Sentinel Chain: The Hope for the Unbanked

Most of the ICO projects, thriving on short-term hype, seem to deepen the ever-increasing gap between the real and the virtual economy, between the lives of those who are online-savvy and the other few billion who often do not have access to stable electricity and running water, let alone enough knowledge to share the newly-generated geek wealth.

The idea behind Sentinel Chain, which, by their own definition, is “a B2B marketplace specifically designed to provide affordable and secure financial services to the unbanked”(1) is the integration of the millions of unsecured, unserviced, ‘unbanked’ livestock farmers in Asia, into the global economy. A new project whose ICO is scheduled for the first quarter of 2019, is, therefore, very far from the Elon Musk-ey type of outer-worldish hype. It is connected to this very earth, its ground, and its err… shyte, to put it a bit shakespearean.

According to the World Bank report, “Agriculture can help reduce poverty for 80% of the world’s poor, who live in rural areas and work mainly in farming. It can raise incomes, improve food security and benefit the environment.”(2) It is also clear, according to recent research, that the majority of the world’s 570 million farms are smallholders and family farms — indeed, those small farmers are in charge of more than 75% of world’s agricultural land.(3)

There are relatively good studies of the market volumes of agricultural land holdings in Asia (see, for example, this interesting study on the land holdings of smaller farmers), because land, quite obviously, is easy to be accounted for. Even if it is shifting owners, the amount of land itself is not shifted, and land is often serving at the basis of agricultural crediting, being non-disputable collateral on loans.

Livestock smallholder and family farmers, however, are disadvantaged in their business. Cattle farming is seeing an immense rise in China and S.-E. Asia(4), with China, according to United States Department of Agriculture (October 2016), being number one beef and veal producer in Asia, and Chinese farmers often “operating herds of 10 000 cows”.(5) This amazing production, however, still leaves the people in the industry vulnerable, because the livestock that they own, even if it’s worth millions, is not accounted for as an asset by the banks, therefore leaving millions of people in the industry in the ‘unbanked’ category. The livestock that the farmers own is real, however, it is often hard to track and verify; its accountability is still based on millenia-old tagging, which can not be associated momentarily with the owner (unlike land or a house or a car which all are digitized and can be digitally tracked in real time). The individual cows, pigs, and sheep are, therefore, hard to insure, take a loan on, serve as collateral, i.e. help as assets in the development or the security of the farmer’s business.

Sentinel Chain is aiming at solving this problem for millions of unbanked livestock farmers in Asia, coming up with a great combination of the best in modern technology. On the one hand, they have developed and presented livestock RFID tag with CrossPay system, introduced by the company. The electronic positioning tag is attached individually to each animal, momentarily making it accounted for; moreover, the tag makes it possible to perform financial operations with a single animal! I.e., a farmer can take a loan simply scanning the tag with a smartphone. The token behind the operations, SENC, is scheduled for public sale in March 2018, and is generating a lot of enthusiasm. It is based on Ethereum platform, is hard-capped at US 14,4 mln and will be the only one used for the purposes of the platform, securing hundreds of millions animals into global financial system.

Effectively, Sentinel Chain will introduce the poor, the disenfranchised, the unbanked to the world of opportunities. We can’t wait!

(1) https://sentinel-chain.org/

(2) http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/overview

(3) “The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide” In: World Development, Volume 87, November 2016, Pages 16–29

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002703

(4) This article in The Wire India estimates that China is currently consuming as much cattle as the European Union: “ https://thewire.in/129802/meat-hook-satiating-asias-demand-beef/

(5) In fact, China has more than 40 farms with a herd of 10 000 cows+ https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/china-dairy-cows-sustainable-farming-production-asia!