Welcome to our Lite Paper, a synthesis of our Seedlife Impact Proposal. If you want to read the in-depth version, you can request it to us via email. We look forward to your involvement in our transformative blockchain impact project. Do contact us if you are keen to help. You can find out more info on our website www.seedlife.io
Summary
At Seedlife, we build a future full of promise by radically altering how we produce food through the blending of sustainability, technology and decentralization. We achieve this goal by enabling an exponential adoption rate of specific agroecological and alternative systems of food production called permaculture and urban farming. To unlock an exponential growth, we have designed a set of connected Apps both onchain and offchain. Our apps combine the dynamics of the collaborative knowledge-sharing networks such as Wikipedia with fully gamified interface similar to building video games such as Minecraft, Farmville or Sim City. The goal is to remove the steep learning curve associated with knowledge intensive systems and to turn the learning experience into a fun and memorable collective experience. This will result in removing the barriers to adoption preventing a mass adoption of permaculture and urban farming ecosystems. Moreover, our marketplace is here to help our alt farmers to buy what they need to set up their operations and to sell the outputs. Our goal is to make those type of food production system profitable.
1. Our vision & mission
Our vision is to use digital assets to have positive impacts on the world and to foster decentralization. We pioneer a path leading to a low-carbon world in which innovation is dedicated to empower communities and to bring them autonomy, cohesion and happiness. We want everybody to become food producer and be part of the distributed structure: newbies and experts alike, part-time gardeners or professional farms, no matter where you are in the world. We have to blend the distinction between consumer and supplier if we are to be part of the new paradigm. We call it Alt (as for alternative) Farming or Farming 3.0
Therefore, our platforms are built upon an innovative and unique Impact Token. The term was coined recently by Goldman Sachs. Our Impact Token is a synthesis of utility and governance features. This token is essential to power our decentralised economics. Doing so we achieve lower transaction costs, protection against corruption, fairer pricing and a real community-based financing. In other words, we fully harvest the power of blockchain to solve a real-life problem that is truly global, vital and massive: feeding the world and enabling development.
2. Welcome to Farming 3.0
a. Some definitions
Agroecology is defined as an application of ecological sciences to the study, design and management of sustainable agroecosystems. Our alt farming solutions focus on two pillars: Urban Farming and Permaculture. We believe that Urban Farming is an essential part of the efforts to reinvent how we product food and to localize the food supply-chain so we chose to include it in our solution. Urban farming is defined as a city and suburban agriculture that takes the form of backyard, roof-top and balcony gardening, beekeeping, aquaponic, community gardening in vacant lots in parks, roadside urban fringe agriculture and livestock grazing in open space. Permaculture is defined as an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man. Permaculture not only enhance biodiversity and ensure the resiliency of food production systems but also contribute to create strong local communities, which is essential to fulfill our mission.
b. The problem we solve
Agroecology has been scientifically assessed by international organizations and it was proven to yields solid results. Consequently, more and more professionals and individuals are aware of its potential and it is very slowly becoming more mainstream. However, a major deterrent to widespread adoption of those solutions lies in the fact that agroecological methods are what is called knowledge-intensive systems. They require to design and operate complex ecosystems. This complexity hence requires food producers to undergo a mental paradigm shift away from monoculture into could be seen as a holistic but complex framework. At this time, agroecology knowledge is actively shared via communities active in online platforms, books or offline workshops.
While agroecology is becoming more well known, its implementation is still marginal because those are knowledge-intensive systems. In other words, the learning curve is very steep and the current rate of transmission of practical knowledge is well too slow given the urgency and the scope of changes that are immediately required to contain climate change.
c. Our solution
Seedlife offers to solve this problem by catalyzing an exponential rate of adoption. How? We achieve this by dramatically reducing the pain point of designing, implementing and operating successfully agroecological food production systems whether it is based on permaculture or urban farming if it is in a city context. We assemble the knowledge and experiences of experts and practitioners into a decision system. We make this knowledge accessible by using data science and recommender engines to contextualize the knowledge according to the specificity of each user. In other words, we build an evolving system where mass knowledge keeps expanding as the community grows, learns and contributes, creating positive feedback loops. Once you know what to do, you can in one-click buy, sell all the things you need to operate, including getting access to a decentralized Marketplace and Seed Bank linked via APIs to our knowledge system. Sharing Seeds through a Seed Bank is an important part of our marketplace as it is crucial to maintain diversity.
