GrainChain, a Texan company focused on agricultural distributed ledger blockchain infrastructure, announced today it has raised $8.2 million in funding led by Medici Ventures Inc.

Using its innovative blockchain platform, GrainChain offers solutions to farmers, distributors, grocers and other agricultural businesses faster payment and the immediate availability 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,” said Medici Ventures President Jonathan Johnson, who is also chief executive of Overstock.com Inc.

This funding follows Medici Ventures’ initial investment in GrainChain of $2.5 million, announced in December 2018. During this funding round, Medici Ventures was joined by Eden Block, a blockchain venture capital outfit, and other investors, bringing the lifetime total investment in the company to $10.7 million.

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

GrainChain co-founder and CEO Luis Macias said the funding will allow the company to “continue product development and expansion to meet market demands in more countries.” Macias added that his company intends to build out a global agricultural marketplace, using blockchain technology to make it transparent and fair to producers.

Blockchain technology creates operational transparency by recording every transaction made to a distributed ledger that can be checked by third parties by using cryptographic hashes to prove that the data has not been tampered with. At the same time, sensitive internal data remains in the control of the data producers and is protected by cryptographic keys, meaning that proprietary information remains secure.

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

The same blockchain also allows these commodities to be traded for tokens, which represent monetary value. As a result, farmers can register crates of food and buyers can purchase those commodities using the blockchain. Along the entire way, the farm and buyers can track each individual crate through the supply chain from farm to storage to distributor all the way to the grocery shelf or restaurant cupboard.

This is the premise behind the IBM Food Trust network, which registers and tracks numerous types of food using blockchain technology in order to ensure the safety of food through the entire agricultural supply chain.

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

Blockchain agriculture and food supply chain markets follow a trajectory driven by an increasing desire for supply chain transparency – to boost safety and consumer trust – and the need for suppliers, such as farmers and producers, to feel that they are being treated fairly in payment for their labor.

GrainChain’s infrastructure platform provides a solution for all of these issues facing producers, distributors and consumers. Since the early access launch of the platform, GrainChain has been joined by 1,439 active participants, completed over 84,410 transactions and processed over 5.2 billion pounds of commodities.

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