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Howdy! 

I’m back and locked in after some good old midweek PTO in which I visited the Sierra Nevada brewery in North Carolina. 

I had an IPA, a genre of beer which is much like native token airdrops for me in that I always think “this time could be different” but still end up disappointed. Anyways:

Agriculture platform lands a partnership

AgriDex, a Solana-native platform for agriculture markets, has brought the Africa-based trader and agricultural producer Parrogate Group on as a partner, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.

Using AgriDex will allow Parrogate to carry out agricultural trades — it’s invested in the edible oil and cotton industry over the last decade, according to its website — more easily and at a lower cost, AgriDex says. This is a new iteration on a years-old idea: putting parts of global supply chains on the blockchain. 

AgriDex CEO Henry Duckworth grew up in Zimbabwe before later becoming a commodities trader dealing with cobalt, which is largely mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Being up close with these countries, Duckworth saw how some combination of poor government, volatile currencies, underdeveloped contract law, and difficult trading environments made things challenging for farmers and suppliers, he told me in an interview. 

“Normally what happens is you have to be your own banker, your own trader, and your own lawyer,” Duckworth said of making agricultural trades in the developing world. He added that this burden falls most heavily on “the smaller guys” in the agriculture world, because larger businesses can afford things like in-house legal teams.

Farmers in places in the US don’t experience as much “friction” while trading goods, and a lot of the world’s food is produced in the developing world, so AgriDex sees a lot of need for its product in regions like sub-Saharan Africa where Parrogate operates, Duckworth said, adding that just getting the legal clearance to operate has been a major expense for AgriDex.

For bigger companies like Parrogate, which also invested in an early AgriDex funding round, the benefit is pretty simple. Parrogate could pay “several percentage points” in transaction costs while importing crops within current systems, Duckworth said. On AgriDex, it’s closer to 0.75%.

On AgriDex, agricultural trades can be listed, executed, and tracked all within the platform, according to a demo video shared with us. Deals are secured with NFTs containing transaction details. The startup also received some grant funding from the Solana Foundation to explore using features like token extensions for trades.

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

Oldenburg Vineyards, another AgriDex investor, settled the first trade on the platform in July.

Experiments like AgriDex have been tried before. During a phase of excitement around “enterprise blockchain,” IBM unveiled a blockchain platform for supply chains called TradeLens that touted many of the same benefits of AgriDex. The project was eventually canned in 2022 amid “commercial viability” concerns.

Duckworth thinks AgriDex can avoid this fate.

Trading houses and agricultural groups “didn't feel comfortable using IBM because they were worried about the commercialization of their data points,” Duckworth said. On the other hand, AgriDex plans to arrange itself as a DAO governed with a native token. 

“We're not seen as somebody who's gonna aggregate and sell out data points and manipulate other people's positions,” Duckworth said. 

The governance token, AGRI, will launch in September, and AgriDex traders will be able to score discounts on fees based on their AGRI holdings. 50% of AgriDex profit will also go to buying back and burning AGRI tokens, according to a press release.

— Jack Kubinec

The Solana ecosystem has had quite the year. Last year at Permissionless II, SOL was hovering around $20, sentiment was down bad, but many kept their heads down and kept shipping. 

Hear from the biggest names in Solana ecosystem share their thoughts on the past, present, and future of Solana at Permissionless III in October.

Early returns are in for the Solana restaking platform Solayer — and so far, it shows little threat of reaching EigenLayer-level usage:

Users have so far delegated 58,000 sSOL, worth roughly $8.5 million, to the four AVSs using Solayer for security. Some $158 million has been restaked on Solayer in total. 

By way of comparison, operators on EigenLayer received around $500 million in restaked ETH delegation in the platform’s first 24 hours on mainnet, according to The Defiant. 

It’s certainly too early to draw conclusions from this data, but it will be interesting to watch whether more significant supply for restaked SOL delegation will emerge.

— Jack Kubinec

We have a new contender for the most disastrous token launch of 2024. After five long months of anticipation and $30M raised from eager presale participants, gm.ai finally graced the world with its GM token.

And everyone who invested became an overnight billionaire, bought infinite lambos, and lived a life of joy and happiness forever after. The end.

Kidding. Hilarious. No, actually, GM holders immediately started dumping their tokens, wiping out over $100M from its $120M market cap within minutes. Adding to the madness is the fact that presale participants received staked xGM tokens instead of the promised GM. Easy enough to unstake, right? Not a chance. Users were left staring at 404 errors and grayed-out buttons as they watched their investments circle the drain. In the aftermath, the Solana community scrambled to tag the CIA, SEC, and every three-letter agency in existence with pleas for accountability.

I guess everyone hates Gary until they need Gary. GM now trades at $0.01152, down from a high of $0.02843, and never has a slower clap been clapped.

Some pre-salers are starting to accept their fate, with @Mugetsu_eth lamenting, “It’s our fault for sending him money in the first place. I'm sad I lost 70% of the pre-sale money I sent, but it’s 10000% my fault. Can’t complain. Keep gambling, degens.” Meanwhile, a disappointed @willard said, “I already expected to lose money on this coin, but losses like this? Wtf man, you got some explaining.” @nxxn gave a sobering recap, “We got rugged. $30M raise in presale and supplying only $2M. 6% buy/sell tax. [...] I hope we have learned a lesson about these Twitter presales now, but probably not.” @MyPepeBagsDown put it bluntly, “You all trusted some random online with $30M. He is a bad guy but you guys can only blame yourselves.”

It's a tough internet out there. This is why you should never BYOB when you DYOR, kids.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Henry Duckworth, CEO of AgriDex: