Brazilian farmers tokenized dairy cows to get loans, bypassing bank limits

paulpauper 59 points 49 comments July 25, 2026
www.coindesk.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (10 comments)

guess_who_is_it

coindesk only promotes ztrash

tiffanyh

Using livestock as collateral is one of the oldest ways to obtain a loan.

tamimio

This is how economy should work, based on physical tangible assets that owned/existed, not some imaginary value based on whatever speculation, that what ruined housing market, what inflated stocks and allowed cons to get wealthier, it’s also why a lot of companies make fake job posting or pr stunts, it’s all to inflate that imaginary market currency then use it to get a real cash, that should be illegal and is a form of Ponzi scheme fraud, if a house as-built cost is 70k, it shouldn’t be sold for 800k, and the owner shouldn’t be able to use that speculative value to get a 600k loan.

bernardom

Brilliant idea, but why the crypto? Couldn't you simply do the collar + web connection... without crypto?

vvpan

Real World Assets (RWA) is the hot stuff these days. While it is still early the mega-banks are starting to pile on. One of the reasons is that any infrastructure built on blockchain is reusable for free by everybody (minus transaction free). Uniswap and Aave have been chugging along for years and are starting to acquire reputation beyond retail. Privacy is moving along as well where you can tokenize, say, bonds and hide the in/out flows with ZK proofs. You can track RWA issuance here https://app.rwa.xyz/

chrisjj

> We take the cow, which is a real and tangible asset, and transform it into a digital asset Fine... if you don't need the cow too.

Animats

"It also includes built-in safeguards that allow the farmer to swap one dead cow for a live one." Is that backwards? If you own the token for a cow, and it dies, what happens?

jareklupinski

finally, economics explained by cows, so i can finally understand it

idiotsecant

Tokenizing physical things is kind of dumb for one reason: it's not trustless and it relies on there being a big mean cop somewhere in the transaction. Say i tokenize my couch and then sell you the the token. Suppose you show up to my house to claim your couch. I can tell you no. You can then sue me and try to get the state to send a big mean cop to get it, or it's equivalent in cash. I've yet to see a scheme that makes this trustless somehow. If you don't have that you don't have anything.

jnyst1985

Wait - is this finally crypto’s mass adoption event we’ve all been waiting for?

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