Fishcoin at Seafood Expo Asia, Hong Kong
Following successful fieldwork testing the mFish app with Thai Union Group near Phuket, Alistair Douglas, Jayson Berryhill and Alastair Smart headed to Hong Kong to present the Fishcoin Project to the annual Seafood Expo Asia in Hong Kong.
The presentation: Fishcoin is a project developed by Singapore’s Eachmile Technologies, and offers seafood harvesters in developing nations an incentive to collect data on their catch. Utilizing blockchain technology, Fishcoin provides tokens for topping up their mobile phone data plans in exchange for collecting and submitting information on their harvest.
The motivation behind the initiative is to gather more data in areas where the industry largely doesn’t have any way to increase the efficiency and sustainability of fisheries and aquaculture operations. Eachmile, being a technology driven global seafood trading business saw this ecosystem approach as the only way to get the essential traceability to the source, “the first mile”, required by downstream buyers, exporters, importers, retailers, chefs and consumers.
With more than 12,000 different species spread over an industry that by some estimates provides the livelihood for one in 10 people in the world, collecting accurate data in an efficient cost-effective way has been difficult. The piece of the puzzle that has been missing, has been incentivizing the harvesters to collect accurate data. While many buyers and retailers can get added value out of traceability, the start of the supply chain misses out despite being the ones that put in the majority of the work. With no benefit to be gained, adding extra effort for traceability can be a difficult proposition, especially in cases where that traceability comes at a price.
The Fishcoin project presents a solution to the problem. Eachmile, is in collaboration with the GSMA — an international organization representing more than 750 mobile phone operators worldwide (representing 3.5 billion subscribers) — and has developed a way to give fishers, and fish farmers a “top-up” on their pre-paid mobile data plans in exchange for collecting data on their harvest.
Data plans are one of the few universal commodities that fishers and fish farmers in developing nations have. In many regions, something like cryptocurrency or a bank transfer is effectively useless, as they often don’t have bank accounts or any way to use the currency in the first place. What they do have, however, is mobile phones. Data plans in many developing nations are pre-paid, and it is essentially treated as a currency.
An electronic catch system, called mFish, is a browser based application that can be accessed on any browser-accessing mobile phone. The application allows fishers and farmers to record catch data on their phone, and present that data to the next step in the supply chain. With Fishcoin tokens used as the incentive to add data, the cost of adding that data to mobile phone plans will be paid by the various downstream actors in the supply chain, such as importers who need the data to import the seafood, or wholesalers that need the data to meet buyer requirements. This operates essentially as a peer-to-peer ecosystem where data is exchanged for tokens between actors, as seafood is exchanged for currency between actors.
Traceability is the “tracks” that full-chain traceability can run on, that, in turn, can help increase the amount of data that flows on those tracks and drive efficiency inside the industry to improve sustainability, and a company’s bottom line. This has the ability to really make a massive impact on people’s lives, on such a huge industry for the planet.
Once an effective data ecosystem is established, the industry can use it to identify areas where waste is created and value is lost.
The goal is to keep the platform open-source to encourage more utilization. Then, as the full infrastructure is established, the operation can be passed on to the relevant actors.
This space is full of innovation that will tap into this network and further grow the ecosystem, beyond seafood.
Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?
Companies and organizations throughout the seafood industry are signing up almost daily to be rollout partners in the Fishcoin ecosystem. If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please read through our white paper, and contact our team.
