The Fishackathon has quite a history. The last one involved more than 3,500 participants in over 30 countries and 40+ cities. Fishackathon inspires the creation of digital solutions to address sustainable fisheries challenges.

Eachmile, together with organisers Padang & Co., is very proud to be supporting the Fishackathon 2022. Members of the Eachmile team, past and present, were involved in previous Fishackathons as experts and judges etc. In 2016, some team members were attending the Our Ocean conference in Washington DC and we visited the Office of Global Partnerships in the Harry Truman Building of the US State Department. Whilst there we met the Fishackathon team and asked what would happen if Donald Trump were to win the election — the answer was simple and ominous — “this would all go”.

The election came, there was a dignified transfer of power, and then, along with anything mentioning climate change or sustainability, including our partnership on mFish, the Fishackathon was archived. We made a promise then that if we could, we would help to keep it alive.

The Fishackathon was able to continue till 2018 where it was held in over 40 cities in more than 30 countries. Later, in that same year, we were assigned the rights to run and keep the Fishackathon going. Although we tried to run one in 2019 we decided to wait till 2020 and were planning an event in March of that year — the month the World Health Organization declared the world had entered a global pandemic.

With the development of vaccines, their production, and rollout, together with the successful transition to virtual events, we finally decided to re-launch in December 2021 and announce the winners in March 2022. On a personal note, I am very happy right now being able to have written that last sentence. I am sitting on a plane for the first time in over a year and a half, currently flying past a lake called “Lake Disappointment” in Western Australia. I hope that is an omen for us all, especially all those who have suffered and continue to suffer during this pandemic as it has been and is much worse than just a disappointment for so many. In that, we hope this Fishackathon is as special to all those involved, those that participate and support it, as it is to us.

Overfishing and other serious problems harm marine environments and can devastate already-struggling, small-scale fishing marketplaces and communities, most of them in developing countries. Protections exist, but actual enforcement faces major obstacles. To combat this, Fishackathon brings together thousands of concerned designers, developers, and subject matter experts to build practical tech solutions to endemic problems defined by the world’s most respected fisheries experts.

Innovation can’t be hacked

One thing we wanted to do was to examine how Fishackathons of the future could be ran. How could we improve them and make them more relevant to more people in a more virtual world? The Fishackathons of the past brought coders and developers together for a weekend. Participants learned about the challenges facing our oceans, new friendships were made, many great ideas were born, code was written, and demonstration applications were built. However, after the events most participants went on their way, and the challenge statements they addressed in 2014 to 2018 are very much applicable today. So we believe it was time for a not only a reboot but also an upgrade in approach.

Hackathons bring coders and developers together to hack solutions to solve challenges. However, innovation is an iterative process that takes time and resources, and, to be impactful, innovations need proof-of-concept and they need to scale.

Startups participate in Challenges to show how their solution addresses a particular challenge. To evolve their solution, they need access to coders, developers and partners. So we decided it was time to meld the two approaches into the one event and provide the context, the resources, the partners and the platforms to form a Blue Innovation Ecosystem from which the Fishackathon would be the annual feeder event.

This way we could help individuals form teams, create a startup, join startups, and engage with the corporates, NGOs, IHLs, and government agencies to help proof out the concepts and scale the solutions.

Our objectives are:

To raise awareness of the challenges facing our oceans globally and the stakeholders involved

To source for impactful and actionable solutions for the sustainable and responsible use of ocean resources

To partner with leading industry stakeholder companies, governments, and organizations to pilot and scale solutions

Want to get involved — either as a sponsor, ecosystem partner or solution hacker? Head to the website at https://fishackathon.co/ and register.

Fishackathon evolves— from hacking to innovating was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In early 2018, during a trip to Lombok, Indonesia, I was out on a handline fishing vessel with three local fishermen when it occured to me that we may be able to use Fishcoin tokens as an incentive to tag and release juvenile fish instead of landing them (the tokens can be redeemed for mobile air-time top ups). I wrote a Medium post about it then and you can see that and the footage of the trip here. Basically it was about rewarding fishers with tokens to get valuable data on who is fishing, how often, and what they are catching to help us understand the fishing effort and what the population of fish stocks may be. Such an initiative could also help the fishery become more productive and more economical.

