Music courtesy of BlackIrisFilms.com

Andy Pickering – Host

Hi folks, it is Andy here. Welcome to Unleashed with the Dacxi Chain, a Dacxi podcast where we learn all about the Dacxi Chain and the incredible opportunities it unlocks. Let’s get on with the show.

My guest today is Jori Armbruster. Jori is the co-founder at EthicHub, which aims to disrupt the current financial lending system by creating a fair global crowd-lending system using regenerative finance. Very interesting. Welcome to the show, Jori. 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Pleasure to have you here, Jori, let’s do what we do at the beginning of the show. Could you please introduce yourself? Love to just hear a little bit about who you are and what you’ve been doing in the lead-up to co-founding Ethic Hub. 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah. So I am half Mexican, half Spanish. Before funding EthicHub, I was running a wholesaler in Spain, and previous to that, I was managing my family’s coffee farm in Mexico. So I know about coffee, I know about the different cultures and situations of these two worlds, and so on. When I decided to start something in 2016, I did an innovation degree, I learned about blockchain technology and I said this will change everything starting with the financial system. So how can I do something with this? And EthicHub is basically connecting Europe with Latin America in the coffee production vertical with small farmers leveraging crypto. And we were one of the very first to do something like that, to use blockchain technology to connect to the real world with a focus on impact. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Yeah, that’s fascinating Jori. So EthicHub is a Regenerative Finance project using blockchain technology to create a more sustainable and equitable economic system. And so tell us a little bit more about how this works. So the way I understand it, you guys at EthicHub, you aim to do this by providing a platform for farmers to sell their produce directly to consumers. Tell us a little bit about how this works and how you’re tying in the wonderful world of web3 and blockchain. 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah, so on one side you have the decentralized protocol which will become a Dao and is based on the Ethix token run by smart contracts and the lending protocol. 

And this is about both providing working capital to the farmers, but also and most importantly about providing them with collateral so you as an investor can decide which role you prefer to have. The low risk, not that low return option is 8%, for now you lend stable coins or you have the higher risk position which is you buy Ethix, which is our token you stake on behalf of the farmers so they have collateral, so other people lend them money. 

And the coffee side of it is a bit like a byproduct of the equity company behind EthicHub. The business model is to buy and sell coffee. So when we act as an auditor looking for new loan originators, we look for a cooperative of coffee producers which we are interested in selling their coffee so we finance the production, transformation and exportation of that coffee. 

But the idea is that in the lending protocol there will be other auditors with other kinds of products or verticals. We are just starting with Heifer International, which is a huge NGO working in ten countries with hundreds of cooperatives. And some of those cooperatives are not in the coffee vertical, they are in Cacao or whatever. And we are also working on a pilot with another project that will act as an auditor for the solar panel for smallholder farmers vertical. Because there are 1.2 billion smallholder farmers excluded from the traditional financial system, which is almost a quarter of the world population. But you also have a very similar number of people excluded from electricity, because they are far from the grids, the traditional electric grid. So the only way to give them electricity is with solar panels. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Yeah, got it. Thank you, Jori. And so you said you’re working with coffee farmers initially and then that will expand out to other products. Tell us, which countries that the coffee farmers are located in at the moment? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

So for now we started in Mexico, because for us we are Mexicans. And we also started doing a couple of pilots two years ago in Honduras and Brazil and last year we also started in Colombia, Peru, Equator. For now that’s what we are doing. But most of it still is in Mexico. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Got it. For people who are wanting to look at EthicHub and support your community of farmers and even potentially get a return on their investment by doing so. Can anyone in the world support the farmers through EthicHub? Is it restricted to any countries? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

It is restricted, at least for retail investors. We don’t accept US investors and Chinese, I think, because of their regulations and it’s super expensive to ask for a regulation over there and they are very strict. But wherever else in the world you can lend and even in the States you can stake, which means buy Ethix and stake on behalf of the farmers because that’s something that still doesn’t have any regulation at all. 

Andy Pickering – Host

And this is really an example of what people call impact investing. Right Jori, so I wonder how you define impact investing? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah, I think we have to all move farther than sustainability and think about regeneration and how you measure that is very complicated. But I think the easy way of doing so is with the Sustainable Development Goals which is like a way to have a common language of what are the biggest problems of the world that need to be solved. And if you have a business model that is not like the traditional social responsibility thing, okay, you are a petrol company but then you give some grants so you balance your impact or something like that. But being an impactful company, a regenerative project means your business model has to create positive externalities in some of these Sustainable Development Goals as part of the business model. Not like to balance the bad impact you did before. And we are contributing to eight Sustainable Development Goals one way or another. Most importantly for sure, it reduces the inequalities. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so important. Can you talk then a little bit about what kind of impact EthicHub is having on some of these farmers? Like what are they seeing out of the support that they’re getting from people investing in what they’re doing via EthicHub? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

