How will the Sentinel Chain revolutionize life for those with no money?

For the millions of unbanked farmers who underpin the global food chain, an innovative new grassroots solution is set to transform their relationship to the global economy — empowering, enriching and engaging, as never before.

When challenged to provide answers to the question “what is cryptocurrency?”, I have developed a habit of flipping the question back at them in the first instance. We can have a far more interesting discussion if I first get the questioner to reflect for themselves on the question: What is money? What is wealth?

After all, in the economies of developed nations, we rarely need to ask this. We move through life interacting easily with financial institutions through a range of cash, credit and other financial assets we call our net worth. These assets are flexibly accepted as payment for goods and services worldwide, stores of value, proof of credit and intent, and securities for other less tangible benefits. But by and large we don’t have to think about it. The financial products we use daily are designed to interact seamlessly with the world.

Imagine for a moment things were different. Imagine you were one of the 420 million farmers in Asia, whose entire wealth was tied up in your flock of livestock — all at once illiquid, unpredictable, difficult-to-prove in terms of ownership and origin. Vulnerable to theft and loss, and unlikely to be realised as an exchangeable asset until some physical maturity window in the future… How would you respond to that same question?

But for all the differences, you’d still have the same basic physical needs — for shelter, food, education and healthcare for your family. And you still want to trade in the wider world, insure your flock, make plans for your future. You might wish to accept micropayments, access credit, or pool resources with collaborators… But to traditional financial institutions, you represent little prospect of profit or return. So, technological changes which have changed the developed world beyond recognition, may well have left your community in the dust with no progress or advantage whatsoever.

By using the blockchain to tokenize the livestock wealth of smallholder farmers, that wealth can be unlocked as a fungible asset. Combining a simple RFID tag for the physical livestock with a functional mobile payment app via the immutability and trustless functionality of blockchain technology, Sentinel Chain will not only enable the farmers to directly interact with a range of formerly-inaccessible services from collateralized loans to crowdfunding, it will create a powerful global provenance for their product — from the farm to the table, anywhere in the world.

Empowering the grassroots of the supply chain in this way has tremendous benefits for consumers across the world, who depend more than they realise on global smallholders for the food in their supermarkets and restaurants.

And the farmer running that app will finally have the power to interact directly with purchasers, importers, insurers, funders, aid programs and consumers, anywhere in the world. It’s these micro-businesses, often family based, which fuel the engine of economic growth for the majority world… Managing their environments, safeguarding indigenous crops. enriching local communities, and providing a genuine alternative to unsustainable urban migration.

In “The Internet of Money”, visionary Andreas Antonopoulos wrote: “Six and a half billion people on this planet have no connection to the world of money. They operate in cash-based societies with very little access to international resources. ​​They don’t need banks.”

What is the impact going to be on the world when those billions of people don’t so much use banks, but actually each are their own banks — atomizing and trading their formerly-illiquid assets, freely amongst one another, and with whomever they choose worldwide? It’s a ground-up, agile transformation, the like of which has never been possible before.

“Decent work and Economic Growth” was defined by the United Nations as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, and empowering the baseline of the supply chain. Meeting this goal by the 2030 deadline is about to receive a big jolt of assistance.

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