Henry: 0:00

When you serve food up on a table, you want to know the providence and provenance of it and you want to know that the data points have been stored fairly.

Joeri: 0:07

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to be joined by Henry. Hi Henry, how are you?

Henry: 0:21

I'm very good, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Joeri: 0:24

Great to have you. It was also fun and really interesting to meet you at ITCC in Brussels while I'm still living in Belgium

Joeri: 0:41

was the youngest trader at Trafigura. I hope I pronounced that the right way. Yes, yes, that's fine. Yeah, and then he set up and ran the EMEA desk for EFA Group. He has over 12 years experience in trading and agriculture investments across multiple Joeri. Henry is now the co-founder and CEO of Agridex, a digital marketplace for trading of physical commodities on the agriculture supply chain. Really interesting for me. When we met Henry, we talked about it. I said I want to know more about this.

Henry: 1:28

So, to start this podcast, henry, can you tell us about Agridex and your and your mission? Sure, it's jurisdictions a bit of a mouthful, it's it's. It's not a simple sort of proposal, but it is a complex problem. The big problem in the world today is our population is growing rapidly. Soon we'll be at 10 billion people. We need to increase food supply, um, dramatically. And how are we going to do that? We're going to do that with better, cleaner, faster payments to payments to farmers. And then, on the reverse, us as consumers, especially in the West, we want more information about our food. We want to know about carbon emissions. We want to know about how our food got to us. We also want to know if the farmers and producers have been paid fairly. So how do you marry those two needs?

Henry: 2:04

You remove friction in the middle of agriculture. There is, at the moment, a huge amount of unnecessary middlemen multiple Joeri, multiple bits of unnecessary documentation, multiple currencies. What the algorithmic system does is it removes a lot of those friction points. It allows people to trade between each other, to settle near instantly and to provide access to producers. So it's a very exciting idea. We're fairly early in on the journey. We built the product for about two and a half years and only a few months ago we released it to the general public and I believe already we've put through some of the first agricultural trades ever on blockchain, and certainly the first on Solana. So we're very excited by that and now we're growing out the company and growing out our footprint.

Joeri: 2:49

It's an excellent place, or an exciting place, to be now, when you're starting a new company. I already felt excited when I met you. I feel it now again, but tell us, how are you exactly leveraging Web3 technology to streamline processes? How do you use blockchain? U

Henry: 3:07

Yes. So look, the big overriding thing about blockchain, having a mutual ledger technology, is the data points you put in can't be tampered with, and that's incredibly important when it's food, whether it's your children, your mother, your uncle, whomever when you serve food up on a table, you want to know the providence and provenanceidence of it and you want to know that the data points have been stored fairly, so that helps. The other thing that's really cool about web3 technology is the idea of instant settlement. We use usdc, but we're adding in several other sort of payment rails as we go. We do have a sort of circle mint account and and what that allows us to do is, let's say, you're in the middle of Argentina volatile currency system, the high inflation of your local currency. What you can now do is you can trade your products to end buyers in, say, america or Europe, but you can trade using USDC, so ultimately, you get away from your local volatile currencies. You can settle and trade. Now. It's something that's more trusted and more secure.

Henry: 4:08

Um, so that was a really cool thing. Settlement function was important, and then, finally, the uk has a new digital act that came out last year. That means that any trades on the planet that go through our system. If you want, you can use the english high court to settle any judgments. It's an English common law product, so that's actually super exciting again because a little bit like and you'll know this from Belgium everyone likes Napoleonic code. For civil stuff, for economic stuff, people often like using the English courts, so that's a huge benefit as well. So all three of those things were facilitated by using Web3 and by using blockchain technology.

Joeri: 4:44

I love it and, for people now listening, I had two guests from Circle on the past podcast episodes. So, yeah, be sure to check it out if you want to know more about USDC. I really love what they are doing at Circle. But now let's talk again about AgriDex. Yeah, yeah, I imagine building a company. I know that I've been there too. You face several challenges, and certainly when you want to integrate web3 technology in the agricultural sector, it seems a wonderful story, but also maybe not the most easiest ones. So can you talk a bit about the challenges?

Henry: 5:27

Yeah, look, there's a lot right. When you are the first one to go into a space, you have first mover advantage, but it also means that you have to make all the problems. It's a little bit like I don't know if you grew up with siblings, but I Web3 older sister and she was always very angry at being the first because the parents would stop her doing certain things. By the time USDC it got to me, it became a little bit easier. We are the oldest child in the.

