HARA Wants To Help Overcome Economic Issues Through Blockchain-Based Data Exchange

The agricultural industry in Indonesia still has issues, one of which is about production efficiency. This issue is often a problem in itself because of the lack of information that can be obtained by farmers. Not only that, the food sector, which is actually close to agriculture, is the same. McKinsey Research once released research results that stated that about 30% of agricultural and food production was wasted due to lack of information and losses of around US$940 billion annually.

HARA was present with enthusiasm to overcome the issue. Operationally, the company has been present in Indonesia since 2015 as a pilot project area. HARA has an office in Singapore which is used for business development and collaboration.

In Indonesia, HARA develops and distributes applications by collaborating with inter-institutions. Such as Community Empowerment Institutions (NGOs or NGOs), financial institutions, and actively conducting agricultural research in several areas.

To DailySocial, HARA CEO Regi Wahyu said that his party built HARA to realize economic prosperity through data exchange (data-exchange) decentralized blockchain technology. Thus, it can support decisions based on appropriate and meaningful data and information for the community.

"With an initial focus on the food and agriculture sectors, HARA is a sustainable solution for stakeholders in the data exchange market for the most socially impacting sectors in the world," said Regi.

business model

HARA utilizes the nearest data (near time data) which is considered to be very valuable for increasing productivity, reducing losses and creating market efficiencies. In the process, the HARA team collected data from various stakeholders over the past two years.

They consist of data providers (data providers) who submit their data in HARA; data buyer (buyer data) which requires data for the decision-making process. In addition, there is also a data assessor (data qualifiers) to ensure data quality; and finally there are services that help users convert data into reference information and reports.

There are incentives provided in the HARA platform to motivate data providers in submitting data and generating proper scalability. Data providers will be rewarded with incentives in the form of tokens and loyalty points, after they contribute factual data about land information, weather forecasts, and KYC data throughout Indonesia.

In a further stage, HARA will use Smart contract to ensure the fulfillment of everything stated in the agreement from the data owner under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) adopted by the European Union.

HARA can be accessed through the application and dashboards with different functions. Applications are used to accelerate data acquisition for data companies, field agents, and farmers. Temporary dashboards provide actionable insights to increase productivity by between 20%-30%.

Thanks to this business model, it also becomes a differentiation between HARA and similar players. Regi believes that decentralized blockchain can create social impact. For this reason, his party starts from the food and agriculture sector, then spreads to other sectors that have the most impact on the community. Examples include education, health, transportation and entertainment.

In addition, the pilot project that has been carried out is claimed to have shown promising initial results, especially for farmers. This is different from other companies that are still in the concept stage.

"We are an initiative of the founders and technology experts from Dattabot who are experienced in the field of big data analytics since 2003. We also collaborate with high-caliber advisors and partners on a global scale."

For the funding, HARA is holding a private sale Initial Coin Offering (ICO) with ERC20 tokens which will be held at the end of June 2018. HARA is offering 1,2 million tokens, it is hoped that the funds raised will range from US$5 million to US$25 million.

The funds will be used for project implementation (45%), product development (37%), business development (8%), and the rest for operations and reserves.

Next challenges and plans

Regi continued the challenges HARA is currently facing regarding the implementation phase itself. According to him, each village has its own character and uniqueness, and the food crop landscape is mostly dominated by small-scale farmers.

For this reason, his party collaborates with strategic partners such as NGOs and the government who have an understanding of the regional agricultural landscape.

This year, HARA targets to expand the pilot project area to western Indonesia, including East Java with a total of 400 new areas. Besides Indonesia, HARA wants to expand to countries located on the equator, such as Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Mexico, and Peru.

"We are targeting to reach 2 million farmers to join the HARA ecosystem in 2020," he concluded.