A program like this was to be a part of what eventually would become an activity of the Fishcoin Foundation to engage artisanal fishers who are unlikely to receive Fishcoin tokens from local or domestic fish buyers for providing traceability data. A percentage of the Fishcoin token commissions from the more commercial supply chain transactions would fund these programs thus providing Fishcoin token buyers with an additional ESG/CSR element to communicate to their customers, and to provide fisheries scientists and governments with much needed data to better manage fisheries and potentially allocate access rights to these artisanal/small-scale fishers.

Whilst I was lecturing a course at James Cook University, Singapore, I met and discussed the concept with Dr. Neil Hutchinson, a marine ecologist and course coordinator at the Singapore campus. Dr. Hutchinson helped shape the concept, entered the Three Minute Thesis competition, and won!

With the added momentum, we teamed up with Dr. Gustaf Mamangkey, a marine biologist of Sam Ratulangi University (UNSRAT) in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and applied for a grant from the Joint Research Program of the Archipelagic & Island States Forum of the United Nations Development Programme. A program we learned about whilst attending the launch of the AIS Blue Startup Hub.

Thankfully we became recipients of the grant however all the contingencies we had written in about the Covid-19 pandemic were now realities and we had to execute the project without any travel between the teams in Singapore and Indonesia. Indeed, with restrictions in place within those countries, it was looking like no in-person training was going to be possible and training videos were produced. Fortunately, Covid containment measures and contact tracing improved, and the UNSRAT team were able to conduct Train-the-Trainer workshops on fish tagging, and then workshops with fishers on how to tag fish and use the Fishcoin enabled mFish mobile application.

It has been a challenging journey so far but as you can see in the video above, we now have fishers successfully tagging fish at sea and releasing them! We are looking forward to expanding the program with more local fishing communities, and getting data coming in from the capture of tagged fish.

Thank you to Dr. Neil Hutchinson, Dr. Gustaf Mamangkey, and Team UNSRAT! Stay tuned, more to come!

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

UNDP Archipelagic & Island States Forum Joint Research Program was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Fishcoin enabled mFish application just got an upgrade. We’re constantly striving to make all our products as intuitive and easy to use as possible, so we will always be innovating with new and enhanced features and improving our user experience as we work on our mission to transform supply chains to be more sustainable, responsible, equitable and profitable. Importantly though, we will always be listening to our users — and if we get something wrong we’re not afraid to change it, so please share your feedback!

For this update, we leapfrogged Ionic version four and went straight to Ionic 5 to improve the application’s performance, and we made some significant interface changes that will improve our user experience and allow for faster updates going forward. This is just the beginning of our upgrade journey and we’re excited to share this version and about the additions and enhancements due in the coming weeks!

So what’s new and what’s next?

Navigation & Home Screen

The biggest UI change is in navigation, designed to be more intuitive and make performing the most common tasks much easier. We’re aiming for the look and feel of a modern, tokenized distributed app that reflects the purpose and usage of Fishcoin.

When users sign in to the application the first difference they will see is the removal of the hamburger button in the top left corner for revealing the main menu. Instead we have introduced a number of tabs at the bottom of the screen for performing the most common tasks — transferring records (the most used, default/home screen), wallet functions and redeeming Fishcoin. All other functions and options are accessed through the Settings button at the bottom, including modifying their user profile.

Species Selection

The species selection experience has been enhanced with a search function, regularly selected species appearing at the top of the screen, and the ability to enter “Other” and then type the name of a species that isn’t in the species list. All of this is designed to speed up the entry of new harvest data, rather than be a cumbersome task that can cause users to revert back to the “old ways” and miss out on the incentives provided by Fishcoin.

Wallet, Transfer & Buy Fishcoin Tokens

In the old version the wallet was accessed via an icon positioned in the top right corner. When tapped users would see the balance and have the option to Buy Fishcoin tokens. To transfer tokens from one wallet to another, users would need to go to the main menu and tap on Transfer Fishcoins. In the new version users can see their balance and transfer tokens after tapping on the Wallet icon at the bottom. To buy Fishcoin tokens, users now tap on Settings and then tap on Buy Fishcoin — a function that mobile phone users like fishers and farmers are less likely to use as they will be receiving tokens from buyers of their harvest data.