Seedlife is a pioneering project that designs virtual ecosystems in accordance with individual parameters and constraints (such as inputs of climate zone, topographical relief, type of soil, pitch size, roof top size for urban farming, etc.). Accessible from all parts of the world, both city, periurban or countryside settings, and continuously improving, our automatic platform enables everybody to start producing food in line with agroecology principles. A big focus for us will be the isotopes in emerging countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia… and ultimately all over the world as we build for the new generation that will have to overcome many challenges.
3. Our applications
Our solutions is based on several integrated applications that are either on-chain Dapps (applications purely running on the blockchain layer 1 protocols) or Cloud-based applications. The monetary currency of our ecosystem is based upon a native Impact Token and on traditional fiat currencies.
a. Seedlife.io: Our Decision System Support (DSS)
The core of our solution is cloud-based decision system. It is a knowledge-sharing based application that will help decision makers to compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and expertise of the members of our community. It offers prescriptive guidance to design and operate a permaculture ecosystem and urban farming operations for individuals and professional farmers. The frontend will be fully gamified to offer an interface similar to Sim City or Minecraft and a unique User-Experience similar to life simulation and building games.
b. Seedlife.shop: Our Marketplace
This is a cloud-based marketplace available as a web-based GUI to let the users engage in the following actions: buy / sell / swap a variety of goods. it will include a Seed Bank to facilitate seed exchanges to enhance biodversity. Advertising and platform usage will carry a selling fee. Transactions and selling fees can be settled in our native token SDL as well as in major crypto currencies or in fiat money. We also believe that new services will emerge once the platform gain sufficient traction. For example, we can imagine that people with space available (a rooftop or some lands) should be able to lease it to operators and get some passive income, whether in crypto or in fiat. We can imagine that unused space become local DAOs to create food in a sustainable way and earn income, which is the win-win context we want to create.
c. Seedlife.exchange: Our pool of liquidity
Participants to our ecosystem will be able to acquire our token either by earning as a reward or buying it on Decentralized Exchange (DEX). This means that a liquidity pool facilitates the exchange of sellers and buyers of our internal token. We plan to support the major decentralized exchanges (DEX) across different blockchain layer 1, depending on network capacity and possible congestion reflecting high transactions costs.
d. Seedlife.finance: Borrowing and Earning passive income
This is an onchain application where food producers can make collateralize loans in digital assets from a decentralized lending pool. Our pool will hold reserves in stable coins and in our native coins defined as total liquidity. The pool accept deposit from lenders against a variable and fixed term rates. The rates is determined between supply and demand. Users can borrow these funds, granted that they lock a minimum value as collateral to back the borrow position and that they are vetted by the community and individual have passed a KYC. The farming project will be available on the platform with details. Succesful project will be able to borrow at the condition that they are transparent and agree to rules of conduct that include an open door policy by the community at preagreed schedule.
Staking is the process of holding SDL into our SDL wallet and locking them for a given fixed period to support the operations of our ecosystem and, in return, SDLs holders are rewarded for their contribution. Special numbers will be offered on specific blocks. The staking rates and benefits are described in our loyalty mode by participating to our mini games. We also reward liquidity miners who bring SDL and other assets into liquidity pool by letting farm their LP tokens.
3. Why we use an Impact token
We have issued an Impact Token that we have named SDL. The SDL tokens are Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens. As mentioned before, we will be looking at supporting cross chains given the network issues on Ethereum.
