This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool which describes itself as a Cardano native startup on a mission to accelerate the world to a more sustainable food source: Fytoboros Pool [FYTO].
Last week’s guest was a stake pool that donates 50% of their fixed fee to supporting projects in the world’s poorest countries.
This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite Stake Pool Operators (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.
Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.
Summary
Cardano SPO, interview with Fytoboros Pool [FYTO]
Hey, glad to have you here. Please introduce yourself, where are you based and what is your background?
My name is Jia, I live in San Diego and Los Angeles currently. I was born and raised in Guangzhou China, and I immigrated to the US when I was 10 years old with my little sister to meet up with our parents in Los Angeles. I became a US citizen when I turned 18, and got my degree in Aerospace Engineering. I built a rocket back when I was in college with friends and that got me in the doors of building even bigger rockets at SpaceX. I am the type of person that likes to continually grow and learn things that interest me, and many times it’s outside of my expertise because that’s where I can grow and learn the most. I am a natural optimist, and I think this is a very important principle to maximize the probability of success in anything I do.
Since you’re a SpaceX engineer, what are your thoughts about the involvement of your CEO, Elon Musk, in the crypto space?
I can’t really comment much on Elon’s involvement in crypto space. He likes to have fun online, and he is not afraid to share his opinions. Elon learns by asking challenging questions, and also asking “dumb questions” (obvious questions that many people have, but afraid to ask because it’s against the consensus). This is one of the ways he constructs his mental model, so he can execute quickly when needed. That pretty much sums up his involvement.
Why have you chosen Cardano? What has captivated you about this blockchain?
I’ve chosen to build on Cardano because of the ecosystem, and the principles behind it that Charles Hoskinson has set. I came into the blockchain space searching for solutions to the many global and social issues that I’ve been pondering about for years.One of the things I think a lot about is how we can solve wealth inequality globally, but Cardano has expanded my thoughts that blockchain can also help us solve some of the harder problems like governance, voting, human rights, environmental protection, and much more.
You’re on a mission to build an immersive eating experience that is more sustainable and fun. Tell us more about your project and your strategy.
I founded Fytoboros back in July 2021 to start working on my passion projects. I had this troubling feeling when I first learned about the large amount of resources needed to produce a burger pattie. It was like 500 gallons of water for 1 pattie.These thoughts have stuck with me for a long time, but I love to eat meat, and I still have a hard time switching over. When I tasted the Beyond Meat burger, I thought it was very tasty and I can eat that instead of a real meat burger. That’s when I realized the only way to solve this problem is to create plant-based meat alternatives that taste as good or better as the real stuff. For anything to scale, you need global adoption, and people will not switch for the kindness of their heart. My goal is to try to find new ways to remove friction in choosing plant based options by making it tastier, more sustainable, cheaper, and fun.
My plan for Fytoboros is to combine blockchain technology with plant based-meat to build an immersive eating experience. The vision is to enable the minting of NFTs in the metaverse after having killed a fictional creature, then convert these NFTs into real physical plant-based meat products. The way we differentiate ourselves from other plant-based products is with a plant-based bone. We plan to create NFT creatures that have well defined bone structures, and when you kill it in the game, the chunk of meat you receive will symbolize the character. You can then use that to buy our plant-based meat products that also have that unique bone with tasty plant-based meat around it. In the future, we can make many partnerships to get our characters deployed in different games, to drive adoption.
#fyto made our first prototype that actually looks exactly likes the real chicken bone! It’s made from a scan of the real bones, and then we made models to shape it to the exact geometry. Will keep you guys posted as we make progress on our development!:) #cardanoproject #cardano pic.twitter.com/HAQye8SIkE
— Jia yang (@Jiayang1) October 12, 2021
We will have our regular line of plant based burger patties, chicken nuggets, etc. to satisfy traditional cravings.There is still a lot of work to to inorder to make this vision into a reality. I was going to work on it in a few years after I’ve saved up enough money, but because of the support from the community delegating their ADA to the FYTO pool, I am able to start allocating all of that extra earnings into this project. So the more ADA that gets delegated into our pool, the faster we can make this into a reality. I think this is the future that I want to see, and FYTO is going to be adding a new layer into the way humans experience food.
Many thanks for your contribution, any final remarks? Where can people follow you?
Thanks for giving me an outlet to share what we are working on in FYTO. We have our Discord channel that is open to the public for anyone that wants to chat with me personally. I am always active there. You can also follow me on Twitter for updates. To support our project directly, the only way to do that right now is to delegate ADA to the FYTO pool. After you have done that please join our discord channel to keep up to date with everything the pool is doing! We want to build this together with the community and everyone is welcome to join!
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation, IOHK or SpaceX in this particular case.