In addition to the above there are a number of other improvements to the user experience — but it is a continual journey of improvement so if you notice areas in need of improvement please let us know. And stay tuned because more improvements are in the pipeline, including a further-enhanced Wallet experience and a really exciting upgrade to the redemption offerings that will bring far greater utility to the Fishcoin token!

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

mFish + Fishcoin Upgrade was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The above excerpt is from a discussion paper and part of an MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century and published two months before the new millennium when Amazon was only a digital bookstore, before Google took off, and other platforms like Uber, AirBnB turned the taxi and accommodation industries on their heads.

The authors stated in 1999 that today’s organizations are working very well. But few institutions anywhere — be they educational, governmental, community, or business institutions — are serving societies’ and individuals’ needs as well as they could. In particular, business institutions, while arguably the healthiest of society’s institutions, are operating far short of their potential to contribute broadly to societal well being.

Sixteen years later the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were adopted. Although progress has been made the climate emergency and the global pandemic has set the world back significantly and impacted all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. Indeed the UNEP predict SDG performance to be likely underestimated.

With regards to SDG 14 Life Below Water we are not faring well at all. The percentage of fish stocks within biologically sustainable levels has gone from 90% in 1990 to 65.8% in 2017, and yet we are discarding, losing or wasting up to 60% of our seafood through supply chains. Furthermore, approximately 30% of our seafood emanates from Illegal, Unreported & Unregulated sources, and up to 80% can be mislabelled.

So 22 years after the MIT Manifesto for Inventing Organizations for the 21st Century, how would we score ourselves? How would our corporations score themselves according to their own Mission, Vision and Value statements? What about us? What about our Mission, Vision & Values statements? Well we tried multiple times to write them and we seemed not to get them done. This might have been because we didn’t feel comfortable with who we were turning into through the process — to be brutally honest we started to feel like the BS artists that know little of the sector the corporate is in but are paid fortunes to spin a narrative for them. Why? Because we found ourselves reviewing these corporate statements, starting to use the same words, and had the feeling in the back of our minds that we needed the statements to appeal to investors, employees and society all at once.

Reading what the authors of the MIT paper wrote decades ago where they claimed that “highly efficient organizations are not achieving what we humans really want, that the current organization of economic activity is intensifying economic inequity and eroding critical environmental systems, it became clear to us that little had changed and that most of the corporate Mission, Vision and Value statements we read aren’t worth the paper they used to be written on.

In fact, things have worsened in many respects. Sadly the authors belief that the increasing divergence between the “haves” and “have-nots” within countries and around the world cannot continue without morally troubling inequities and, perhaps, major social disruptions has come true.

And we agree with the authors in that there is a clear need to invent organizations — and social systems within which they operate — that can be both economically efficient and also widely perceived as equitable. So rather than spinning out corporation-esque Mission, Vision and Values statements we decided to produce a Manifesto and tell you what we believe, and what we are trying to do to address the challenges. Basically, so we can hopefully look at our children and grandchildren in the eye and say that we did our best.

So what do we believe?