The tokens system would create the following incentives:
- Encourage certain behaviors: the user of the DSS will earn our tokens by engaging with the community and more important by sharing their knowledge as experts into the system. It is a strong extrinsic motivator. We will detail the full reward system at a later date.
- Increase the value of the community: On our marketplace, the seller fees can be settled with a discount using the token. So users who have earning the tokens can sell it with the vendors who wish to sell their products on the market place. The more transactions, the more sellers the greater the value of the token. So all users are incentivized to grow the value of the advertising value of the community. Thus, we trust that this mechanism will create an intrinsic economic value of the SDL that is derived from the advertising value of the Seedlife marketplace as well as the volume and the size of transactions taking place.
- Conduct marketing: we use them as an essential tools for user acquisitions through airdrops, distributions through staking etc.
- Do partnerships: in order to build successful potential partners who can bring new values to our ecosystem we will use tokens to align our interests.
- Hire the best developers: we aim to increase the value of our tokens so that it is a powerful tool to compensate the developers and data scientists who will work on our project
4. Characteristics of our token
The SDL are available for trading on a liquidity pool on Uniswap and other decentralized exchanges. They will be trading against other stable coins. The tokens are harvested by participating and using our DSS and contributing to the pool of knowledge.
The SDL tokens have the following characteristics:
a. Governance: voting rights for all the token holders. We will offer a right to submit proposal for approval to owners of more than 1% of the tokens at the time of distribution. The community itself will be structured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), sometimes labeled a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. governed by our own governance system.
b. Our reward system incentivizes the users to engage in knowledge sharing and to grow the community. A conversion system between the points earned by the active users of our community and the experts by interacting on the platform and the allocation of Tokens. This is to reward our users who engage in certain specific actions that we believe will increase the value of the marketplace. The points system will be administered by the community through a DAO. in order to generate a monetary value of the SDL token, we have implemented a system in the marketplace that allows sellers to obtain advertising fee discounts through settlement of the token instead of fiat. This is to create a real demand to generate an intrinsic value to the SDLs.
c. Payment: SDL tokens can be used by buyers and sellers to settle the transactions on our marketplace. Holders of SDLs will be able to settle their purchase using the tokens they have earned. Moreover, we will be looking for partnerships with fiat gateway providers and fiat/crypto exchanges to offer rapidly the ability to buy and sell SDL against fiat currencies. We believe that our model of economics is a major differentiator.
d. Settlement of the seller fees: Tokens can be used to settle the marketplace associated seller fees with a steep discount compared to fiat. Therefore, genuine demand for the token will be created as the third-party vendors to the marketplace will have to acquire it on Seedlife.exchange to benefit from the discounts on the seller fees.
5. Token economy
6. Roadmap
Phase 1: Using the proceed from the Seed, we build a working MVP of the DSS and the Marketplace supporting Crypto currencies only to simplify operations and legal aspects. We focus on growing the community of experts and users. We will support only selected climate zones on the DSS.
Phase 2: We grow our coverage of the DSS climate zone. We incorporate the support of fiat currencies of the marketplace using the right legal structure for key markets. As our community grow, we attract more suppliers and advertisers to generate revenues, financing our expansion.
Phase 3: We focus on growing internationally fast in order to scale and have the maximum impact. We add a robust lending protocol for projects vetted the community.
Conclusion
At Seedlife we believe that the potential of the DeFi space should serve a greater purpose and could be focused on the general welfare. Given the sobering statistics on the numbers of undernourished worldwide and the crippling figures on poverty, Seedlife seeks its higher purpose in improving food security and sustainability worldwide.
It is certainly disheartening to observe that there are almost no significant public policies nor governmental actions in place to scale up agroecology massively. It is also concerning to see the growing resistance against building a decentralized world. However, it is not a reason to stay complacent. We have to take control of our future and steer the world into a new path, one that is decentralized, sustainable and where technology truly serves the development of local communities. Our time is truly where we see transformational events opening the door to new possibilities that we can actualize if we make a stand and size the opportunity offered. Now is the time for action. Join our mission and make an impact.
