Announcing Cecil Alliance Foundation

Blockchain and Hardware Technologies for the Welfare of All Animals

The team at MustangChain is proud to announce the creation of Cecil Alliance; an overarching foundation with an horizontal business structure and with the MustangChain company being one of the verticals in this approach.

Cecil Alliance is named after Cecil the lion who lived peacefully in the Hwange National Park in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe. He was a major attraction to the park itself. Visitors would fly to Zimbabwe just to observe the lion in his natural habitat. They would marvel at his grandeur and elegance. This all ended when on July 1th 2015, the American dentist Walter Palmer paid $50,000 to hunt Cecil for his own recreation. Dr. Palmer lured Cecil into a trap and shot him with an arrow, only to track the wounded animal for 12 hours before firing the finishing arrow.

Cecil Alliance is our response.

As seen in the media there are many different institutions and charities who focus on improving the welfare of animals. For example, there are many efforts to improve the preservation of endangered species, to better monitor the health and position of cattle, and to help pet owners take care of their animals. However, despite these efforts there are still many caveats that need to be taken care of in order to truly make an impact on the welfare of animals. One of the components that is needed in order make strides forward is more transparency, better oversight, improved accessibility of data, and aligned cooperation through a global platform. All of these advancements are now within reach when we combine existing hardware and software solutions with the advantages of the blockchain.

To change the trend of mass animal use and abuse, there has to be a radical shift of awareness in humanity. We need to see the problem for what it is: in this stage of human evolution in our current tumultuous political climate, it is simply not a priority of mankind to take care for those who have no voice. This needs to change. Cecil is not an isolated event. Unfortunately, there are many cases that resemble Cecil’s in this world. Animals who are being done the highest level of injustice by humanity and for who there is only marginal support.

However, in order to increase the financial support people are willing to give, or to make more people want to help out with their time, or to motivate technology companies who develop new and creative ways of protecting these animals, the most important factor is awareness and a global easy-to-use platform to turn that awareness into collaborative action.

See teaser video on Cecil Alliance:

Cecil Alliance; The Vision and Mission

The vision of Cecil Alliance is that every animal counts. With this vision there are many different opportunities across a range of animal based industries that will benefit from the implementation of blockchain-IoT technology.

The mission of the Cecil Alliance Foundation is to advance animal preservation, livestock care, and the pet industry by providing state-of-the-art toolkits and solution sets that consist of both hardware and software solutions. This foundation is built in a bid to identify and track animals using the CECIL token and the VeChainThor Blockchain so that their welfare is promoted. The hardware and software solutions developed by Cecil Alliance will be open sourced as modular components that can be arranged according to the needs of the different animal based industries.

Horizontal structure

The Cecil Alliance Foundation (CAF) is set to a horizontal structure, meaning that rather than building into one niche or going deep in one industry, the CAF encompasses a number of modular technologies that can be used across a wide variety of issues regarding the identification, tracking, and protection of animals. The CAF aims to have a wide focus without any preconceived notions on how to use the technology, letting the members of the alliance be creative and tactful. One example, MustangChain is a focused and vertical approach to the issues in transparency and inaccessibility of equine data. CAF encourages other such vertical approaches by the use of open source technology incepted and developed by the Foundation.

Background of Cecil Alliance

The issues experienced in the equine industry were also recognizable in different animal based industry at large. For example, the animal preservation industry is still dependent on volunteers who go out and physically protect these animals, and while more and more digitization is happening, these initiatives still come from big companies such as IBM who have funds. What if the community was empowered with plug-and-play and blockchain integrated hardware and software services to freely build their own dApps and solutions to better protect endangered species. Similarly, many of the issues experienced by the equine industry are the same as those experienced in other pet industries. Many of these industries are also ineffecient, still rely on outdated paper legacy systems, do not keep track of animal data (pedigree/medical records) on a digital system, and are also fragmented into local and regional niches due to the absence of digitization. Other key issues in animal based industries mainly include preventable sickness and disease and the absence of sufficient transparency. For example:

The recurrent viral outbreaks can be better prevented through pre-emptive NB-IoT mediated health tracking;

The large list of new species threatened with extinction can be reduced by giving wildlife preservationist technological tools to better protect endangered species;

The incredible numbers of senselessly euthanized pets each year might be greatly reduced by giving these animals an identity coupled to ownership on the blockchain;

Flow of donation funds and the pedigree/medical history of the animal can be made more transparent through the use of blockchain technology;

Data accessibility can be greatly improved by digitalization;

Global collaboration towards the welfare of animals can be strengthened by uniting all stakeholders on a global platform.