1. The Fishcoin Project team believes that ultimately industry must drive the change we need, and that platform approaches to trading can solve many of our ocean’s challenges. We believe that a trading platform that sells seafood for a fair and transparent commission is incentivised to assist producers/sellers (fishers, farmers, processors etc.) to produce legal, reported, regulated, and safe seafood of the highest quality, consistently, and in compliance to sustainability and responsibility standards demanded by the market.
2. The Fishcoin Project team believes that one of the greatest barriers to achieving data-driven trading platforms that integrate seafood supply and financial chains, is the lack of viable first mile traceability solutions for developing nation producers that produce over 90% of the world’s seafood and employs 95% of those engaged in the global seafood industry.
3. The Fishcoin Project team believes fishers and farmers in developing nations should not have to pay for traceability systems, and that the market should determine the value of the traceability data and reward those that share their data. Therefore we launched a token as part of a blockchain based traceability solution that is free to access and that rewards fishers and farmers for sharing their traceability data. Although blockchain traceability can be achieved for as low as one US cent (0.01 tokens), we believe the market will eventually determine a viable and fair market price for the data.
4. The Fishcoin Project team believes it is a responsibility to pay tax so governments can invest in fisheries research and development as well as cover the expense of monitoring, compliance and surveillance. The Fishcoin project earns revenues from transparent commissions when Fishcoin tokens are transferred and will pay tax on those commissions.
5. The Fishcoin Project team believes it is important to involve, support and reward developers around the world to build applications using the underlying Trace Protocol. It is our intention, where, and as much as possible, to help the technologically inclined daughter of a fisherman or son of a fish farmer to build applications for the fishers or farmers in their local community. We commit to splitting commissions with these developers and we commit to providing the tools, libraries and training to build solutions around standards such as those developed by the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST).
6. The Fishcoin Project team believes integration is also the key to achieving scale. We will integrate Fishcoin into existing traceability applications to help their users/subscribers offset or cover the costs of subscriptions to those applications, thus helping them to scale.
7. The Fishcoin Project team believe it is critical to put the fisher’s and farmer’s interests first, but that it is also critical to involve government and non-government actors. We believe the fishers and farmers should own their data but that the data needs to be shared with governments for informed policy generation, fisheries management purposes, and to transition to rights based fisheries management. We believe this can and must be achieved in a way that protects the fisher’s and farmer’s interests, yet meets the data protection and data sovereignty concerns and responsibilities of governments.
8. The Fishcoin Project team believes that blockchain technologies will enable fishers and farmers to become shareholders in the business of both traceability and trading. The project team is working on such solutions as well as solutions to help them secure access to fair finance and insurance.
9. The Fishcoin Project team believes in gender equality and that the empowerment of women will significantly advance society toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The Fishcoin team will work to ensure women in fishing and farming communities, as well as those in the supply chain and technology industries are included and rewarded.
10. The Fishcoin Project team believes in currency sovereignty and wishes to work with governments, government bodies, and their representatives on, inter alia, the creation of regulatory sandbox environments to allow the traceability utility token to be redeemed into fiat currencies with banks helping the unbanked become banked, or for the tokens to be redeemed for government e-vouchers such as food stamps, medical services etc.

Finally, the Fishcoin team believes in partnerships. We cannot do this alone. We want to and need to work with likeminded people to change the world for the better.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

The Fishcoin Manifesto was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we’ve mentioned before, traceability can be a fairly dry topic but it is mission critical to achieve from the first mile, and mostly in developing nations for seafood supply chains. As Fishcoin tokens are only redeemable (at present) for mobile air-time top ups, they have limited applicability in developed nations where most people are on post-paid accounts with their mobile operator.

However, traceability is still a requirement in developed nations where seafood mislabelling and fraud is a major issue. Thus using a blockchain system like Fishcoin, even alongside a paper or an electronic solution, is still relevant for building trust and differentiating you, your product, your company, and your brand in the market.

At Eachmile Technologies, and through the Fishcoin Project, one of the things we take delight in is being able to bring people together — this is about one of those stories. In this case it is Rick Kolega in Southern Australia and Lucas Glanville in Singapore.

Rick, the co-owner and general manager of Kolega Fisheries, is an industry leader. He has led by often being the first within his industry, Australia or the region to get ISO certifications for protecting the environment, for setting welfare standards for the crews etc. and thus he has received numerous accolades and awards along the way. He takes great pride in what he, his brothers, and their crews and staff do every day to produce and deliver the highest quality, sustainable prawns to the market.

On the other side of the equation is the Director of Culinary Operations at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Singapore. Not only awarded for his culinary pursuits, Chef Lucas has led the Hyatt hotels in Singapore and the region to many firsts — especially in sustainability. Chef Lucas, an Ocean Ambassador has implemented water, waste recycling, and chain of custody programs, he has set up rooftop gardens, and received the Marine Stewardship Council Hospitality Star Award at the 2019 World Gourmet Awards.

