Announcing AgriMint alpha release
What is the problem?
Almost half a billion people — mostly in the Global South — save in informal groups, such as rotating savings and credit groups (ROSCAs), savings groups and self-help groups. They are known by different local names – susu, esusu, njangi and others.
People have practiced these traditions for generations, but they face several key challenges:
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The savings are typically kept in cash and are prone to physical security risks and embezzlement.
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They are denominated in local currencies, which traditionally suffer from high inflation in these regions. This prevents these communities to accumulate long-term capital.
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The informal nature does not help communities generate data about their savings and credit history, thus keeping them disconnected from formal financial institutions who can provide capital for development of their activities and protection against unexpected events.
How to address this?
What if these informal groups can become digital, self-sovereign, globally-connected community banks? We believe that by doing so, these informal group can remain independent, secure their savings, start managing their liquidity, accumulate data and long-term capital for their economic development and attract funding for their projects.
But creating a bank is an expensive endeavour. It is not, thanks to the already existing and emerging technologies on top of Bitcoin.
We propose a Bitcoin-based approach to democratise the creation of digital community micro-banks and deliver a full stack of financial services tailored to their needs:
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US dollar stablecoins and bitcoin for short and long-term saving and capital accumulation.
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Federated Chaumian mints for community custody and privacy-preserving current account, protected by a number of trusted community guardians.
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Lightning network connectivity for instant global and local payments.
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Multi-sig addresses secured by cheap hardware signing devices to protect the long-term capital of the community.
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Access via the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol on features phones without the need for internet connection.
The name AgriMint is inspired by the fact that most of the communities we are aiming to serve are in rural areas and are engaged in agriculture. Mint comes from the Chaumian mint concept.
These micro-banks will operate as full reserve banks and provide full transparency to their members. Moreover, due to the nature of the community custody, we believe that they can continue to operate informally, thus avoiding expensive regulations.
How do we approach the market?
It is estimated that more than 20 million of people are leading these informal groups. We plan to reach out to these groups and leaders through our network and local associations and cooperatives.
Through our past and current experience working in the financial inclusion space, we have seen first-hand the challenges these communities face and their needs and aspirations. We are designing an inclusive solution, focused on simple user experience facilitating adoption.
In comparison to other solutions, we have a distinct offering – we plan to deliver a digital bank in a box. The communities can start very quickly and without any technical skills. Behind the scenes, we manage a trust-minimised multi-tenant infrastructure that provides highly-reliable service, given that the areas these communities live in may often lack stable electricity and internet connections. However, we do not plan to compromise on security, and we are designing a platform that will enable a community to be in full control of their funds, and to be able to move to their own infrastructure at any point in time as the whole project is FOSS.
What are we releasing today?
The initial idea for AgriMint was shared in this story on Bolt.fun just a month and half ago. Since then, we made an enormous progress, researching and building the components of the platform. We have reported the weekly progress on our project page, exchanged with the community and participated in African Bitcoin spacer on Twitter to collect insights & feedback.
While we are not yet ready for primetime on mainnet, we are releasing the first versions of the 5 main components of the AgriMint today.
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AgriMint web application, which is used by guardians to set up and manage the mints, available in development environment at https://app.dev.agrimint.xyz, and its source code is available at https://github.com/agrimint/agrimint-web-app
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AgriMint USSD service for member access via feature phones – currently running inside Africa's Talking simulator. Its source code is available at https://github.com/agrimint/ussd-service
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AgriMint back end service providing the business logic behind the web app and USSD service was deployed on https://app-be.dev.agrimint.xyz:8081 and its source code is available at https://github.com/agrimint/agrimint-backend
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Fedimint RESTful API gateway – a Fedimint gateway, which manages the automated creation of tenants with federations and the interaction with the nodes. It's deployed at http://mints.dev.agrimint.xyz:3000 and its source code is available at https://github.com/agrimint/fedimint-restful-gw
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Full-featured hardware signing device with a low pricing point (<$20) – we have done an initial design, available at https://github.com/agrimint/hardwareWallet
What are the next steps?
Our roadmap is a natural continuation of the work so far:
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Complete the features related to Fedimint as their team is releasing very important functionalities and working towards a release that will be feasible to use with Bitcoin mainnet. At Fedimint is not mature yet and undergoes fast evolution, we have faced several issues during the Tournament, which we'll continue working on addressing with the help of their team.
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Integrate with Galoy's Stablesats – we could not achieve this during the Tournament due to the tight coupling of Stablesats with the full Galoy stack. However, they are planning to release it as a stand-alone module.
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Finalise the design of the hardware devices.
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Lending to other members.
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Building a credit record and borrowing with fair conditions from external lenders, using an integration with the Growr protocol.
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Securely storing long-term savings into a multi-sig vault, protected by hardware signing devices.
Our Figma project provides a visual presentation of the different concepts we are working on.
In addition to our roadmap, we are certainly focused on continuing to test the value proposition with the communities we're aiming to serve. Two of our team members (Niyi and Radoy) will attend the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Accra on 5-7 December. If you are there, we'd love to meet you!
What challenges do we see ahead?
The most important challenge is the change management. We will focus on communicating clearly the benefits of AgriMint to local community leaders, who are the most critical success factor to onboarding the informal groups. In order to facilitate adoption, we will need to support a variety of local languages.
We also plan to partner with supply chain partners of the communities, which would benefit from the credit records the community members would be able to build, and increase their business activity. Examples with this includes providers of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, cooperatives and wholesale buyers of the produce.
Supporting local currencies may be another challenge we need to address. US dollar and bitcoin are great alternatives, but the unit of account of these communities is most often their local currency. There are some projects that aim to enable the creation of stablecoins pegged to local currencies.
Last but not least, we expect some potential push-back from local and state governments. This is uncharted territory and we believe our approach as a provider of global infrastructure is the right one in this direction, but we'll be also looking into diversifying with community-hosted infrastructure.