Thus we always kept in the back of our mind and we wondered whether we should expand our vision from the equine industry and provide a solution that could benefit many more animals. Rather than only using digitization to improve on transparency, data accessibility, and uniting a community on a global platform, our solutions could actually be used to help and protect the animals themselves. This is our hearts at MustangChain, and though we see MustangChain as a true profit seeking opportunity, we saw it best fit to make a radical change and to broaden our scope to also fulfill a socially responsible role. Ultimately, the different software and hardware solutions that are being developed for MustangChain, or which we have access to, should be readily available for everyone as plug and play and modular solutions for all animal based industries. Members of the Alliance can use the technology implemented in MustangChain with the ability to rearrange these components to match the specific issues that the given industry faces.

Cecil Alliance technology

So what does the Foundation facilitate with its tools?

What are the plug-and-play modular components that the CAF will provide?

CAF partnered with VeChain for its superior blockchain technology. The CAF is fortunate that it can make use of a wide range of different protocols developed by the VeChain Foundation.

However, in order to translate the benefits of blockchain technology to help animals, we connect the identity and data of those animals to the blockchain. For this, the CAF provides a list of cutting edge IoT (Internet of Things) and other hardware solutions. CAF works closely together with VeChain to further enhance the IoT solutions in general and for the animal industry. For example, NFC chips to be used as a portal to the corresponding data assets on the blockchain, such as during the authentication of official documents, while RFID chips and Iris scanning can be used to digitize the identity of the animal, and NB-IoT may be utilized to track and analyze the overall health of a animal over a longer period of time, day by day, or even hour by hour.

CAF is aware that not all information can be stored on the blockchain because of privacy reasons. Because of this, the Foundation has worked tirelessly on developing highly secured private databases that work seamlessly with the blockchain and applications that stores sensitive data such as people’s identity, GPS locations, and others. Only the hash value of the raw data is stored on the blockchain. In addition, hash value can only be accessed upon authorization. The raw private data itself is stored in a decentralized data encryption and storage solution developed by the CAF.

Collected data is useless if it cannot be analyzed or read in a simple and effective way. With user friendly applications and an attractive design the CAF enables the community to actively engage with data pulled from both the blockchain and private databases.

Finally, prebuilt configurable applications will be provided so that the community can easily make their own dApps based on the data that is available on the platform. In this way, everyone involved in promoting the welfare of animals can make their own dApps. One does not necessarily have to be a developer to be able to use the different components of Cecil Alliance to track its animal(s). This ensures that CAF closes the gap of users actually using blockchain in combination with other technologies.

These different hardware and software solutions can be used in various configurations to build solutions for the reliable verification of an animals identity and authentication of official documents, for the monitoring and tracking of a number of variables of the animals, and to build integrated systems that facilitate the efforts towards wildlife preservation.

Cecil Alliance solutions

Cecil Alliance aims to be a comprehensive ecosystem including and serving the needs of all stakeholders that fight together for better identification, tracking, and protection of animals. The Foundation develops crucial functionalities and dApps that enable mass adoption and a Cecil Alliance Platform (CAP) to unite all stakeholders on a single global stage. By creating a global community around common interests, strengthening the match between supply and demand, and unlocking new markets, various dApps can be created that use the modular technologies of the CAF. The CAP will be developed in a way that it is easy to use by any possible stakeholder in the future. It is not needed to have any experience with blockchain programming thanks to the prebuilt applications of the CAF to create dApps and functionalities.

Some practicalities

Before ending we want to also inform the community on practicalities.

The company structure of MustangChain remains the same as before and makes use of the technologies developed by Cecil Alliance. The only thing changing is that the MustangChain platform will now be using the CECIL token instead of the MUST token. That is, since MustangChain will be running as a vertical under the hood of Cecil Alliance, it will no longer have its own coin but use the CECIL token instead. Those who have participated in the private token manifestation will be receiving an equal amount of CECIL tokens instead of MUST tokens. These participants will be contacted privately via mail.

Secondly, we will be rebranding the MustangChain social media accounts to Cecil Alliance. All information, announcements, developments etc at MustangChain will be shared through the Cecil Alliance social media channels. Therefore, please do not be alarmed if suddenly the name Cecil Alliance pops up in your feed if you are following MustangChain.

We hope that you are excited as we are to start this great initiative. The whitepaper and token sale information of Cecil Alliance will be published in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned:

Website: https://www.cecilalliance.com

Medium: https://medium.com/@cecilalliancefoundation

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