The Internet of Animals

The Grand Vision at the Heart of Cecil Alliance

There’s probably one big question on your mind when it comes to Cecil — where have we been? And it’s a good one. Much has happened since we first announced our pivot from an equine solution to one catering all animals. The pivot opened up a huge business opportunity for us but also necessitated a long period of restructuring and engagement with stakeholders all over the world. This process is still ongoing and includes governments, key decision-makers and governing bodies. For us, blockchain devotees blockchain adoption is a given and we’re comfortable with it. But for these important future partners, things move a little slower.

One question we always ask ourselves is: what does success look like for Cecil? The answer is simple: clients are willing to pay for our solutions. Being a blockchain project is no excuse for not being business focused and that means creating revenue and a route to profitability. We have seen many projects launch in the vain hope that the dApps and services needed for a viable ecosystem will miraculous appear. We do not see any kind of sustainable business operating in this way. So our priority has been to engage with paying clients eager to apply this exciting technology to their industries.

Adoption is no longer ‘coming’, adoption is here.

Some of these key early partners (such as the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation) have already been revealed but many more remain unannounced. Over the coming months as we build to our public sale we will go into much more detail about the role of our partners, the solutions we’re creating and the different strategies we’ll use to bring them onto the platform.

Alongside this key business development, we have also spent many hours debating the role Cecil should play, our philosophy, our vision, our beliefs. Our project is as much about IoT and big data as it is about blockchain and decentralized databases. Our solutions cover a vast range of applications from conservation to veterinarians to pets and the food supply chain. The sheer weight of all these applications and the scope of the project forced us to think long and hard about who we are and what we are doing. How could we articulate all that richness? How could we build everything into a single, powerful idea, that represents the vision and the business opportunity? Bitcoin is described as Digital Gold, so how do we describe?

Simply put: Cecil is the Internet of Animals.

The name is controversial. Any time you connect animals and technology there’s always going to be a debate about ethics. But this is a debate we welcome. Our mission is to build the protocols, standards, and governance that ensure an Internet of Animals is done right: Breaking it down, there are four layers to Cecil;

Layer 1: digital animal identity with immutable animal data as the core

Enabling different kinds of stakeholders to write or read data to or from an Animal Data Asset (ADA) that functions as the animal’s digital identity. Animals from all animal-based industries (wildlife, zoos, pets, livestock, sports) will own their data thanks to their digital identity with immutable and verified information supplied by the various stakeholders authorized to write to the asset.

Layer 2: connecting animal identity with IoT to generate additional animal data and trust

IoT can be automatically paired with the digital animal identity creating a secondary trust layer and generating additional in-depth data. And lots of it. Essential for building valuable data lakes.

Layer 3: Swift interoperability with external animal data platforms

Stakeholders are able to smoothly integrate all kinds of external data within the platform and if wished with the ADA. The integration of external data within the platform will be smooth and handled through various API portals. This will further improve the interoperability of external platforms through a common platform and thus ease the sharing of data.

Layer 4: For the first time ever building powerful (business) applications using immutable animal data

The fourth layer enables Cecil Alliance and the developer community to leverage the first three layers by building applications on top of it. Applications of this type have never been possible before in animal-based industries.

The first three layers already solve many problems and will be extremely valuable on their own. But Layer 4 is where the true power of the platform can be realized. Take Equine insurance for instance. A Layer 4 application, built on immutable equine data, will offer a one-click tailor-made insurance policy thanks to the security of the ADA’s. This one application is a game-changer but there are many more that can be built.

Ethics are going to be a constant discussion here as we move forward with our platform. And, alongside ensuring our solutions are ethical, we are being mindful to ensure those standards also apply to how we conduct ourselves towards our community.

Crypto investors have grown weary of projects whose tokens carry no real utility. We sympathize. So let us explain ours. We are building a platform for animal data. Humans have proven, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with animal data. The only solution is a trustless, disintermediated system and those can only function when properly incentivized. With a token. The token is built the very core of Cecil Alliance, the animal itself. All animals require a small number of tokens to participate in the platform, from businesses to pet-owners. The animal requires tokens to incentive stakeholders to write new data, but it receives tokens when it shares this data. The more data is shared the more tokens can be earned. We recognise that token economies can appear complex for those new to crypto so our focus is on making the user interaction with the token as frictionless as possible. But that’s a discussion for a future post.

Tokens fuel all interactions on the platform, creating clear incentives for all participants. There will be no exceptions. We understand token-holders often feel betrayed by projects closing fiat deals with companies where the token is circumvented entirely. We will never do that. We will allow users to pay in fiat but all tokens required to power digital animal identities will be automatically preloaded to Animal Data Assets by Cecil Alliance in case of fiat deals.

So, that’s the serious stuff.

Coming up we’ve got an NTI, or TME, or IEO (or whatever the term will be in six months) ahead of us. we’ve had plenty of opportunities to observe some campaigns and, yes, some absolute stinkers. We haven’t decided what format we’ll take for the public sale but we are going to involve the community in the process. Yes, that’s you. Because you’re important.

Community is a misunderstood concept in this space. Too often community just means a place for people to feel good (or bad) about the price of a token. When Bitcoin started there really were only a handful of extremely forward-thinking brave souls who evangelized the project and built out the documentation, the code, the awareness and the platform for everything that has come since. That’s the community. Find a little piece of a project’s real estate, stake a claim and then make it great. Community isn’t about price, it’s about talent. And we really really value talent.

We have so much to tell you. So much to talk about. And so much to do. Rapid deployment of our MVP, community engagement, a pilot programme with our impressive equine partners and… yes, community community community. We have taken our time getting here but with good reason. If you want to change the world you have to make sure you start off on the right foot. As Paul Graham of YCombinator famously wrote ‘…recruiting 10 customers who have a burning problem is much better than 1000 customers who have a passing annoyance.’ We identified these customers within the equine industry and they are ready to help us iterate the first phase of the Cecil platform.

We know that it’s been hard to understand the true mission of the Cecil project and why we’re so passionate about it. We will publish a series of articles in the coming weeks that go into more detail and we need your help to share what we’re doing as we begin s building our all-important community.

We are Cecil. We are building the Internet of Animals. We are building it for everyone.

Follow us on our social media to stay tuned for future developments and to support us in our mission to build the Internet of Animals: