Project Introduction

The core of the AGRI project is a blockchain-driven digital platform called AgriDex, which is built on the underlying technology provided by the Solana blockchain. It utilizes smart contracts and USDC for instant settlement, collaborates with Circle, and leverages Stripe’s bridge to reduce agricultural trade costs. The project aims to revolutionize global agricultural trade by integrating entry and exit ramps, connecting producers, traders, and buyers worldwide, and enhancing the resilience and adaptability of trade. In addition, AgriDex is designed to support different regulatory environments, establishing clear standards globally and ensuring compliance, even in the strictest jurisdictions, to facilitate seamless trade.

The highlight of AgriDex is the use of blockchain technology to provide a low-cost, real-time settlement system, and to improve the transparency and traceability of the agricultural value chain through on-chain recorded sustainability certification. It also addresses long-standing issues such as high remittance costs, food fraud, and poor cross-jurisdictional traceability. The platform has reduced the average global trade cost from 3% to 0.5%, shortened payment time from days to seconds, and streamlined the complex cross-border trading process of agricultural products. It is widely adopted by the world’s largest traders and food producers.

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AGRI Project Logo (Image Source: https://x.com/AgriDexPlatform)

Team Information

Henry Duckworth (Founder and CEO) - Born into a farming family in Africa, he grew up in a harsh environment of agricultural system collapse and severe inflation, which gave him a profound understanding of the agricultural supply chain. As the youngest commodities trader at Trafigura, he accumulated rich experience in cross-jurisdictional trading, and gained unique insights into the high friction and high cost issues in trading, realizing that agricultural product trading is full of friction due to its decentralization and lack of unified standards. These experiences later became the inspiration for the AgriDex platform, providing an integrated solution for the sale, transportation, and purchase of agricultural products.

Founder of the project, Henry Duckworth’s homepage (Image source:linkedin.com/in/henry-duckworth-b8731531)

Russell Duckworth (Chairman) - also one of the founding investors of DeepMind, which is a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. Russell has over 30 years of experience in the financial industry, having served as the global head of stock research at Deutsche Bank, and has over ten years of experience in investing in and founding small growth companies. As a technical investor and founder, Russell also serves as a director of an African agricultural group, dedicated to using technology to solve real-world problems.

Edward Monckton (Chief Strategy Officer) - With over 15 years of military leadership, diplomatic, and strategic consulting experience, he has worked and lived in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, accumulating extensive experience in promoting complex international cooperation and strategic development processes.

David Campbell OBE (Chair of the Foundation) - Practitioner of global sustainable agricultural development, with over 40 years of experience in food security education. He has led the launch of educational programs ‘Shamba Shape Up’ and ‘Makutano Junction’, achieving significant results in Africa and developing countries. The programs have covered Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, impacting millions of small-scale farmers and promoting sustainable agricultural practices through intuitive methods.

Token Economics

Governance Token: $AGRI

Initial price: $ 0.065 (Q4, 2024)

Token total supply: 1,000,000,000

TGE token amount: 75,000,000, with the rest being released linearly

Token allocation plan: The initial token allocation covers seed round participants, private placement, equity investors, team, partners, airdrops, reserves, and ecological development, ensuring a balance of interests among all parties and driving the long-term development of the project. The specific allocation ratios are as follows.

Agri Token Distribution Plan (Image Source:Agridex Whitepaper)

Token Release Time:

During the Token Generation Event (TGE), the circulation of AgriDex tokens reaches its peak, and the tokens released during this period will be sufficient to support early users of the ecosystem and provide ample liquidity in the early stages of listing. In addition, AgriDex has spent a lot of time building the community and attracting key partners and users, fully preparing for listing. The following diagram shows the schedule for token release plan.

Token linear release schedule (Image source: [AgriDEX White Paper]

Token Functionality

1. Governance Function - AGRI token holders can obtain voting rights for governance and can propose and vote on platform improvement proposals. The platform incentivizes active participation by users to grant more governance power and promote deep community involvement in platform ecosystem development.

2. Repurchase and Redistribution: The platform may repurchase tokens through profits and redistribute them to key contributors, rewarding community members who have made outstanding contributions to the project’s success, ensuring that users share in the growth of AgriDex.

