Children of the Corn: A New Type of Agricultural Futures Exchange
As the tenet goes, write about what you know, and I have spent the majority of my life in the grain and soybean producing region of the central United States. My firm, Decet, is working and developing within the Tezos ecosystem , sponsored by a generous grant from the Tezos Foundation.
This is an introduction of sorts and the first in a series of articles that will be published by Decet on Tezos fueled decentralized applications as they relate to agriculture, specifically, grain and bean markets in the central United States.
Decet will design and market a new product and financial ecosystem for farmers and grain elevators to transact with each other and allow them to benefit from futures and options contracts in the same way the trading houses and major exchanges have over the last century.
I will be the first to admit that grain and bean futures are neither the sexiest nor most entertaining application of decentralized technologies, but Crypto Kitties and digital Bitcoin casinos can only push the crypto sector so far toward large scale adoption. We need to find areas of established industries and provide a better decentralized alternative to what is currently offered.
As a protocol, I am of the firm conviction that Tezos is primed as the ascendant blockchain and will soon come to hold a very strong position in this sector. Utilizing the Tezos blockchain, Decet will build this new type of localized yet distributed commodities contract exchange, allowing for a significant increase to the farmers, grain elevators and exporters’ profit margins.
As one of the most striking components of blockchain technology is its ability to revolutionize transactions of value in markets and exchanges, we believe that grain and bean commodities markets are ideal candidates for a Decet built and Tezos fueled entry into this space. Our push to decentralize traditional markets will begin in the corn fields.
Our inroads into the agricultural economic markets will begin with specifically designed software and protocols meant to benefit the producers, not the clearinghouses nor exchanges. Our push into this massive and important economic sector will begin, literally, from the ground. The top is bloated and inefficient; we intend to implement our changes from an opposite yet equally powerful direction; from the soil.
As we progress toward our goal, a Tezos powered exchange that will allow farmers and grain elevators to trade futures options contracts for the basis price among themselves, we will continue to publish articles that highlight the technical aspects of our prototype by referencing Decet’s Tezos Developer Documentation.
We hope that this will pique an interest in those motivated designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to build their own projects on Tezos as well as keeping the community and rapidly growing user base and ecosystem informed on our progress.
This is one of the many real world use cases of a decentralized application on a blockchain protocol. We hope that this project and the associated documentation will provide a launching pad for those who wish to design and build their own application on Tezos as we all plod along to a decentralized future.
Gordon Speagle
Decet