Henry: 5:49

A lot of the people that we deal with mid-40-year-old producers and farmers. They don't know about wallets. They don't know about a lot of the Web3 products and ideas that exist. So a big challenge for us was to produce something that seemingly looks Web2 but has all the benefits of Web three, and that comes from a unique sign up that we've had with bastion, who are producing our our wallet system to obviously using usdc and a settlement function with a good on and off ramp. So we're trying to make everything as fluid as possible, but it's always an issue educating people on the benefits of blockchain and also trusting it, because some people you and I may enjoy using usdC and think it's a very cool story, but some people hear it and they go hang on a second.

Henry: 6:50

I don't understand why not just use US dollars? You're like no, it's like digital RYO dollars. There's a great benefit in using it to transform around the world, but they still don't understand it. They don't get what it is and they don't get the benefits of it at first. So RYO you need to educate them and I think a big thing around the digital cash and crypto itself as a product is we need to more and more encourage better on and off ramping, because as soon as people do see the fiat representation of what they had in crypto, they actually become much more trusting of keeping most of their money in crypto, which would be the grander aim, right, yeah?

Joeri: 7:26

Exactly, that's a really good point. In another episode I had the people from the Rio coin on the podcast and actually I will also be moderating their panel in Toronto when I will be there A really nice solution. But that's the question that people that are in web2 ask me about Rio. Yeah, if you have them, how can you get it into theater? There are solutions, but we need to educate people how to do that. Education also about why or how to trust it, because people hear a lot about scams and so on.

Henry: 7:59

First, it would be conducting your meeting in toronto in french or english. What?

Joeri: 8:03

if I could do both, but it's a panel you will be moderating. They are the main sponsor of the blockchain futurist conference over there, so it will be in english, but that's in french and dutch. I don't have an accent. People here in english they hear my accent. That's why it's a good thing, too, henry, because if I go in austin, for instance, they remember my accent from the podcast so they know who I am. But yeah, with everything that you said about trust and so on, I have a few questions about that too. I know that your platform uses AI to verify trading documents and ensure compliance. Yeah, maybe explain a bit about that.

Henry: 8:45

Yeah, sure, sure. So I think when you've seen a lot of fraud in the world of trading, it's often by something called double pledging. So it's when people take out, say, banking lines, using documents that state goods that either don't exist or have already been traded. And the same thing happens with people uploading documentation. When you go on the AgriDex system I'm selling you 10 tons of cocoa and'm in northern Nigeria and you're a buyer in the Netherlands the first starting point AI is we upload all the documentation to show that's real, show the pictures of the cocoa, show an SGS certificate saying what the valuation of the cocoa is and how it looks, what the moisture is, et cetera, et cetera. Now, to make sure that there's been no double pledging or that these documents have been used historically already is we do a sort of AI scrape and a comparison.

Henry: 9:34

There's a few of these tools AI there. None of them Web3 are perfect, yet it does help and it assists in not making it fraud proof, but lower fraud. I think it's always difficult when people claim that something is fraud proof, because certainly I've never found anything that's fully fraud proof but can help. Things can help and I think it's a great mechanism and tool for help, and I think the other exciting thing that we will be looking at down the line is using ai to check on crops themselves, because you can do scrapes of the actual photos by satellite image. You can give people better ideas about the production levels on their farms and it starts to get incredibly exciting the more AI you put into the farming world.

Joeri: 10:14

Yeah, like for me also, ai is a part of PupTree, my broader definition of my podcast. So, yeah, I love it when all these technologies come together.

Henry: 10:25

Actually, our co-founder was the original investor in DeepMind, which is the first sort of big AI company out of the UK, and apparently his Demis' big thing he was interested in was using it for the medical profession. And I think farming as well is something where there could be a really cool ability to firstly increase productivity but give easier data points at a much cheaper level to lower scale producers, because a lot of farmers can't afford to be educated better. So actually, if you can provide them with better AI tools, it can encourage higher productivity without costing you anything. I think that's super exciting.

Joeri: 11:56

Yeah, also, what is exciting is you really have a real use case solution for a problem that you have with Web3. And that's what we need. Talk a bit more about security, because many people are wondering, with these digital wallets and so on, how secure is all of that? How are users protected from scams?