3. DAO Voting (Token holders who meet the conditions of DAO can vote to decide the following practical functions):

a. Market Insights: The platform provides monthly subscription services to create stable demand for tokens, while helping users gain access to valuable agricultural market insights and make wiser decisions.

b. Liquidity Pool Rewards: By providing support to loans through liquidity pools, holders can receive liquidity rewards.

c. Influence Agricultural Fund: Through crowdfunding, AGRI token holders can pool funds and invest in high-potential agricultural projects; after the project succeeds, holders can receive agricultural revenue, token rewards, or exclusive merchandise returns.

d. Data Services: Allows sellers to use tokens to order custom insights, reports or advertising services.

e. Staking Rewards: Holders can stake AGRI tokens to earn profits, and a portion of the staking rewards will be used to fund sustainable development projects led by the AgriDex Foundation.

Project Roadmap

1. 2022: Concept Formation \
The concept of AgriDex was initially born, and the team identified the goal of promoting innovation in the agricultural trade market through digital solutions, and began to plan the related technical framework.

2. 2023: Preliminary layout

Q1: The platform officially launched, and the team focused on building the infrastructure for the digital market, defining the scope of requirements and technical roadmap.

Q2-Q3: Successfully completed seed round financing, laying the foundation for AgriDex’s long-term development. At the same time, the team signed a strategic agreement for future farms, established cooperation with 3,500 British farmers, and planned to expand the market to the United States and South Africa.

Q4: Choose Solana as a technical partner and receive strategic support from its founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

3. 2024: Function Expansion

Q1: The platform enters the feasibility demonstration and concept verification stage, demonstrating available products and providing customized services and promotion to key customers to verify the feasibility of core functions and market response.

Q2: Released core market functions, supported the implementation of agricultural product listing, search and filtering functions; signed multiple strategic partnerships, including cooperation with Bridge.xyz to provide cross-jurisdictional USDC payment services; provided custody solutions.

Q4: Governance token $AGRI launched, simultaneously releasing initial MVP product; starting to promote community development and ecosystem governance, integrating user registration, integrating KYC/AML; completed seamless switching between fiat and crypto assets, testing integration of ESG report function to cover environmental and social standards of trading products. In addition, testing with key customers has been conducted, and invoice financing function has been launched.

Four, 2025: Launch core functions

Q1: The plan is to expand business to the UK, Africa, and the Middle East, with a target of adding 2,400 new customers. To meet the needs of customers in different regions, the platform will launch a series of core features in this phase, including one-on-one trade finance services to help agricultural enterprises achieve customized financial support; and provide comprehensive insurance services to protect against risks that may arise during trade.

Latest Progress

On December 12, 2024, AgriDex announced the successful raising of $4 million in a strategic round of financing, led by venture capital platform Portal Ventures, with support from Endeavour Ventures, FS Ventures, Hawkwood Capital, and Sycamore Gap Management. Following last year’s $5 million pre-seed financing, AgriDex has raised over $9 million from investors to date and plans to expand its partner network to provide innovative agricultural trade finance services.

This move pushed the AgriDex native token AGRI to a new all-time high of $0.1201 on December 12, 2024, an increase of 79% from the low of $0.06265 on December 6. As of January 16, 2025, the latest price of AGRI is $0.07722.

AGRI latest price trend (source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/agridex/)

On December 25, 2024, Agridex also facilitated its first on-chain coffee transaction, executed by the UK-based coffee brand Tiki Tonga Coffee, with payment in South African Rand and settlement in British pounds using the Agridex blockchain. Brad Barritt, founder of Tiki Tonga, claimed that the transaction only incurred a 0.5% transaction fee, a small fraction of the typical 5%-7% cost for cross-border transactions involving agricultural products, clearly opening the door to more cost-effective agricultural transactions.

Conclusion

By converting real-world assets (RWA) into digital tokens, AgriDex aims to reduce investment barriers in the agricultural sector and promote more efficient and economical trading methods in the industry. Currently, AgriDex has successfully introduced various agricultural products such as wine and coffee to the blockchain platform, effectively addressing challenges such as inefficiency, lack of technological support, environmental degradation, and opaque supply chains. It also provides strong emerging support for the digital transformation of the agricultural industry.

According to the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, agriculture contributes about 5.5% to the total domestic production value in the United States, while the total value of U.S. farmland has exceeded $30 trillion. This market size provides a trillion-dollar opportunity for the tokenization of agricultural products, demonstrating the huge potential and market prospects for the tokenization of agricultural assets. With the continuous advancement of technology and the gradual maturity of the market, AgriDex is expected to occupy an important position in this huge market, leading the agricultural industry towards a more transparent, efficient, and sustainable future.