Blockchain & Startup Icon Joins Flux Advisory
Startup Weekend Founder Andrew Hyde to rally tech community to put the globe’s farming communities on the blockchain
A dispatch from Boulder–– Long before pioneering farming families from Europe came to America and wrote the Farmer’s Almanac to help their own communities sow future harvests for corn and wheat, Native Americans already had a code: a detailed and complex oral protocol that no one person owned, but to which everyone participated: It was a protocol for abundance and how our people could harvest rice, salmon and plants to sustain generations to come. That know-how has been lost, but the approach can be revived.
Israeli-American startup Flux (which I am a founder) aims to help humanity return to the source code of all good, and create a universal ledger technology so every grower and farmer can share their data and secrets to create a future of abundance, as our Native American peoples once enjoyed. To help them achieve the goal, they have brought on startup icon Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend and community heavyweight from the blockchain world as the Head of Community for Origin Protocol, to help rally the global community of entrepreneurs who stand behind the vision that no one company should own our food system. Flux will be one of the first projects to utilize Origin’s Marketplace tool.
Andrew has joined Flux Protocol, a hardware company building tools for farmers and growers utilizing blockchain technology, with the mission to return opportunities and abundance back to the people who work the land.
“We know how it works in big corporations and the food within the agriculture industry is among the most challenging.” says Andrew. “Farming data is locked behind corporate vaults, and now new mega mergers. It’s an outdated industry with a massive imbalance of power and control, and these food and chemical companies have a chokehold on the subsistence farmers in developing nations, but also on massive American farms, largely automated, and which must rely on subsidies to be ‘profitable’,” says Hyde.
“Plant, farming and growing insights should be shared. Those that contribute should be rewarded in more than just good karma,” he says. “They can be rewarded with tokens and enjoy super secure and anonymous profiles at the same time. A farmer’s dream.”
Hyde will be responsible for helping to foment interest and notoriety within the Flux community among the tech network, including the early adopters and creators of blockchain opportunities. Unlike Bitcoin which is just a digital currency, Flux plans to use distributed ledgers to collect, track, trace, and reward the growers and farmers who offer their data to the network. The data will be collected by Eddy, a robotic multi-sensor and amorphic hardware product, inspired by Israeli military know-how. It speaks the language of “plants” and learns how to automate or control parts of the farm or greenhouse so that plants, people and the local environment grows with prosperity.
“We are bombarded with news every single day that is based on fear and greed. As hackers and technologists we know that distributed ledger technology can build a protocol for nature’s data. We know it’s possible and from my view over here in a gorgeous Boulder, Colorado, I see capitalism, farming and the blockchain unlocking a future of abundance for all — a future where we work less, and enjoy more and no one is exploited in the story — no one growing our food in America or India.”
Hyde is a long-time resident of Boulder, the new headquarters of Flux where the company is now a founding member of the BLDR Crypto Hub. He shares the same value and passion for environmental issues as the company’s founding team, and has inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to build their dreams. His company Startup Weekend focuses on how to live a simpler life, by living with only what is needed. At one time, Hyde boasted owning 15 essential items which he travelled with around the world as a global nomad.
Hyde has influenced hundreds of thousands of developers through his events, and this experience will help Flux community farming and growing to the developer community which will advance new sensors and algorithms to better understand the natural language that Flux is working to decode. Hyde’s experience will push forward Flux’s go-to-market strategy and its product platform, MICO, an electronics board that can be equipped with almost any sensor in the universe to pull out analog or digital data from nature. This data can then be used on the blockchain to grow food, fish, vineyards, or even better control operation efficiencies and automate processes at factories.
Featured in the NY Times, NBC, and the Washington Post, Hyde’s founding events include Ignite Boulder, TEDxBoulder, Startup Weekend, Startup Week and more. His experience will give credibility to an industry that is deeply suspicious and resistant to change, mainly because banks, chemical companies and food giants have a stranglehold and monopoly over our food.
“We are talking about using blockchain to find a better ship to sail into our food future,” says Blake Burris, Flux CEO. “Not creating a mutiny against the big players, just a smoother sea. We want the smaller growers stuck in the shadows, like the cannabis growers, smallholder farmers, and the disenfranchised tech community, to enjoy a restored balance. At Flux, we want all the stakeholders to rightfully earn for their contributions and labor. I think this vision for new agriculture is what Andrew wants to see as part of his future too.”
Flux looks forward to the opening of its shared workspace at Boulder’s “crypto hub” alongside Origin, DAO Stack and Gitcoin: “Honestly, I did a happy dance when Andrew told me he’d join our company. I couldn’t be happier,” Burris adds.
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