The team members of Eachmile Technologies have been working closely with both gentlemen since 2010 on a variety of sustainability focussed initiatives — mostly surrounding the MSC certified Western King Prawns that Kolega Fisheries supply to Chef Lucas and his team at the Grand Hyatt, Singapore. The latest shipment of Western King Prawns were blockchain traced using the Fishcoin application for 0.01 Fishcoin tokens — that is US$0.01c for a shipment of 1,500kg of sustainable prawns. It was quick and it was simple.

Some may ask, why is it so cheap? How do we make profit on that? Well we don’t. We leave it up to the market to decide what price is fair to pay. As it is designed for those in seafood supply chains in the developing nations, it is hoped that seafood importers in developed nations will figure out what a fair price for the data is and reward developing nation fishers and farmers. With 95% of seafood produced in developing nations, and markets like the US and Australia importing 70–90% of their seafood, it is really about getting a system for that trade. The more it is used in and between developed nation actors is great too — it means buyers will most likely introduce the system to their suppliers who are buying seafood from developing nations. What we do get from this is the satisfaction of helping two people connect that are striving to make the world a better place.

In the end it is not just about a transaction between companies. It is about people. About their stories and giving them recognition for what they do and their efforts to make the world a better place. So as much as code #MduAWJD1Fpq6me9bYE9 is important, so are the people behind it. Click on the trace code to see the story behind the batch.

Blockchain Traceability: This Time It’s Personal was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Traceability can be a very dry topic. Key Data Elements, Critical Tracking Events, syntactic and semantic interoperability etc. Before you switch off I will stop there (we will leave the exploration of technicalities and challenges to other posts). Essentially it is the ability to trace a product and, if applicable, its ingredients/components back to the source. Companies are required to track what comes into their company and what goes out — it’s called one-up, one-down traceability. In the food industry it is important for food recalls when there is a contaminant that can be harmful to consumers. So it is important.

So how could something so simple, mundane be that critical? Well let’s think about it, if we cannot trace our seafood (or any other product or ingredient for that matter) back to the source then how can we tell if it was legally produced? How can we be sure it was responsibly or sustainably caught or grown and not caught by slaves on fishing boats or processed by children? Without traceability we cannot come close to being sure. Indeed without traceability we have no ability to identify, verify and reward sustainable and responsible producers.

Surely this is not a wide spread problem and the above only highlights some isolated cases in the developing world? Surely our trusted supermarkets, on-line stores, and brands check and make sure the products they sell us are legally and responsibly produced? Sadly, the lack of traceability or visibility in supply chains is staggering. A survey in 2017 showed that only 6% of firms said they had full supply chain visibility. This is complicated by the fact supply chains are global, and in the case of seafood, 95% of global production emanates out of developing nations, and of this, about 1 in 3 fish is from Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated fishing according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Challenges are not isolated to developing nations. An analysis of 44 studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast global scale.

So without traceability buyers and consumers cannot use their purchasing power to drive and reward more responsible production. It is like the steering wheel is disconnected from the wheels and our planet is driving toward a cliff. This is why we say it is mission critical. We need the traceability data to not only identify and reward more responsible producers, we also need the catch and effort data to manage our fisheries sustainably and transition to rights based fisheries management (ownership of the resource). We need to get time-temperature data from the fishers and farmers so we can move from risk-based use-by dates on products to evidence-based best-before dates and stop throwing away perfectly good produce and reduce the up to 60% of our seafood that is wasted through supply chains. We need the data to de-risk finance and assess risk for insurance. We need this to make the seafood industry more equitable, more sustainable, more responsible, and more profitable. And we need it now if we are going to avoid that cliff. This is our Why.

Up next will be the story of Our How — how Fishcoin does things differently.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

Fishcoin: Our Why was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Firstly, sorry for the radio silence! The pandemic has been a challenge but we didn’t go anywhere. Well, actually, we did. Just after our last post and field test in Indonesia we went to Australia, Thailand, Mauritius, Madagascar, the United Kingdom... and then just before we were about to travel to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Barcelona, Morocco and Bangladesh for conferences and meetings with the likes of fishers, farmers, NGOs, mobile operators etc. Covid-19 locked us down mid-March 2020 — all of us!

