GrainChain, a Texan company concentrated on agricultural distributed ledger blockchain infrastructure, declared today it had raised $8.2 million in funding conducted by Medici Ventures Inc.

Utilizing its innovative blockchain platform, GrainChain provides solutions to grocers, farmers, distributors, and other agricultural businesses faster payment and the immediate accessibility of tradable commodities between farms and buyers.

“GrainChain has quietly become one of the most successful blockchain-meets-agriculture platforms on the market by allowing more and more farmers to receive fair value and prompt payment for their crops, while also selling to a larger pool of buyers,” stated Medici Ventures President Jonathan Johnson, who is also chief executive of Overstock.com Inc.

Medici Ventures is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Overstock and operates as a blockchain-technology accelerator for businesses across the industry. The company has funded in numerous blockchain businesses, including Vinsent, a blockchain platform for wine futures, and financial industry startup PeerNova Inc. The company has also launched its blockchain wallet, Bitsy.

GrainChain co-founder and CEO Luis Macias stated the funding would enable the company to “continue product development and expansion to meet market demands in more countries.” Macias replied that his company plans to build out a global agricultural marketplace, applying blockchain technology to make it fair and transparent to producers.

Blockchain technology builds operational transparency by recording every transaction made to a distributed ledger that can be verified by third parties by utilizing cryptographic hashes to verify that the data has not been tampered with. Also, sensitive internal data resides in the control of the data producers and is guarded by cryptographic keys, suggesting that proprietary data remains secure.

Utilizing the blockchain, farmers can turn crates and pallets of food into commodities that can be pursued by the blockchain by their entire lifecycle.

The same blockchain also provides these commodities to be exchanged for tokens, which describe monetary value. In conclusion, farmers can register crates of food, and customers can buy those commodities utilizing the blockchain. Along the entire way, the farm and buyers can trace each container through the supply chain from farm to storage to distributor to the grocery shelf or restaurant cupboard.

This is the basis behind the IBM Food Trust network, which registers and traces various sorts of food utilizing blockchain technology to assure the safety of food by the complete agricultural supply chain.

Market research firm MarketsAndMarkets prophesied in a 2018 report that the Asia-Pacific region would view the most significant growth globally for agricultural blockchain technology. The market was expected to be valued at $60.8 million in 2018 and predicted that the industry would reach $429.7 million by 2023.

Blockchain agriculture and food supply chain markets follow a trajectory propelled by an expanding desire for supply chain transparency – to promote safety and customer trust – and the demand for suppliers, such as producers and farmers, to feel that they are being treated equitably in payment for their labor.

GrainChain’s infrastructure platform offers a solution for all of these problems facing distributors, producers, and customers. Since the early launch and access of the platform, GrainChain has been accompanied by 1,439 active participants, finished over 84,410 transactions, and processed over 5.2 billion pounds of commodities.