One of the biggest issues facing ICOs to date is the lack of company history. Many projects assembled a team last month to launch an ICO tomorrow. However, in the case of the Flux Protocol, strong roots have been established for the past half-decade that have helped evolve the project into the hidden gem that it has become today. We wanted to take this time to tell our community about Flux’s story, from its origins through the present.

An Environmentalist’s Vision

The story of Flux begins in Israel, where our Communications and PR lead Karin Kloosterman was living and working as an environmental journalist in the first years of this decade.

Kloosterman’s coverage of environmentally hazardous practices, such as the use of pesticides, sparked an interest in alternative systems that let us “work with nature to augment and solve the devastating problems that we face in agriculture without causing long-lasting harm to the environment”.

Living in Israel provided inspiration and contacts with entrepreneurs who were working on the types of solutions that appealed to Kloosterman, albeit not necessarily with the same goals. As a country that has at times needed to develop self-sufficiency and optimizations to ensure its supply of resources like energy and water, as well as one with a strong military research industry, Israel was home to a flourishing ecosystem of new technologies that promised to help humans better collect information from the environment.

But there was one problem: Many of those companies were building solutions that catered to the needs of particular businesses. They were chasing corporate acquisitions by the very agricultural conglomerates that Kloosterman saw as “enemies” of environmentalism, rather than creating technology designed for the collective benefit of living beings.

Kloosterman had a different vision. “I wanted to tap into the wisdom that Mother Earth had to offer,” she said. “We were collecting all of this data for specific business purposes, and it wasn’t getting integrated into a big story.”

Karin Kloosterman in her rooftop hydroponics lab in Jaffa, Israel

In a bid to change that, she turned to Amichai Yifrach, an engineer with an extensive background in sensor technology, artificial intelligence and artificial personality. Yifrach had built a network of AI machines that can understand natural systems — exactly the type of functionality that Kloosterman saw as critical for unlocking the information needed to create an alternative, environmentally friendly agricultural technologies.

Working with Yifrach and a handful of other entrepreneurs, Kloosterman founded Flux in 2015. Inspired by the availability of inexpensive, customizable hardware devices like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, their vision was to allow anyone to collect and share environmental data. This ultimately led to the creation of a military-grade custom electronics board for IoT data collection christened “MICO”.

Following the completion of initial MICO prototypes in early 2016, Blake Burris was introduced to the project as a mentor by ICONYC Labs, an accelerator program in New York City, to bring his experience in IoT and work with major cities globally to solve environmental challenges. Later in 2016, Burris was invited to take on the CEO role to execute on the vision and scale the team beyond its R&D base in Israel; open US headquarters in Boulder, Colorado; and soon, staffing up in Hong Kong given its proximity to manufacturing in Shenzhen, Asian partners, and access to the Chinese market.

Enter Open Data Standards and Blockchain Technology

Early on, our founders had a strong vision and the basic hardware they needed to collect the data that would drive it.

What lacked, however, was a way to ensure that the data could be shared freely with anyone. That led to the development of an open standard for environmental data, along with an organization called the TARA Alliance, whose mission is to “evolve and promulgate that standard by spreading it far and wide across academia and enterprise”.

The next problem was trying to find a way to incentivize the contribution of data, storage and its platform for distributed intelligence. On that front, we turned to blockchain.

For us, blockchain technology serves as much more than a way to facilitate economic exchange. It is a tool for decentralizing the storage of environmental data. In turn, it helps individuals provide for their own needs, rather than making them dependent on powerful companies to collect and distribute crucial data.

With the help of blockchain technology, our team has begun building an incentivization engine that rewards participation on the platform. Along with our open hardware platform, MICO, the TARA Alliance and the open data standard, these incentivization engine round out the true beauty of the Flux Protocol.

Flux Today

With these solutions, Flux Protocol will make it possible for anyone to “hack society”. Flux will provide the access to information that individuals need to study and interact with the world around them more responsibly, and short-circuit dependencies on major corporations to study the environment for them.

CEO, Blake Burris presents Flux in Astana, Kazahkstan (2017)

How far will our solution reach? According to our CEO Blake Burris, there is no limit. The goal is to create a truly “universal platform which will serve everyone from urban farmers, to home growers, to small-scale subsistence farmers,” he said.

In fact, Kloosterman is keen to point out that Flux’s value is not limited to humans.

“We want to create a world where people are prosperous and resources are allocated efficiently,” she said, “in a way that allows all members of this planet to thrive — and I don’t just mean human beings.”

“We now have a way of democratizing data so it’s not just siloed on the servers of some multi-national corporation,” Kloosterman continued. “We believe data doesn’t necessarily belong to any one company or individual, and that if we want to do right by this planet, we must open it up and have a holistic approach to deciding how we run our planet.”

Burris agrees that, beyond advancing a world-changing technology like blockchain, Flux has the potential to be much more than just a business venture.

“Flux originated in the Holy Land,” he said, adding that the company has a “spiritual mission to protect human sanctity. All men, women and children on earth should have equitable access to clean water, food and medicines.”

Flux’s true mission aims to provide the information that will facilitate this Future of Abundance.

For more information on our project, please visit our new website at https://www.fluxprotocol.io. From there, you can access our whitepaper, pitch deck, and one-pager and participate in our first airdrop. If you’re now reading this, we’re proud to welcome you as one of our early community supporters and look forward to providing you with regular updates on our development over the course of the next few months.