The Fishcoin Initiative: a personal story of passion for seafood and the oceans
I am writing this message from Penang after an exciting conference with the GSMA in Kuala Lumpur which got me to thinking — how and why did I get here?
Its a long way from where I grew up on a picturesque hilly sheep farm in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia near the small town of Melrose with a very strong passion for fish — somehow.. ! Probably from night fishing for garfish as a child with my dad and grandpa.. great memories!
Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to follow that passion into learning more about the aquatic world, and it has literally taken me all around the world, working in over 20 countries throughout North and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, And the Asia Pacific, where I have continued to learn more about seafood and have made some great friendships along the way. I love exploring the oceans on top and below, and enjoying the variety, taste and health benefits of the 12,000 + seafood species. It’s pretty incredible. Some of you know me from the mountain biking world also — an equally great passion that started later but will continue with me until I can’t do it anymore — but back to the fish.
I absolutely love my salmon but one of the biggest learnings has been that over 90% of our seafood comes from small scale producers in developing nations, and along with that we have almost no data for this seafood.
This has led me and my many partners to develop a solution using Blockchain technology that incentivises these seafood producers with a reward for entering their harvest information into an open source protocol thereby providing traceability for these supply chains — Fishcoin. That’s a mouthful! But a mission critical one! The importance of this for all of us is that this data fundamentally underpins the long term sustainability of our aquatic world and the seafood that is so important for the health of so many people.
My passion is unchanged, and probably even stronger now I have children of my own that are intelligent and environmentally aware, and listen to messages from Greta Thunberg and others to help drive change and better custodianship or the planet.
I now have far greater capacity to effect significant change well beyond that which I could have achieved when I was younger, mainly due to some extra knowledge and wisdom and also a lot of important relationship capital with like-minded people in the Fish world. I feel that this gives me a certain moral responsibility. The livelihoods of one in 10 people on the planet are involved in the seafood industry — it’s colossal.
The Fishcoin initiative and underlying Trace Protocol framework will have great positive impact for the millions of small scale seafood producers and their families, that bring us our seafood on a daily basis, predominantly from developing nations and I am extremely motivated and proud to be involved.
#sdgs #fishcoin #traceprotocol #sustainable #seafood #gsma #stellar #blockchain #IoT #distributedledgertechnology