Henry: 12:23

It's an interesting point. So we tokenize the contract, so the terms afterwards are quite clearly stated, outside of price discovery. So what that means is, whenever there's trade flow going on, people can look at historical trades on the system. They just won't know the pricing because obviously people buying and selling don't want people to know the price they're engaging at. We try to provide quite clear.

Henry: 12:46

A big thing about web3 is obviously people like to see proof of trades, they like to see historical stuff. I think one of the cool things is we always know when some whales doing a bit of manipulation in the market, because you can see big amounts moving from one wallet to the other and I like that, I like the idea that there's sight of movement and we have that on our system. We just don't show the price discovery itself In terms of people hacking into personal wallets. We've got a custodianship with a group called Bastion and they're going to be providing custody and actually insurance on the wallet holders and that's incredibly exciting because that kind of insures away a lot of the risk profiles that come out of this. So again, we don't try to pretend anything's totally fraud proof. I think it's always ridiculous to claim that, but a lot of our flows are covered with insurance products, so if something does go wrong, people have somebody to go to, and I think that's the idea of adding some institutional benefits to engaging in this world.

Joeri: 13:47

Yeah, it makes sense that you have that. That's obviously something that makes people less worried if they know there is insurance. You mentioned also transparency. It's important in the food supply chain to know where everything is coming from. How does your platform enhance traceability and maybe what are the benefits?

Henry: 14:13

So it's a really good point. So we're adding in functionality as we go right. I think the first thing we can do in terms of traceability is it's very clear where payments are going to and what they are, and a lot of the time people don't know what the ultimate monies and where they're being routed to are for a lot of farmers. So we're engaging with that instantly. I think a big thing for the next step for us is to start looking at carbon emissions on the trade flows. It's quite easy to set that out once you have the information. And then, outside of that, I think a big one for us is one of our first verticals is cocoa. We're going very heavily into the world of cocoa.

Henry: 14:51

I had a history of being a trader financing trade flow in cocoa and we all like chocolate, but unfortunately it's one of those ones that has issues with slave labor. A lot of people talk about child endangerment inside of the cocoa supply chain. There's some quite bad stories in there, which is a shame because it ends up being this nice product that we all eat and it makes us very happy. But the origin story is not very good and I think a big part of our rollout is to assist in that world with data points that try to reduce child harm and child employment in the cocoa industry. Again, nothing's perfect, but it's a wonderful aim and I think also the other big thing is to show real payments to farmers.

Henry: 15:34

There's been underinvestment in the cocoa industry for 40 years. Most cocoa trees only TCC last 35 to 40 years, so the reason why cocoa has gone up so much in the last couple of years is no one's replanted. So all of these places that we buy chocolate from gone up so much in the last couple of years is no one's replanted. So all of these places that we buy chocolate from may not even exist in the next few years because of underinvestment. So there really needs to be a shift in the way that we deal with chocolate. It also, unfortunately, takes eight to 10 years for a cocoa tree to grow. So no matter what we do now, there's still a lag, so we need to be proactive as long as you, uh, still want your sort of chocolate bar I love that.

Joeri: 16:08

Uh, while you're talking, I'm thinking about we had a conversation already at tcc that how you are using the if I call it EXW the benefits or the features of blockchain with your product. So I have a few more questions about that yeah first one that, or the next one that I wanted to ask you is about the smart contracts. You are using regardion and smart contracts to simplify international trade, so can you explain how these smart contracts work?

Henry: 16:38

yeah, so with trading, it's quite lucky for programming that there's a very set range of terms called incoterms, and those go from exw, which is x works, which is you buy it straight from the warehouse, all the way to ddp, which is the duties paid it's been delivered right at the end consumer and there's incoterms all the way along that track. So actually at the moment, the uh, the world of trading is not very mature. It uses paper documents and they I, when I'm dealing with you, I'll send a paper document by dhl all the way over to you and you sign in and you send it back. A lot of this stuff can, a lot of this unnecessary documentation, can be taken away by a smart contract. Why not bind people in um using our system? Why not remove the unnecessary documentation? We already know what the incoterms are. We already know the obligations in trade.

Henry: 17:30

A lot of this is unnecessary duplication and I don't know if this is because, uh, big banks or big trading houses like to have lots of unnecessary people in the middle. It's causes, causes, causes, jobs, because I think this is the big thing about crypto in general, right, when we all probably first came to it with Bitcoin and then with some of the stable coins like USDT. It actually removes a lot of unnecessary people in the middle. If you can settle with each other using outside normal banking channels, it's a great thing, but it also removes a lot of jobs and I feel sometimes that's why there's so much pushback on crypto, because it is. It's making the system a lot more productive and with a lot less people, and I don't know if that serves the aims of some, some communities that could be quite closeted and want the kind of job creation yeah, that's something to to think about or discuss.

