‘Non-fungible plants’ are right up there with symbolic farts in jars

Non-fungible plants.

They sound like something cooked in a dorm room somewhere in one of the 23 legalized states.

Instead, this vague Web3 fever dream comes via two academics from Austral University’s Intellectual Property Center Law School in Argentina.

International IP law does not fully cover the concept of unique plant varieties, say Miguel Rapela and Lucas Lehtinen. So why not enforce a system that solves that with smart contracts?

Intellectual property owners could mint NFTs for each seed to be sold and sell them for crypto on the open market.

Suppose you are a farmer who has just forked his way into a plant species never seen before – such as a type of corn that tastes like cotton candy. You register the non-fungible plant variety (NFPV) with an Ethereum smart contract system and count the number of seeds collected – minting an ERC-721 token for each.

Then you would run something from an initial coin offering (ICO) for those seeds, sell the NFTs through MetaMask and, presumably, send the physical seeds to buyers.

The Ethereum blockchain would automatically track the provenance. This would establish a clear relationship between the maker of the plant (who also owns the related genome) and the buyer of the seeds.

A decentralized seed supply chain backed by non-fungible plant tokens. It’s a brain-teasing statement that any LinkedIn influencer would be proud of.

“Each digital token of an NFPV is backed by a seed unit of the same real-world variety produced by the breeder that year,” the authors wrote in a paper published in the January 2010 issue of the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology.

“An NFPV digital token cannot exist without the backing of a seed unit of the same variety, and vice versa… By the time the physical seed units are ready, they will have printed the QR code identifying them with the purchased NFPV.”

The system can be applied to all plant species, but is especially suitable for special crops.

All of this is intellectually offensive on a myriad of levels. A thought crime similar to the brilliant idea that destroying a diamond tied to an NFT would not affect the value of the token at all.

Systems like this only make sense for terminally online people dealing with long Twitter threads from McKinsey interns.

Yes, it is possible to hit NFTs that are supposedly linked to anything. These systems already exist – mortgages, gold, Picassos and even farts in jars have all been sold as NFTs. Seeds could just be another example in a long list of weird things made possible by the blockchain.

But democratizing access to these assets creates a level of trust that derails the entire enterprise.

In 2015, the world was forced to grapple with the Volkswagen emissions scandal – or Dieselgate. Volkswagen coded its cars to only activate carbon checks when they were tested to see if they were compliant with US regulations.

Test sensors picked up legitimate readings, but the input method was tampered with. The cars pumped out up to 40 times more carbon dioxide when they drove in the real world.

It’s easy to see how a blockchain – supposedly an oracle of truth – can get illegitimate data designed for gaming markets. In the proposed seed system, the plant variety owner must promise not to have a supply of seeds that do not have a corresponding NFT.

Price discovery for the seed ICO can only be effective if the market knows (and can verify) exactly how many seeds there are. If three times as many are in a garden shed of some courageous seed farmer, the whole market would be ruined and most likely go to zero.

Scarcity, when it comes to blockchain, might only make sense for digital artifacts. We’re sure only 10,000 Bored Apes exist – it’s this knowledge that gives the market the confidence to figure out what they’re worth.

It wouldn’t make any sense at all if Yuga Labs only promised that there wouldn’t be more Bored Apes on a hard drive somewhere.

One day, sometime in the future, when blockchains are ubiquitous in global supply chains, we will certainly have to reckon with the fact that these systems will only kick “trust” in the long run.

In the meantime, we can do without the non-fungible plants.

David is a Netherlands-based editor who focuses on data-driven journalism. He previously wrote for TheNextWeb’s crypto vertical before launching Protos in 2021. He is a reformed hardline Bitcoiner who is passionate about permissionless and decentralized networks. Please contact David at david@blockworks.co