SpaceVis will track and tokenize cattle with Corda blockchain

When giving a lecture on the possibilities of blockchain at the service of agribusiness, the partner and co-founder of SpaceVis, Guilherme Canavese, was asked about the feasibility of the technology for bovine tracking. The answer brought the insight that led to the development of a solution that brought together blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), software and connectivity and gave life to SpaceVis, a cattle monitoring, traceability and tokenization platform that starts operating in August.

The demand for the traceability service comes in a scenario where ranchers are under global public scrutiny around sustainability in the processes, in particular the use of deforestation to increase pasture areas.

According to a 2021 report by the Brazilian Beef Exporting Industries Association (Abiec), Brazil has 187.55 million cattle, the largest commercial herd in the world. In 2020, the sector generated BRL 747.05 billion, equivalent to 10% of Brazilian GDP. The numbers give the exact measure of the importance of implementing effective mechanisms of transparency and efficiency in this production chain.

Integration of technologies

SpaceVis has developed a platform that integrates four technologies to offer a complete service to ranchers. The first one comes from Iot, which is a GPS earring developed by SpaceVis for real-time ox monitoring. “The earring is already widely used in livestock. The difference is that we developed the GPS earring, a great innovation because this technology does not yet exist on a global scale, much less in Brazil”, explains Guilherme Canavese.

Connectivity, a problem in rural areas of the country, is improved by installing towers on properties. The third technology is the real-time herd monitoring software, which also enables the integration of other market solutions, such as management software, for example. “Inventory control is a huge problem in livestock due to theft and loss of animals. Our solution brings more security to the rancher in the monitoring of cattle”, explains Canavese.

R3’s Corda blockchain technology completes the package developed by SpaceVis. The GPS data collected on the earring creates a timestamping, that is, a blockchain record of the animal’s geolocation daily. “How can you prove that your cattle never set foot in an illegal or deforestation area? Blockchain is essential for this because it makes the data immutable, which generates more transparency, governance and compliance throughout the process”, says the co-founder of SpaceVis, explaining that the pioneering spirit of the solution lies in joining the possibilities of GPS with blockchain ones.

The Corda blockchain, which originated in a consortium of banks, will also enable the tokenization of oxen by SpaceVis, an unprecedented initiative in the world of tokens. The idea is that the transformation of cattle into a digital asset expands the possibilities of guaranteeing credit to the segment, which today only accepts assets such as property and machinery, but not live cattle.

The SpaceVis team is currently talking to banks to come up with a solution in terms of a financial product. “We chose Corda precisely because it is already very advanced in this regard, it is very integrated with banks, there are CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) initiatives using Corda”, ponders Guilherme Canavese.

R3’s country manager in Brazil, Gustavo Paro, celebrates the integrated solution of several technologies developed by SpaceVis to improve herd management and make more assertive management decisions in business. “SpaceVis is another one of those exciting projects. They identified a business opportunity that will bring numerous benefits to cattle ranchers. All this being recorded on a blockchain platform in Corda, by R3, ensuring the immutability of this information, traceability and management of the life cycle of each head of cattle individually”.

According to Paro, use cases of Corda in agribusiness are already a reality in some regions of the world. In Brazil, he cites the Gavea Marketplace, a Corda Blockchain platform to connect the world’s major commodity buyers and exporters with local providers. “All the purchase and sale negotiation takes place on this platform, recording each stage of the commercial cycle in Corda, ensuring the immutability and auditing of the process. The contracts are ‘tokenized’ and can be used as collateral in credit operations”, explains R3’s country manager.

Blockchain Corda by R3

R3’s country manager in Brazil explains that Corda is considered the third generation of Blockchain/DLT, that of permissioned platforms. The first generation are public platforms like BTC and ETH, and the second generation are private platforms like Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum.

Corda was born from the demand of banks that were part of the R3 Consortium in 2016, for a Blockchain/DLT platform that had 3 main characteristics: privacy, to keep transactions restricted only between counterparties that are transacting with each other; scalability, to support as many transactions per second as necessary to meet the demand of the use case; and Interoperability – Corda’s permissioned network concept allows any participant recognized by the network to be able to interoperate with any other network participant, even if both are in different business networks, and thus can exchange assets transacted in any of these business networks with each other.

In the beginning, R3 used the most popular technologies available on the market to perform blockchain use case tests. “At the end of 2016, R3 released the first version of Corda, using open source. In April 2018, the first production-ready version of Corda was released, still in open source. In July 2018, R3 released the Enterprise version of Corda, which incorporated some non-functional security requirements. From that moment on, R3 stopped being a Consortium to become a provider of corporate Blockchain/DLT software”, says Gustavo Paro about the evolution of Corda.