Dimitra, a blockchain-based agricultural technology company, has partnered with Layer 1 blockchain platform MANTRA to bring real-world agricultural assets on-chain.
Jon Trask, Dimitra’s founder CEO, told CoinDesk at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas last week that the partnership aims to eventually bring a billion dollars worth of agricultural assets, starting with cacao in Brazil and carbon credits in Mexico, onto MANTRA’s blockchain.
Trask added that the two pilot projects with MANTRA are currently small in scale — in Brazil, only 25 of the 374 cocoa farmers in Brazil’s so-called “cocoa pole” in the southern region of Roraima are currently signed up to participate — but could be expanded “indefinitely” with enough investor interest.
Through the partnership, MANTRA holders will be able to invest directly in smallholder farmers, providing funding for a variety of regenerative agricultural projects in a way that is made traceable and verifiable by the blockchain. Trask estimated that investors could see between a 10-30% return on their investments annually, which he clarified was a a projected range based on preliminary modeling — with agriculture comes risks like pests and drought which could impact yield, he added.
Trask said that Dimitra is still in the process of integrating the two pilot programs with MANTRA, but expects that holders of MANTRA’s native OM token will be able to invest in the projects within the next couple of months.
Dimitra’s announcement comes a month after MANTRA took a beating. Its OM token plummeted 90% in a flash-crash in April. Since the crash, OM has hovered around $0.34 — a far cry from its height of $8.47 in February.
Asked why Dimitra went forward on a partnership with MANTRA following the fallout, Trask said that the deal pre-dated the crash, but admitted it initially gave him pause.
“We made the deal many months ago,” Trask told CoinDesk. “Then they had their crash, and we all took a pause to reassess to ensure we were making the best decisions for the long-term benefit of the community and projects amid a time of volatility.”
But ultimately Trask decided to move forward with the partnership, telling CoinDesk that, when the dust settled, he still found the fundamental reasons for the partnership to hold true: MANTRA had a strong team, he said, the real-world asset (RWA) development was sound, and he was impressed by their virtual asset service provider (VASP) license, granted by Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), which it obtained earlier this year.
MANTRA has done a number of RWA tokenization projects in the Middle East, including tokenizing $500 million worth of real estate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a Dubai-based real estate group.
“Tokenizing agriculture isn’t just about innovation, it’s about finding solutions to real-world issues long associated with food supply — at scale — and for long-term impact,” said John Patrick Mullin, CEO of MANTRA, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “Dimitra is solving real-world problems, with a focus on traceability and transparency — and we’re proud to help bring those to a wider audience. MANTRA Chain was built to support projects like these.”
