INTRODUCING | How Solana’s RWA Platform, AgriDex, is Bringing Africa’s Agricultural Market On-Chain

In July 2024, AgriDex, a marketplace for real-world assets (RWAs) made history when it settled its first agricultural trade on the Solana blockchain.

The platform, which aims to bring the global agricultural market on-chain by tokenizing various crops, enabled the shipment of over two hundred bottles of extra virgin olive oil and multiple cases of wine from a farm and vineyards in South Africa to London.

According to AgriDex, it ‘settled the transactions almost instantly, charging only 0.15% to each side of the trade‘ while in traditional systems ‘fees can be several percentage points per trade.”

“We settled the first-ever trade on a public blockchain, and it is now on its way from South Africa to London,” said Adrian Vanderspuy, Owner and CEO of Oldenburg Vineyards.

“The funds came into our AgriDex account in seconds rather than days and the fees were 5 GBP.”

According to Henry Duckworth, Co-Founder and CEO of AgriDex:

“With every 1% of global trade we onboard, billions of dollars are saved and millions of lives are positively affected.”

AgriDex, which raised $5 million in May 2024 with investments from:

• Endeavour Ventures
• African Crops, a sub-Saharan African agricultural group, and
• Oldenburg Vineyard, a South African vineyard group

wants to bring more of their stock on-chain to reduce time taken to receive payments and transaction remittance costs.

AgriDex was also reportedly facilitating the sale of farmland in Zambia by a Mauritian sustainable development organization and the sale of bakery machinery from South Africa to Zimbabwe. Both deals were valued at more than $500,000.

According to a demo video shared on its website, AgriDex allows agricultural trades to be listed, executed, and tracked entirely within the platform. Transactions are secured with NFTs that store the details of each deal. AgriDex allows various crops to be bought on its marketplace. When finalized, deals are then secured by minting a non-fungible token (NFT) recording the key transaction details.

The solution is especially useful in African markets where poor government, volatile currencies, underdeveloped contract law, and difficult trading environments make things challenging for farmers and suppliers, Duckworth has said in a past interview.

“I grew up in Zimbabwe and saw the rise of bitcoin as a respite from hyperinflation. After a while I realized the technology went so much further than financial settlement, it could be used to make global trade safer and more efficient for suppliers in a supply chain, this opened me up to using blockchain for agriculture”

– Henry Duckworth, Co-Founder and CEO of AgriDex

Most recently, AgriDex brought on the Africa-based trader and agricultural producer, Parrogate Group, as a partner.

By using the AgriDex platform, Parrogate will be able to conduct agricultural trades more efficiently and at a reduced cost. Parrogate has invested in the edible oil and cotton industries over the past decade mainly in Southern African markets including:

• Malawi
• Zambia, and
• Zimbabwe

AgriDex trade flow is public, since the platform runs on a public blockchain, but price discovery is hidden, Duckworth said.

The platform is also launching its token, called $AGRI.