By Ásgeir Thór Óskarsson, Managing Director, BSV Association
I spent the past week at VIV Europe 2026 in Utrecht. The conversations worth having were not about technology. They were about coordination.
Across sessions on African food system development, circular value creation and emerging agricultural science, the same question surfaced in different forms. How do we share information across networks of producers, buyers, policymakers and consumers who do not trust each other, do not share platforms and are often operating under entirely different regulatory frameworks?
That is, at its core, an infrastructure problem. And it is one blockchain is well-placed to address: not because of novelty, but because a distributed ledger is a shared record that anyone can read, anyone authorised can write to and no one can quietly alter.
What Blockchain Is Actually For
For most people working in agriculture and food systems, blockchain still signals speculation, whitepaper promises and solutions in search of a problem.
That framing is out of date.
The infrastructure we are building and deploying is not for traders. It is for farmers, cooperatives, food scientists and certifiers. The value is in the record and the proofs.
At the heart of it is a common identity standard on the network itself: owned by the user, not by any app, and shareable across all of them. You are onboard once. You define what you share, with which network, on what terms. And because every application speaks the same standard, they work together by default: a credential created in one is recognised by the next, with no re-registration, no duplicated profiles, no third party brokering your relationships.
All of this is powered by CommonSource, the digital collaboration platform built on BSV blockchain that connects participants across food system networks (farmers, advisors, researchers, policymakers, youth communities) with every interaction recorded on a shared, tamper-proof ledger. Fragmentation is addressed without forcing anyone to surrender autonomy or migrate to someone else’s platform.
Mycelia and BRIXit, both initiatives developed with the Bionutrient Food Association, show what this looks like in practice. With Mycelia, a farmer registers once and moves across connected applications with a single self-sovereign identity, in full control of their data. BRIXit extends the same foundation into citizen science: anyone can buy a measurement kit, submit a nutrient-density reading through an app and turn it into a verified, producer-attributed data point on a global public map. No technical knowledge required. No centralised platform capturing the value.
One onboarding. One identity. Multiple purposes. These are systems running on a common standard. And they are just the beginning. The same foundation, shared identity, verified records, data owned by the people who create it, applies wherever food systems run on trust: certification, provenance, regenerative outcomes, regional finance. The opportunities still to identify, explore and build far outnumber the ones already live. That is what makes this the right moment to get involved.
What VIV Made Clear
Dan Kittredge of The Bionutrient Institute put it plainly: if food quality can be measured, tracked and verified, it can be rewarded. Nutrient density is currently unpriced, so it goes unmanaged. The measurement infrastructure already exists. What has been missing is a trust layer for the data.
Mark Frederiks of Common Source made a point worth repeating: the human factor comes first. Technology provides the foundation.
That is also how I think about what we are building. Technology does not replace the farmer who shows up every morning, makes decisions in conditions no model fully captures and takes on risks no platform shares. What it can do is make that farmer’s contribution visible to the people who should be paying for it and ensure the data they generate is attributed to them rather than extracted by a platform they did not choose.
Prof Fadel Ndiame’s session on Africa’s food system governance added an important dimension: scale matters, but inclusion matters equally. The infrastructure must be accessible to producers across different geographies, languages and levels of digital literacy. That is why standards matter. One digital credential, multiple networks, with blockchain complexity abstracted away from the end user.
Where Food Systems Actually Fail
Food systems do not fail because farmers lack data. When it comes to data, they fail because the data that exists is fragmented, inaccessible, unverifiable or controlled by intermediaries whose interests do not align with the people producing the food.
Farmers are not getting paid fairly. Nutrient density has fallen sharply since the 1950s, yet there is no mechanism at the point of purchase that rewards quality. Recalls that should take minutes take days because provenance records are scattered across disconnected systems. When a shock hits, whether climate-related, geopolitical or logistical, the absence of shared real-time visibility means responses are slow, waste is high and trust erodes further
The food system is broken in more ways than infrastructure can fix. Retailer monopolies, broken subsidy systems and deeply entrenched power imbalances require policy solutions, not technical ones. But within the domain where better infrastructure can make a difference, there are a few things that would meaningfully shift the picture: a single trusted source of truth for food data; traceable provenance from farm to fork; systems that do not concentrate control in central platforms; real-time visibility that enables faster responses to disruption; and incentive structures that reward quality and sustainability alongside volume. These are not easy to deliver. But they are possible. And they are where the work is focused.
Blockchain does not solve all of this on its own. But it is the infrastructure layer that makes all of it possible at scale.
What Comes Next?
VIV Europe 2026 confirmed where the work is. The pilots are done. The architecture is validated. The demand, from producer cooperatives, from policymakers, from food system networks across Europe and beyond, is real.
The question now is deployment at scale: with the right partners, the right governance frameworks and the right funding mechanisms to support producers doing the hard work of building more resilient food systems every day.
Better food systems start with collaboration. They are sustained by infrastructure that makes trust possible.
That is what we are building and we welcome more of them. If you are working on food system challenges and want to explore what shared infrastructure could make possible, get in touch.
