In an effort to transform the global food commodity trade and empower farmers, Farmsent, a blockchain platform focused on farmers, has announced a new partnership with Peaq, a decentralized physical infrastructure network. This collaboration, which was revealed on April 9, is a significant step towards Farmsent’s goal of decentralizing the agricultural supply chain, improving transparency in the global food trade, and creating a global Web3 marketplace that directly connects farmers with consumer-facing businesses worldwide.
Farmsent aims to eliminate centralized intermediaries and reduce costs for all stakeholders by utilizing a network of sensors, known as DePINs, to track product quality and provenance. This technology ensures transparency across the supply chain, benefiting both farmers and consumers. Farmers can make data-driven decisions to optimize crop health and yields, while consumers can access information about the food they purchase.
The current state of the global food trade highlights the urgent need for change. Despite being the backbone of the industry, farmers often receive a disproportionately low share of the market value. Farmsent plans to address this issue by bypassing traditional intermediaries and enabling direct transactions between farmers and consumers. The platform, currently in beta, already has over 160,000 farmers onboarded in Indonesia and Colombia. It is being used to track coffee, avocados, and palm sugar between these countries, as well as the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Farmsent is also working on securing three additional licenses.
To effectively store large amounts of data from sensors, farms, and partners, Farmsent has chosen to work with Peaq. Peaq’s network provides cost-effective data storage and scalability. The Peaq network has gained traction in the industry and recently secured $15 million in a Series A round led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital. Peaq has previously collaborated with major companies like Bosch and has even worked on tokenizing 100 Teslas in a decentralized Web3 ride-sharing initiative across Europe.
Handling transactions and data from farmers and business owners worldwide is a significant challenge in terms of scalability and security. Farmsent’s DePIN network gathers information from three sources: manual entry by authorized personnel, data collected through IoT sensors placed throughout the supply chain, and data from third-party partners like logistics companies. To ensure data security, Farmsent utilizes Peaq decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to enhance data privacy, allowing for data verification and controlled access while protecting sensitive information.
Till Wendler, the co-founder of Peaq, believes that this use case within the agriculture industry is not only exciting but also one of the most important ones. It has the potential to address global food insecurity and deliver cheaper and higher-quality produce to people worldwide, all in a secure manner.