Digital Cows Are Coming to Australia in Major XRPL Leap

Asset tokenisation is one of the biggest driving forces of widespread crypto adoption across the world. Pair that with inefficiencies in several major economic industries, and it’s only a matter of time before companies start to fully embrace tokenisation. In what might be one of the biggest steps toward this reality, it appears Australia is mooving toward optimising the cattle industry – so let’s enter the world of digital cows.

Digital Cows Will Allow New Investors to Enter Cattle Market

In a virtual interview posted to Twitter, Australian Scott Chamberlain presented his case for why digitising cows (that is, representing beef as crypto tokens) will go a long way to improving the local cattle industry.

There is no futures market for cattle in Australia…so there needs to exist a way for hedge funds and others to get exposure to beef prices…and there needs to be a way for farmers to get finance for their farm that isn’t bank debt and simply selling cattle.

Scott Chamberlain

The idea is all well and good – but how exactly would it work?

The first step is to gather together a bunch of cows that are “all the same”. That means they’re the same breed, have the same vaccinations, same diet and so on. Next, the farmer can mint tokens that represents the sale price of all those cows, which can then be purchased by investors.

When the cows come to market, the sale price gets turned into a stablecoin and issued into a “vault”. This vault, thanks to a smart contract, can then automatically distribute the sale price across all of the original digital cow investors.

Tokenised Beef Possible With EvernodeXRPL

Scott Chamberlain has been pushing the tokenisation of beef for years – first presenting the idea in a 2021 research paper called Digital Cows. However, the infrastructure to transform this concept into a reality hasn’t existed…until now. 

Chamberlain helped form Evernode Labs, a Layer 2 network designed to support mini dApps that can be built using all sorts of coding language, geography and scale. The L2 sits atop the Xahau network, which is essentially an XRP Ledger side chain that supports “hooks” (essentially smart contracts).

Essentially, Evernode’s smart contracts will likely be used to control the keys for the digitised assets, which will then be distributed on either the Xahau or XRPL networks. Either way, there’s still a little bit of fine-tuning to be done before we see cows roaming the internet – but it’s not too far away.