Why are you participating for Based Africa?

To showcase our native Ethereum solution for Agriculture financing in Africa, and how it's adopting Base for onchain liquidity. We expect to leverage Base for stablecoin lending starting in Kenya, the country with the strongest cashless culture in Africa.

What challenges are you focusing on?

Access to working capital as a smallholder farmer in Africa is an unpleasant experience because there are limited methods to gauge ability to pay and capacity to utilize capital.

Popular approaches contain blind spots to unique differences between farms and mostly suffer from generalization which introduces inefficiencies in gauging the ability to absorb working capital loans deployed to farmers. This neither benefits the farmer nor the lender, limiting growth of farmers and reducing available capital for agriculture.

Antugrow integrates Base to ensure multiple farm record keeping transactions are reconciled at low fees while facilitating a low cost fee for liquidity transfers when issuing lending to farmers.

How does your submission address this challenge?

Antugrow provides farmers with a mobile app for standardized record keeping to ensure best practices in farm management while ensuring farm records build a farmer's credit score onchain. The onchain reputation scores are then consumed by liquidity pools to provide microcredit commensurate to a farmer's assessed productivity.

Antugrow ensures that verified farm records are recorded as Verifiable Credentials that farmers can use to unlock lending from crypto liquidity pools while tracking utilization of the loan for the farmer’s onchain Reputation Scoring.

Challenges we ran into

During development, we had issues with setting up Paymaster for facilitating the cost for our smart contracts. The paymaster could not clearly state the amount of gas fees it would cover.

The Onchain Kit documentation was kind of confusing on how to set up an existing project and how to integrate with Paymaster as it does not clearly state it.

Onchain Kit was somehow rigid on customization to fit in a custom application flow. This happens because we want to attach the Transaction components within a form setup and want to perform form validation.

We had issues with Onchain Kit as it provided ambiguous error messages in case a contract transaction failed.

Deployment of our smart contracts on Base Sepolia was a challenge, we had issues with gas fees attaching the token smart contract to a new contract being deployed as some of the smart contracts depended on an already existing smart contract.

Additional Features

During the Buildathon, we worked on developing a module to allow potential investors to deposit crypto for financing farmers through Antugrow. We developed a smart contract to facilitate the deposit of crypto.

• To facilitate the deposit of crypto, we developed smart contracts named AntugrowEscrow,
• We integrated our frontend with Onchain Kit to facilitate the deposit of crypto,
• Paymaster for facilitating gas fees for transactions, and
• Smart Wallet to make it easier to onboard investors.

Before the Buildathon we had developed Verifiable Credentials based on farm activities of a given farmer using Privado ID.