Joeri: 18:20

Indeed, it's making it's like. Another point that I want to discuss with you is the fact that we have instant settlements, and it can also significantly impact operations of agricultural businesses.

Henry: 18:34

Yeah, it's super interesting.

Henry: 18:36

The average time to settle a trade of agriculture in the emerging world is anywhere from three to 14 days. And if you imagine that some of these people don't have a huge amount of money they have school fees to pay, they have food to buy at home, that they're not the best at doing personal financial structuring and suddenly your payments now are two weeks late that can cause real issues. And even on if even for larger companies that that it's hard to reconcile an account when you don't know whether the money is coming in tomorrow or it's coming in next week, it's a huge issue. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier that the banking system is not as productive as it should be. In some countries it's much more expensive.

Henry: 19:17

People don't realize that the average trade in the emerging world can be anything up to 2% to 3% of the cost of the transaction, which is huge If you think. For our system we're charging 0.15% on this purchase and 0.15% on the sales, so it's much, much lower With the idea. That's competitive. So it's great for us as a company, but.

Joeri: 19:44

Yeah, that's a really good offer that you have there. I've seen others and I was also thinking, while you're explaining, that I'm selling my house in Belgium and I'm buying a house in Portugal, so it's still within Europe. You have the SIPA transfers, but still it's not direct. With blockchain, it would not be a problem, okay, you you've. You are a startup you've launched, so I'm also curious to hear the the response from farmers and traders that you have when yeah, thank you.

Henry: 20:22

I never know when the idea of startups as a term finishes. Oh, what is? What is the sort of no, because we definitely still are. But when do you stop being a startup? When you, you IPO or when you sell the company?

Joeri: 20:34

That's a good question. We can discuss that, but still you're out there in the public and you have your customers, so I'm curious to hear how they're responding.

Henry: 20:45

We're almost suffering from the fact that too many potential clients are using the product, which is great on one side. I think a lot of people, especially in the emerging world, really like the product. They like the idea of fast settlement and they like the idea of smart contracts, removing unnecessary documentation. So we have a range of launch partners a group called Paragate, which is a major trader of grains out of Southern Africa. Some of our first trades were to do with a group called Oldenburg, which is a vineyard. We some of our first trades were to do with a group called Oldenburg, which is a vineyard, so some great wines that came out from South Africa into Europe. We just olive oil trades. So there's a range of different agricultural groups that have already come on, and then on top of that we have quite a sort of backlog of larger clients who want to use it.

Henry: 21:36

So the response has been really good. I think the one quandary is always how to educate people to use the system in the best way, because a lot of people don't get the buzzwords that we almost use too much right, which is like saying web3, which they don't even know how that means, or usdc, or on and off ramping or creation of wallets. All of these things are not languages that these guys are used to, so you can talk in the vein of optimization of their trade flow or lower costs for their transfers, but getting them actually onboarded and using it properly is still a level of education. So the initial response to Zorro is yes, this sounds great, and actually the hard bit comes in once you're onboarding them.

Joeri: 22:12

Yeah, that's still a pain. I see that once they get it it's like wow, but still you need to onboard. When did you?

Henry: 22:21

first get into crypto. What was your kind of origin story?

Joeri: 22:25

Yeah, that's a funny story actually, because if you go back you will see that my background is in business analytics and at an investment club. I was into social media marketing but then I was already interested in bitcoin and that three and so on, but not really diving in. And then I was at the social media marketing world conference and there we got like michael stelzer at that point said everyone gets an nft who is here, and I said, okay, nft, I need to figure this out. At the same moment I am also met mark shafer, who is a personal branding expert and our good friend of mine.

Joeri: 23:00

In the meantime, and just by discussing with people, seeing that diving into, I went into mark's community and started to organize metaverse events, starting to do stuff with web3 and and that's how I got in doing stuff setting, creating NFTs, experimenting with it without putting much money in it, showing this to others, other marketers that were like you know, I was just like in the beginning of my journey, but they were even before the journey started for them and they were just following me and I could make mistakes and I could just show them what I did and that's how it has grown and also my podcast. At that time I was more a broader podcast, but then I niched down on Web3. And so it's yeah, it is where we are now. Today, we are now on this podcast and I am also speaking about Web3. So if you take the time and if you want to learn and if you experiment, and if you are not afraid to try out stuff, it can go fast.