So what have we been doing? Well we have been and are continuing to upgrade our web-based, Android and iOS mFish + Fishcoin applications (aka mFish-Trace). Our Ionic 5 upgrade is just around the corner. We are building out our critical second mile tracing and inventory management solution called Fishrr which is designed for processors in the developing world. Projects are underway for blue swimming crab, octopus, and tuna in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

We have been working on projects in Australia and Indonesia where we have been partnering with the United Nations Development Program’s Archipelagic & Island States Forum, James Cook University and Sam Ratulangi University. We have done projects for Tuna Australia and are embarking on new and exciting Fishery and Aquaculture Improvement Projects for demersal fish and farmed shrimp respectively.

We have featured in a number of publications, journals, theses, books and members of our team have either convened panels, breakout sessions or been participants in them in a variety of conferences and webinars.

So, we have a lot to update and share with you in the coming months — some from the last year or so, and some fresh off the press. We also have some great stuff in the pipeline. Although it has been and continues to be a very challenging environment we need to press ahead because the need for first and second mile traceability solutions has only grown. That’s because Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported fishing activity has been on the rise with the pandemic, and, as is often the case, it has been the small scale fishers and farmers that have been bearing the brunt. More to come.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

Fishcoin: A Quick Update was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In December members of the Eachmile team visited Asian Seafood Improvement Collaborative (ASIC) member PT ATINA in Sidoarjo, Indonesia. ATINA is a processor of prawns and a leader in the sustainable and responsible seafood movement — not just in the region but globally. Eachmile have been lucky to work with ATINA over the years on supply chain improvement projects from the fishing grounds of the broodstock in Aceh through to the consumption of their black tiger prawns at venues like the Grand Hyatt in Singapore.

We were in Sidoarjo to further test the latest version of the Fishcoin enabled mFish application — a traceability solution based on distributed ledger technology that aims to incentivise data sharing from the first mile. This means getting out to a harvest and this time we visited Koniba Wetan owned by Pak Masud and managed by Pak Said — a farm we have purchased prawns from in the past.

The harvest was typical in that it involved collecting prawns that had entered traps set the day before. The ATINA technicians were on hand to grade, weigh, chill, box and transport the prawns back to their processing facility.

After the harvest we entered the Key Data Elements (KDEs) for traceability into the application for transmitting them from the farm to ATINA and for putting the KDEs on the Stellar blockchain. Transferred Fishcoin utility tokens were destroyed when they were redeemed for mobile air-time top ups by Pak Masud and Pak Said — both of whom are on pre-paid plans with their mobile operators. The mobile airtime top ups were much appreciated by both gentlemen and confirmed it as being a motivating incentive to share data.

There will be an ongoing process of continuous improvement for the application and traceability ecosystem, and significant modifications have already been made on the application based on our learnings from this trip. In the coming months we will be undertaking more field trials in various seafood producing nations around the globe.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please contact our team.

Fishcoin Field Report — PT ATINA East Java, December 2019 was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to follow that passion into learning more about the aquatic world, and it has literally taken me all around the world, working in over 20 countries throughout North and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, And the Asia Pacific, where I have continued to learn more about seafood and have made some great friendships along the way. I love exploring the oceans on top and below, and enjoying the variety, taste and health benefits of the 12,000 + seafood species. It’s pretty incredible. Some of you know me from the mountain biking world also — an equally great passion that started later but will continue with me until I can’t do it anymore — but back to the fish.

I absolutely love my salmon but one of the biggest learnings has been that over 90% of our seafood comes from small scale producers in developing nations, and along with that we have almost no data for this seafood.
This has led me and my many partners to develop a solution using Blockchain technology that incentivises these seafood producers with a reward for entering their harvest information into an open source protocol thereby providing traceability for these supply chains — Fishcoin. That’s a mouthful! But a mission critical one! The importance of this for all of us is that this data fundamentally underpins the long term sustainability of our aquatic world and the seafood that is so important for the health of so many people.

