 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. This is our exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is a conference where the local entrepreneurs, industry legends, financiers, funders, everyone's coming together from Blockchain Cryptocurrency and a decentralized web, a lot of great use cases. We have the politicians as well here in Puerto Rico kind of enticing the community to do more here. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We have Luis Macaz, who's the CEO of Grain Chain, a startup out of Texas doing very interesting things with Blockchain and a real good example of really the value proposition of reducing steps it takes to get something done, creating value and then sharing that value. Luis, good to see you, thanks for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. So we talked yesterday last year off camera about what you're doing on, but I want you to take a minute to explain to folks what you guys do and why Blockchain, what's the difference? Sure, so I would say about five years ago we got approached by a large scale farmer and he asked us to find a solution to be able to modernize his business. You know, as we all know, the farming industry is not as technical as a lot of the other industries. So we went out in search and we just couldn't find a solution. So we built the appropriate solution to take a seed from the ground and take it all the way to the commodities market in an instant instead of three to four weeks. And so basically what we do is we join the buyer, the buyers of the actual soft commodities and we allow them to create smart contracts with individual farmers. This ensures not only the payments of the farmer but it allows the farmer to get paid instantly. What does it do really for our overall industry? Our buyers gain instant custody of the actual grain, the second it crosses the scale. That changes everybody's life dramatically. So middleman get kind of destructive, but before we get into that, I want to dig into this, this is important because I'm from California, so huge farming thing there, cultural thing going on there. What's your background? How did you get here? I mean, how long you've been doing it? Sure. And when did you jump on the Blockchain as an opportunity? So we've been developing software for the last 17 years. We've done it for the insurance industry and for the government, for our small state governments. And we live, we're in Texas and we have a personal relationship with many farmers. We saw a problem and we needed to solve it. In the last year, we went ahead and started applying the Blockchain to the process. And the Blockchain is a perfect form. When you have two parties who really, really don't need to trust each other and need to trust each other, with a distributed ledger, you've got a perfect scenario. If we're able to write a contract and a thousand people be able to verify that contract and we're able to transfer money from one person to another without the two parties being involved, we've got a perfect scenario. Yeah, that's awesome. And that's where Blockchain really, really affects the agriculture industry and our farmers. You know, I said on theCUBE this morning, we were talking about it last, I was talking about it last night with some folks, the killer app for Blockchain is money. Yes. So the common thread in all this is money. Just like the first computer in the TCPIP revolution, it was email. Yes. Killer app. It's kind of, we hate email now, but the point is you're in the money transaction business, but there's a supply chain involved. This is where it gets interesting. This is where I think you're onto something really nice here because you're essentially creating a better contractual environment between buyer and seller, but the product still needs to move to the market. Yes. This is where you're innovating. Can you talk up specifically about how you're disrupting that piece? Sure. So basically what we're able to do is not only allow farmers to involve themselves in the forward and futures market, also the spot market within the actual system. So it integrates with actual trading applications, but it also integrates with their futures market and forward market contractors. So we're taking a group of people who are not very technical and we're giving them that ability to do what the big brokers do in the overall industry. So give an example, just give like a run of the mill example use case. Sure. One of our farmers who's got five million pounds of corn does a forward market with a buyer. The second he crosses the scale, it'll settle that contract instantly and then it'll actually notify him, say it's in your best interest to go ahead and close the other three million pounds because the price just spiked. He hits one button. He makes more money than he's ever made on any contract he's done in the past. And that's because what happened? What was the old way? What was the old way? The old way is he pretty much put it in the silo and sent the papers to an accounting office three, four weeks later he figured out how much he had. Then he gave it to a broker to be able to look at the actual inventory. They put it up on the market and they make the actual commission. So they make the spread. Yeah. They increase, they mark it up. Exactly. They take the spread down and then they still got to send paperwork back to the guy and say, this is what we sold. Exactly. And then eventually get paid. This pretty much turns that entire process into an instant action. This is a game changer. This is basically taking all those steps and a lot of potential miscues could happen in that process. Absolutely. Time wasted, errors. And you know, I don't want to put any bad actors but it also eliminates the bad actors out of the scenario. Our governance system actually integrates directly into the scales, get signatures from the scientific reading instruments. So we're removing bad actors and we're removing errors and we're speeding the process. You have a computer science degree and software background like yourself but also got an MBA from Babson College. One of the things, the words they use in the MBA class is value chain. The value chain, you