, crane operators whether its port labors or truckers to take away the containers, all these problems confound to each other and with covid and the people basically buying in bulk, buy products off shelves thinking there is some kind of supply issue when really they are just increasing demand for one single person, pushing that across the whole population. It is really quite a perfect storm that we are seeing in supply chain but all these issues that we are seeing can be solved by simple digitalization tools that are being built by Dimitra and Morpheus to help companies in countries that are having these congestions all around the world. So, another great question in this AMA is what Dimitra is working on and what Morpheus is working on, and how many people are impacted by these solutions.

Jon: Right now we’ve got over a million people on the system and we’ve signed up deals that will bring us to about 18 million. If you look at the actual people impacted, particularly in the global supply chain, those shipments are feeding millions and maybe hundreds of millions of people. It’s a shame what is going on in the world, and some of the challenges that the environment and other things are impacting shipments and delaying shipments. There is a huge impact from a food perspective as a lot of that is fresh produce and it is essentially just sitting there, rotting in containers because of some of these distribution issues. Certainly, Morpheus and Dimitra together can help manage some of those problems, so that we can prioritize distribution to reduce loss and reduce waste. Those are some of the reasons that our customers are coming to us because those are the challenges that they have. There is so much waste and loss in the logistics system in the world with fresh food and exporters are trying to get better at it. Ports and customs agencies are trying to get better at clearing that and create a more efficient system that allows the appropriate paperwork to be processed, to make sure it gets in on time and to make sure that is accurate, and to make sure that we have the appropriate provenance, and we see hundreds of millions of consumers being impacted by the system, even today.

Dan: That’s a powerful statement, and when we say impact — this is a matter of feeding people, right? It’s a matter of people starving or not, so it’s not a simple thing if they get some sort of luxury in their hands, this is just simple food. With Morpheus, you know the world of global trade is a 15 trillion dollar industry, so tackling it as heavily as we can with all the different vertices we’ve already tapped into, working with Gulftainer, the world’s largest privately-owned port operator, is obviously absolutely huge for us. They are teaching us so much when it comes to port operations and being that API hub for Gulftainer is just amazing and you know to push these solutions out to other ports as well. Now one thing with Morpheus is we are constantly expanding to different places around the world, internationalization, you know the different global languages we have to import into the platform, localization. We are working with different currencies and timezones and all of that is built into the platform as well so it’s a ton of work for the team but it does make sense obviously as we keep on growing. With Jon and your reach in Africa as well as different geographies, we keep on growing the utilization of the platform.

How can you get closer to Dimitra’s goal for small farmers in collaboration with Morpheus.

Jon: One of our objectives is to work more with smallholder farmers and small independent farmers. Between those small farmers and taking the product to market or export, typically there are cooperatives or packing houses, various methods of consolidation, and Dimitra together with Morpheus provides a great tool because a user can log right into the Dimitra platform and start their shipment. We API into the Morpheus Network and can actually help farmers when they go and pick and they pick enough tomatoes or whatever the produce may be, label that bin of tomatoes and actually take that data and transfer it to the Morpheus system and it is seamless. The farmer does not know they’re transferring it to the Morpheus system, they just know they have created a bin of tomatoes and they are shipping. The API does all the work to move it from one system to the other and so Morpheus plays a great role in helping those individual smallholder farmers from an export perspective, from a documentation perspective, and from a shipping perspective. We can look at it as an upstream and downstream food chain, and water flows downstream. Morpheus is an expert at managing that downstream and Dimitra is an expert at managing that upstream. Together we provide quite a platform for farmers around the world. Dan, do you have thoughts on how we work together to help small farmers?

Dan: Yes, most definitely, I feel like what Morpheus is doing to give an example with Federated Co-op is one of the largest food suppliers in Canada. They are a massive food supplier and they do work with farmers to sell their product through FCL like Jon was saying, us working with FCL and accepting the data from those smallholder farmers, having Dimitra work with those small-holder farmers from that end of it just makes complete sense for us to join forces together and have all these different farmers around the world contributing to our different systems that were working on. One thing that we can also provide to the Dimitra platform is all the different integrations we’ve been working on for years now, we have hundreds and hundreds of integrations. If extra robust data is required for these containers of shipments of food, whatever it would be, we can add those IoT integrations with our partners. All different devices that do different things based on the data that is required, and adding in the automation and compliance of the documentation, is definitely a good value add for Dimitra and Dimitra clients as well. We’re happy to work with Jon and have a great connection with your partners and this is a huge benefit for us.

How will smallholder farmers using the Connected Farmer platform benefit from the partnership of Dimitra and Morpheus? How do we promote this cooperative to the communities that are still struggling to fit into the ag-tech and blockchain world?

Jon: We do a lot of work in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia and we have a great team. We have salespeople in over 60 countries and Dan has salespeople all over the world as well. We are talking to governments, farming cooperatives, agencies, and ag-tech companies every day and we need to continue having those conversations and determine which leads are out there and where we become a good fit. I think our interest level is very very high and our adoption level is high, we’ve signed a number of deals, we’ve announced a few deals in the past few months and we’ve got a few more deals coming that will be announcing global agtech projects and I think the Dimitra and Morpheus piece really ties things together.