Henry: 24:02

Yeah, yeah. w a y j n t m e a w i c t y b o s p i y l o at this moment i s i g?

Joeri: 24:04

And, yeah, maybe that had a question that always comes back back and I always have to ask that is, what are you now, at this moment, the most excited about when it comes to your business, you know, to something personal in your life, to the space in general? Yeah, for us to hear that yeah, sure, sure.

Henry: 24:26

I mean in general, I'm very excited because we took an investment from solana. I met the Anatoly, who's super supportive of us, and by doing that I learned a bit about Solana itself. So I bought some Solana at the right time, so I'm very excited about Solana. I'm very excited about Blinks and the ZK compressors and other aspects of the Solana community, so very bullish on Solana. I'm really enjoying some of the some of the new technology coming out on ethereum again, stuff focused on lowering the overall gas fees and interactivity. So on those two ones, excited about that.

Henry: 25:04

On a personal level, I'm speaking at breakpoint in singapore, so I'm excited about going there because I haven't. I actually worked in singapore for some years and I haven't been back really, so it'll be my first time there since 2017, so I'm very much looking forward to being in singapore and meeting up with the wider web3 community there. And then I suppose, on the company aspect, I think we're really excited for our version 2, which will be allowing us to do insurance, trade, finance products, so we're looking at building that now. So that's a kind of personal company and then, finally, why the ecosphere things that I'm excited about?

Henry: 25:43

What are some of the things you're excited about this upcoming Web3?

Joeri: 25:46

So let's first see on a personal level, I'm excited to do this podcast with people like you. I'm excited that the podcast is like you, putting this hard work in there, educating people, but it starts to pay off. You don't see it yourself. I don't see it myself because I do this podcast episodes like every day. But people around me, they give me the comments and I see things happening. So I like that things happening. So I like that. I like the fact when I go to conferences and you are there too that there is a lot of people around on the main event but also on the side events. So web3 is, if we can say that it was gone, now it is back. You see, it's alive. I see a lot of real life use cases, interesting startups, interesting projects like yours. That's exciting me. The possibility also to go to these conferences and, like you, to be on stage, to be moderating a panel. After Toronto, I will also be in Barcelona at the end of September at the European Blockchain Convention.

Henry: 26:49

We must meet in person there.

Joeri: 26:51

Yeah, yeah, oh, awesome, awesome, yeah, and a few others probably will come up, but I also have my move to Lisbon in the next week, so it's busy times. But, yeah, I'm quite excited myself for a lot of things that are happening. I like to see things on the positive side.

Henry: 27:10

It's going to be great. Are you not worried you're going to miss the rain in Brussels?

Joeri: 27:14

Yeah, yeah, still, yeah, still. That's, of course, one of the reasons to go there, but also it's sometimes in life you need to take another path or change stuff, and this was just something that I felt like now is the time to do that yeah, it's a big world out there.

Henry: 27:30

It's nice to see a bit more of that.

Joeri: 27:32

Absolutely so, Henry, thank you so much for sharing your excitement, but also your story and explaining how you are using blockchain in the agriculture business. So thank you so much. If people want to follow you or they want to know more about Agridex, where would you like?

Henry: 27:52

to send yeah, please. So I would say either go onto our twitter, which is agridex platform, or go onto our discord. We we have a very engaged following, but we're always Henry looking for more people to get excited about it and in a couple of months we'll have a, a token coming out to represent the, the group itself. So we're in a trajectory now until into that release. So what I advise is get on our socials, engage anywhere you can. Once a week, our CTO does engagements on the various socials. So if you have any questions about the tech or any suggestions because we're obviously led by having interesting people giving us advice please do that.

Joeri: 28:32

Your links, or Henry maybe additional information that you will provide me, will be in the show notes. Thank you very much. It will be the blog article. Yeah, thank you too, henry. It was a pleasure to have you on the show thank you so much guys.

Joeri: 28:45

I love how henry has explained all these different aspects of blockchain and how he's using that to build a company and really get the benefits out of Web3. So this is really a story that I think you should share with people around you. So be sure to do that, be sure to follow the show if you aren't already following me. It's a real pleasure for me to get your feedback. Also, if you haven't given me a review yet, please do that, because it helps me, yeah, to reach even more people and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.