My passion is unchanged, and probably even stronger now I have children of my own that are intelligent and environmentally aware, and listen to messages from Greta Thunberg and others to help drive change and better custodianship or the planet.
I now have far greater capacity to effect significant change well beyond that which I could have achieved when I was younger, mainly due to some extra knowledge and wisdom and also a lot of important relationship capital with like-minded people in the Fish world. I feel that this gives me a certain moral responsibility. The livelihoods of one in 10 people on the planet are involved in the seafood industry — it’s colossal.

The Fishcoin initiative and underlying Trace Protocol framework will have great positive impact for the millions of small scale seafood producers and their families, that bring us our seafood on a daily basis, predominantly from developing nations and I am extremely motivated and proud to be involved.

#sdgs #fishcoin #traceprotocol #sustainable #seafood #gsma #stellar #blockchain #IoT #distributedledgertechnology

The Fishcoin Initiative: a personal story of passion for seafood and the oceans was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In February, Fishcoin was honoured to present at the the SAFET Conference (formerly the Monitoring, Control, and Surveillance [MCS] Emerging Technologies Workshop). It is the only global conference where MCS, and now seafood supply chain practitioners from around the world can explore and learn about the very latest technologies available for application in fisheries MCS and supply chain traceability.

The overarching goal of the conference series is to explore and discover the potential of emerging technologies to address some of the most difficult fisheries MCS and seafood supply chain traceability challenges in an effort to prevent, deter, or eliminate Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated fishing.

Specifically, the objectives of the conference were to:

• Improve and clarify the understanding of the existing MCS and supply chain traceability environment.
• Objectively review emerging and advancing technologies that might contribute to less expensive and more efficient MCS and supply chain traceability.
• Advance the future implementation of innovative emerging technologies in MCS and supply chain traceability applications where appropriate.

On show were technologies as diverse as satellite remote sensing, unmanned surveillance vehicles, and companies such as Integrated Monitoring able to show real time footage of fishing activity in South America. Running alongside the conference was a Seafood Traceability Hackathon whereby great solutions were built in just a few days.

Fishcoin were also invited to present and we highlighted that much of the technology on display was inaccessible to the majority of fishers as they are small scale fishers in developing nations. This was not only an economic inaccessibility challenge but also a capacity challenge, and therefore we need to look to solutions that are not only affordable but that can operate in 2G environments and that are made with the fishers in mind as many have low digital literacies. Furthermore, on top of capture fishers there a millions of people working in aquaculture — a sector that is still heavily reliant on wild stocks for seed and feed.

To be inclusive and reach the vast majority of these fishers, technologies need to be built around the technology that they have in their hands — mobile phones. Increasingly that is becoming smartphone technology as entry models continue to become cheaper. Indeed, the Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA) predicts that smartphone connections will rise from 57% to 77% by 2025, and that in those six years 2G connections will decline from 41% to 5%. Most of this growth will occur in the Asia Pacific region where most of the worlds seafood is caught or grown.

The Fishcoin decentralised application, mFish has already been shown to function on the most basic of smartphones such as a $45 Advan phone purchased in Indonesia. This phone receives and sends records, and records the data on the Rinkeby Ethereum test net blockchain. Indeed with such low costs, thus lower risk, phone sellers may be more likely offer finance lease arrangements for the phones, and one day even accept payments in Fishcoin tokens from fishers and fish farmers.

The SAFET conference created and strengthened new connections among technology, industry, and government specialists, and identified current and future opportunities for the application of innovative technologies in fisheries MCS and supply chain traceability. We look forward to playing a leading role in this endeavour. In closing, the Fishcoin team would like to thank WWF’s Bubba Cook for inviting us to present and we appreciated all the hard work he and his colleagues put in to making the conference a great success.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin or Seafood Innovation Project Community partner?

Companies and organisations in the seafood industry interested in becoming rollout partners in the Fishcoin ecosystem or who just want to know more about joining the Fishcoin community of partners please contact our team.

Seafood And Fisheries Emerging Technologies Conference was originally published in Fishcoin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.