Dan: Talking about any user for Morpheus or Dimitra, I know Jon you’d agree with this is that, we can speak all day about the amazing technologies but if it’s not easy to use, that’s always in the back of our minds, we have to allow the use of the platform to function properly. We’re always working with our clients on that. We really have to form our product based on the benefits and if it’s easy to use.

Jon: There is a question here about robotics in space gathering steam?

Dan: Regarding space supply chains specifically, we did have that new partnership with (GEC)Geometrik Engine Corporation — great projection with SpaceX (Doge-1 mission to the moon) People ask us what is with the supply chain automation when it comes to space, shipments into space, but that’s not obviously what we’re working on right now. We are working on the parts and pieces that go into space, into that satellite, they have to be certified and looked at by engineers and there is a whole bunch of documentation and certification that goes on behind these parts. That’s where Morpheus comes in.

Jon: Do you get to go up in space with Elon?

Dan: I believe Elon is one of the few billionaires who have the ability to go up to space and hasn’t taken that chance yet. It’s not in my agenda, I feel like Morpheus members would be worried if I’m launching myself into space aimlessly, but if there is a need to go up into space, I will be there.

What is the joint roadmap for the two projects going forward?

Dan: We have our heads down, scaling up and growing. We’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing clients set up our platforms and scale it up, extrapolate it all around the world to amazing companies that can benefit from it. That goes hand-in-hand with what we’re doing with Dimitra, since they’re working with smallholder farms, our system that we have in place for supply chain compliance and supply chain automation just makes complete sense. Our road map is to keep on growing with our partners around the world.

I think another question was about projects disappearing, this leads right into that. We’ve been working on this for years. I’ve been in supply chain for over 20 years myself and Jon has for over 25 years. If people are worried about the founders and companies disappearing, that is absolutely ridiculous. We are so dedicated to this project and we are not going anywhere.

Jon: Yeah, I’ve worked in supply chain for over 25 years and worked on over 150 projects, and now, Dimitra is my baby. It is something I think we can expand around the world and we will have projects in countries around the world every year. I expect next year we will sign about 10 contracts. This year, I think we’re going to come out with 8 major contracts that we’ve signed that are all very large in scope and affect a lot of countries and continents (millions to tens of millions of dollars in revenue) with millions of users in some of them or hundreds of thousands of users in many, so we’re continuing to look for those projects. Now that we have our Dimitra token we have some avenues to help with funding some projects and providing Dimitra token grants which will start with some of those nations that maybe don’t have the budget to get going but have profitable projects in the long run so we can work on providing some grants. That leads me to the next question… You had a recent announcement, you just launched on Kucoin, tell me a little bit about that.

Dan: It’s a fantastic exchange, Kucoin, people can go on and see that we’re trading as a USDT pair right now, very very exciting. I will say to our community listening that we are also trading on Gate.io, another amazing exchange as well. We’re working on a few more exchanges right now as well. Kucoin has been amazing to work with, their communication has been great.

Jon: Yea Dan, it’s great you’re working with Gate and Kucoin, we’re also working with them. Kucoin was our first exchange and we just launched on Gate.io yesterday. We are really excited to be working with Gate as an exchange, they are our 3rd centralized exchange and we’ve got a few more exchanges coming in the next few months.

This question is specifically about explaining how our projects remain agile and live on the Ethereum chain with high fees.

Dan: Through the platform itself, we have been working with our own private side chains to reduce fees as much as possible but it does get expensive, as you know. Ethereum does have a large developer base so it is constantly expanding and improving its technology. We’ve actually designed the platform and developed it from the beginning to be Blockchain agnostic, meaning that we could move over to another chain as needed. We are always evaluating other solutions. These are conversations that are always happening but overall we are happy with Ethereum.

Jon: We have a farmer points program and our farmer points are provided in Dimitra tokens. We calculate and register the points, and then we do a roll-up. The roll-up contains many transactions, many thoughts of farmer points transactions, and then it rolls up into one transaction from a gas perspective. We can apply thousands, and even more, and make the gas fees only pennies per transaction. Or even less than that depending on how many people are receiving it from that perspective. We are sensitive to gas fees and were working on a lot of initiatives internally to look t diff platforms. Our Chief Digital Currency Officer Mike Muerin, is constantly looking at partnerships in the crypto space, so you will see some announcements on those over the next few months. We will continue those conversations and hope for one of those conversations to lead to another great partnership like the Morpheus x Dimitra partnership.

Dan: I am so excited about what we’re doing, what Dimitra is doing. If anyone has any questions, please reach out to us because we love to talk about it. The team is working hard, we’re working hard, and everyone is excited. That’s all I have to say.

Jon: Thank you for your time here today and our team will be out to all of those winners who came out with the great questions we had today. Happy Tuesday everybody!

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for the AMA, we will be reaching out to our top-question winners. Winners of the $DMTR and MNW giveaway are listed below.

@AnothPerso

@9AuaJh5JjpO9LzW

@TendaiADhodho

@Fmeweg

@Mastsethi

@Kr8zytiger