agro.yaya.cash
agro.yaya.cash is a working design for carrying produce certifications — orgánico, libre de pesticidas, BPA, fair-trade terms — inside GNU Taler payment contracts, so that a shopper in a Peruvian market can get cryptographic certainty about what they are buying at the moment they pay for it, and the producer — not the intermediary — is the party who signs for it.
| Type | Open protocol draft + reference implementation |
|---|---|
| Domain | Produce certification attestation |
| Built on | GNU Taler contract terms & token families |
| Country | Peru pilot |
| Regulator | SENASA (Ley 29196, Ley 30983) |
| Status | v0.1-draft — pre-pilot, spec unstable |
| Licence | Spec: CC BY-SA. Code: AGPL-3.0 (intended) |
The premise
An organic certificate today is a document about a farm that travels as paper and PDF through a chain of buyers, and that arrives at the shelf as a printed logo. Two things happen along the way. The claim becomes unverifiable at the point where it matters — nobody in the aisle can check a paper trail — and the premium the claim earns is captured mostly by whoever is closest to the shopper.
This project treats the certification as a signed object that the producer holds and spends, rather than a label a retailer prints. The certifying organisation signs an attestation to the producer's key. The producer signs the sale. The shopper's wallet verifies the chain offline in the checkout line. The retailer's cut is a line item inside the same signed contract, visible to everyone who reads it.
Conventional scheme: certifier → paper → exporter → retailer → retailer makes the claim, retailer books the premium.
This scheme: certifier → producer's key → producer signs the sale → retailer countersigns as a distributor with a declared commission → the shopper verifies the producer, and can see the split.
Why Peru, why now
Peru already did the hard institutional work. Ley 29196 makes SENASA the national authority for organic production; Ley 30983 (2019) then did something unusual — it recognised the Sistema de Garantía Participativo, a peer-audited, community-run certification route, as legally sufficient for small producers selling on the domestic market.[4] That is a state-sanctioned certifier that is not a company charging USD 2,500.
What the SGP does not have is a way to make its guarantee legible outside the room where the peer audit happened. A shopper in Lima has no way to check an Arequipa SGP council's decision. That is a transport problem, and transport problems have cryptographic answers.
Read the wiki
The problem →
Three separate failures: certification cost, fraud through paper trails, and margin capture. Only the third one is usually said out loud.
Who does what →
Agricultor, certifier, SGP council, market vendor, shopper, SENASA — what each one gains, and what each one has to actually do.
Certification landscape →
Reference table: RTPO, SGP, Sello BPA, EU 2018/848, USDA NOP + SOE, GLOBALG.A.P., Fairtrade. What each one certifies and who it is really for.
GNU Taler primer →
Exchange, merchant, wallet. Contract terms, merchant_sig,
token families — and why this stack in particular fits the problem.
Protocol overview →
Attestations, kilo-tokens, mass balance, and the verification a wallet runs in the checkout line without a network connection.
Data model & spec →
Draft v0.1: JSON structures, the key hierarchy, slug grammar, revocation, and the verification algorithm step by step.
Where the money goes →
The honest version: what the literature supports, what this project asserts, and what the pilot has to measure before we claim it.
Pilot & roadmap →
Phases, the open questions we have not resolved, and what participating would require of a producer association.
What this is not
- Not a new certification standard. We do not decide what "organic" means. SENASA-registered bodies and SGP councils do that, under the RTPO. This is a transport and verification layer for decisions they already make.
- Not a blockchain. There is no token to buy, no chain, no consensus mechanism. GNU Taler is a signature and blind-signature system with a conventional settlement account behind it. See why that matters.
- Not a surveillance layer. The design goal is that a certifier can bound how many kilos are sold as organic without learning who bought them, and that a shopper can verify without phoning home. See privacy properties.
- Not deployed. v0.1-draft is a draft. No producer is running this in a market today.
References
- SENASA, Lista de entidades de certificación de la producción orgánica registradas. gob.pe
- Peru organic sector overview; smallholder share in northern highland organic coffee. See Where the money goes § sources.
- Cost comparison cited in the participatory-guarantee-system literature; treat as order-of-magnitude, not a Peruvian tariff. See Certification landscape § cost.
- Ley N° 30983, modifying Ley N° 29196 to develop certification of organic products from small producers. El Peruano