know, the activities as part of the creating value. Kind of a document thing. But the word blockchain, value chain, really this is a perfect example of the kinds of use cases that we see in blockchain. Absolutely. Moving a product to the market, reducing the steps it takes to do something, saving time and being more efficient. And having a complete trust system. You know, when you have a farmer who's paying a 1% premium to be able to ensure to get paid at a 90% and there's still litigation and everything being involved, this completely eliminates that scenario. Yeah. The other thing we talked about in theCUBE this morning and yesterday in conversation I was saying is that killer apps money, which is what great money has to move around. That's what we see activity on and some bad actors there for sure. But marketplaces is also the other killer app. Do you agree? I mean, because you're essentially creating a marketplace, you need a marketplace. Absolutely. I actually just got approached about 10 minutes ago from a local Puerto Rican gentleman who's restarting a farm after the weather event that happened here. He's trying to figure out how to get money into the US market, but is scared to sell it to just anyone. He asked me if it's possible to be able to put it, set up smart contracts with all the random buyers that want to buy his honey. This is an exact scenario where we're helping a community who has to start over and figure out who to sell their product to. You know, Luis, this is a great example of kind of categorically what I'm seeing across the disruption scheme out there, which is in the cloud computing era, Amazon Web Services created a catalog of services that allowed you to use resources without having to build stuff up from scratch provisioning servers. This is kind of happening here where you're starting to see sets of services or players, a catalog of services happening in business. So actually going to the next level, this seems to be a consistent pattern. What's your take? Yeah, absolutely. It's allowing the smallest guys in the industry to the biggest guys in the industry to take advantage. When you have people using Amazon Web Services, you're having massive corporations and the one businessman owner. What we're doing here is we're giving the same opportunities for both classes of people to be able to scale and put their product on the market without having to do a massive investment or be scared that they're going to get robbed. It's a great value proposition. I'm sure you got a lot of investors knocking on your door. Take us through what you're doing right now. You're doing an ICO. Are you raising money? And what are your expansion plans? Because I know you're in Texas. Are you in California yet? I mean, a lot of agricultural activity there. What's your growth plan? So what we're doing is we're doing a token sale event and we're doing a private placement sale to accredited investors. We are trying to respect all the SEC regulations out there. We're launching that at the end of this month. We are currently based in Texas and we also got approached by the Mexican government to apply the technology to the state run silos in Mexico. So what we're looking for is really finding people who want to help us scale this product worldwide and being able to participate in our sale. If you're able to go on to our website, grainchain.io and sign up to our white list, that'll allow you to get some information on how to participate. Grainchain.io, like the grain of seed. Absolutely. Okay, so I'm going to ask you about Puerto Rico. Yes. You've been here a couple of days. What's the vibe here? I mean, why is this such an important event? A lot of people who are watching this aren't here. What's happening in Puerto Rico? What are you hearing in the hallways? What is some of your conversation and what are your observations? I mean, I think that the reality is that Puerto Rico is trying to embrace technology and trying to embrace an industry that can support the people here. We've seen a lot of the devastation as they're driving them around, but Puerto Rico's back up and running. So the reality is I feel very, very strongly about not only supporting the local economy, but the fact that they're supporting real technology and providing and trying to get real solutions into this country to restart. And the young people are really engaged on blockchain crypto. Absolutely, and you know, you'll have a lot of young, very, very aggressive developers. I've met a lot of people here who've come here, a lot of locals who are looking for work in blockchain and developers. So we're very excited to really, really see that everything's kind of kicking back up here in Puerto Rico. Well, my final question for you, Louise, is as an industry participant and developer and player, what is this wave about? You put your industry hat on and expert hat on. What is happening? I mean, what is really happening with blockchain crypto and decentralized applications? Because there's so much action. People want to get on this wave and surf this puppy. What's happening? In your personal opinion, what is this wave all about? I mean, I think that this is, again, from not comparing to the dot-com era, but it's giving the average person the ability to get into real industry. It's allowing everyone to be a participant, an investor, a developer, an overall embracer of the technology that you haven't seen in a long time. Usually the technical, the software development and putting out products takes a lot of technical skill. And this has really kind of encouraged everyone to embrace it, look at it, and allows everyone to participate. It's basically the democratization of society. Absolutely. But it's also the democratization of a world economy, not a local economy. And the locals can play and customize it for their own personal needs. Absolutely. Well, Puerto Rico's got a great opportunity. Luis, thanks for coming on. CEO of greenchain.io. I'm John Furrier at the Blockchain Unbound Conference, day one of two days of coverage. We're talking to all the experts, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, investors, more live coverage after this short break.