Free TON blockchain deployed to issue food-distribution cards

HumanVenture, which runs a platform for charitable organisations, has completed the integration of the Free TON blockchain. The integration code published on Github.

The new solution is used in the project Prodkarta, launched by one of Russia’s largest charitable foundations, ‘Rus’. According to the Prodkarta website, the foundation’s partners in the project include retailers X5 Retail Group and Magnit. During an AMA session, a spokesperson for HumanVenture, Anton Zur, spoke about initial results.

The Free TON community approved the partnership with HumanVenture in November 2020. The agreement envisaged a transfer of 200 000 TON Crystal to the company for the technical implementation of the integration and up to 1 million TON Crystal over the course of a year for achieving KPI for user acquisition.

The HumanVenture platform allows charitable organisations to create and tailor a system for collecting and distributing donations on the blockchain for their needs. As a result, all transactions, including donations and their expenses, are recorded on a distributed ledger, and the data cannot be altered or deleted.

Thus, a charitable organisation can quickly and cheaply build a transparent system for distributing collected funds on the platform and send detailed expenditure reports to its donors.

‘Prodkarta’ became the first project on the HumanVenture platform to use the Free TON blockchain. Prodkarta is an initiative of the charitable foundation ‘Rus’, which specialises in distributing food to those in need. According to Rusfond, ‘Rus’ ranks third in Russia among charitable organisations by total funds raised.

As Anton Zur explained, the foundation previously distributed food hampers to those in need en masse, but this required large logistics costs and recipients could not choose the products. To address these problems, they launched the ‘Prodkarta’ project.

It envisages issuing special plastic cards (‘prodkarts’) to underprivileged families with children. Each card is linked to an anonymised blockchain Free TON account. The addresses of the accounts are available in the Free TON block explorer. The foundation manages a common account and distributes funds from it to the cards through the HumanVenture platform.

The prodkart can be used only in Magnit stores and only for essential goods — alcohol or cigarettes cannot be purchased with this card. The ability to buy products with prodkarta is expected to appear soon in X5 Retail Group stores. A few days ago, the Rus foundation began collecting applications for prodkarts in Rostov region, which will be usable in the regional Perekrestok stores.

In the HumanVenture interface you can view details of every expenditure operation on the card: exactly which products and for what amount the cardholder bought. Retailers provide this data. The profiles of all participants — donors and recipients — remain anonymised.

Co-founder and chief technology officer of HumanVenture, Alexander Peresichan, told Forklog that using blockchain provides a high level of security and reliability of data on the distribution of funds and recipients’ expenditures across the chain, which no traditional loyalty system can match.

Running the system on blockchain is cheaper for the operator, since transaction fees in the Free TON network are markedly lower than those for bank card acquiring. The system is accessible to people without bank accounts or smartphones.

Funds are currently disbursed to more than 1,000 families across four regions of Russia: around 3,000 children and 1,800 adults. To scale Prodkarta in Russia, HumanVenture is addressing legal questions related to the use of blockchain, Peresichan said.

The company plans to promote a new version of its platform with integrated Free TON blockchain among foreign charitable organisations in Austria, the United Kingdom and developing countries, as well as among global organisations under UN patronage.

HumanVenture hopes that the platform will be used not only for food charity but also for programmes to improve education, affordable housing, health care and in other areas of social development.

Earlier in March 2021, TON Labs became a partner of China’s state blockchain platform Blockchain-based Service Network.