So this is a bit of the why behind EthicHub, right? Because people don’t know that these more than 1 billion people’s only access to capital is cash loans at 100% interest rates and things like that. So for sure, if you provide them with an alternative source of funding it’s not only that they pay less interest but also they can really ask for a loan because now it’s affordable to invest and improve their productivity. We focus from the beginning in this vertical because here you know that the money is not going to buy a TV, the money is going to invest in their productivity so they can get out of the poverty cycle. Which is precisely that because if you don’t have money, you cannot improve your productivity, you then don’t increase your income so you cannot run out of this busy circle. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Yeah, that’s exactly right. Very well said. And look, we talked about impact investing, which is really just an investment strategy that seeks to generate a return but while also creating a positive social impact or environmental impact. And I think EthicHub is definitely an example of impact investing. But we talked also I talked about in the beginning about regenerative finance. So I wonder if we can just explain that a little bit more because I think that is kind of tied into the environment looking after the environment as well as the social capital side of things. Right, Jori? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah, for sure. So on one side we are talking about this moving forward not only from sustainability but towards regeneration which means you are not balancing your impacts but really taking out, for example, carbon from the air. It’s not that you balance your emissions. No, and we are too late for that. We need to take carbon from there. The other part of the world is regenerative finance. The finance part of it is about rethinking financing in order to be regenerative leveraging web3 tools like smart contracts, tokenomics and distributed ledgers. So I think it’s basically projects that are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, which are providing regenerative practices, incentivizing regenerative practices in between their business models and leveraging on crypto in order to be more scalable and align incentives. 

Andy Pickering – Host

Yeah, well, that’s exactly right. And that is exactly what we here at the Dacxi Chain are working on, Jori. We’re trying to create a new global regulated ecosystem where investors all around the world have access to interesting opportunities in far-flung parts of the world such as Mexico and Spain and the areas where you’re talking about. And if we can connect those investors with different innovators around the world and then link some of those investment opportunities to tokenization, create secondary markets where that equity can be traded, then eventually that means that these investors and innovators can meet each other in a marketplace that is regulated. And that’s the future that we’re all working towards, thanks to Web3 blockchain tokenization, right? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Yeah, for sure. I think the regulated part of it is very tough because we are facing, when we are talking about innovation, it takes years for regulators to understand that innovation and create the framework for that kind of new financial tools, for example. Right, so I think we are starting to see something in Europe which is where I’m more aware of the laws we have now, which is a good first step forward, but still is about cryptos, for example, not NFT nor DeFi tools. So it will still take years to have a framework for that to be regulated. 

Andy Pickering – Host

All right, well, as we start to finish off, just tell us what you’re working on at the moment with EthicHub. What is coming next? What are you working on? 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

So one very important thing that maybe your community can participate in is we not only need the people to lend to the farmers and the people who provide collateral by staking in Ethix, but now we are doing a crowdfunding equity round for us as a project. So this is in Adventurees and I can share the link with you so you can put it in the podcast notes. And this is the minimum ticket, 1500 euro. And you can do it from wherever in the world too. And the other part we are working on is a product, for sure, tens of parts of the product that have to be still improved. We are moving towards launching the Dao for the lending protocol for the end of the year, beginning of next year. 

And like a bit of side products of EthicHub, we are working on how to tokenize the carbon credits of our farmers because they are not only excluded from the traditional financial system, traditional certification, organic certification, for example, but also from carbon credits markets because they are too small to do the proper due diligence on how much carbon is there. But we are very creative as we have been with the financing part of it, and I think we can find solutions for that. And we are also working on these pilots with the solar panels etc.

Andy Pickering – Host

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing some of your story with us. I’ll certainly put a link in the show notes to that crowdfunding round that you talked about. There’s also a link in the show notes to EthicHub. But listeners, if you want to check it out now, it is just Ethichub.com. Jori, thank you so much for coming on the show. All the best and bye for now. 

Jori Armbruster – Guest

Thank you very much to you and thank you for inviting me.

Andy Pickering – Host

That was Jori from EthicHub. And I thought this episode is just a good example of the promise and potential of where the Dacxi Chain is heading. We’re creating a new, fully regulated global ecosystem. The idea, of course, is that investors all around the world will have access to new innovation investment opportunities. And for the founders of those innovative companies and ideas, they will need funding for those ideas, and they will be able to access that global investor pool. All done in a safe, sophisticated, mature, and regulated way. Of course, it’s done at scale globally via tokenization of those equity shares so people can invest in whatever amount they wish in line with the regulations in their country. 

And so, of course, the Dacxi Chain is going to solve the liquidity issue, give people the ability to trade in and out of those equity positions via tokenization at the local level. Through a network of locally owned crowdfunding platforms, Dacxi will launch a specialist secondary market for trading. I think EthicHub is one example of a platform that could be connected to the Dacxi Chain by phase two, phase three, phase four of the Dacxi Chain rollout in the years ahead. So, yeah, it’s exciting times. And of course, don’t forget that later this quarter, the Dacxi Chain will announce phase one and its first launch partners. So we have all that to look forward to in the months ahead. 

So do make sure you keep listening to the podcast and make sure you’re subscribed, but that is today’s episode. Thanks, team. Thanks for listening and bye for now.

www.ethichub.com/es/

https://www.adventurees.com/ethichub-1