Animal Hackers

Dateline: Sydney, 27th March 2025.When it comes to financial inclusion, there is one category of living things that have so far been overlooked: animals. It may sound a little. far-fetched to give animals their own purses, and a means to spend the contents in such a way as to increase their change of survival, but this is the “interspecies money” concept being explored in a trial involving a family of 19 mountain gorillas in Rwanda (with the intention of extending across the whole country next year).Subscribe nowWallet of the Apes The gorillas are not using cryptocurrency (that would be silly) but instead are connected through a platform that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to determine the needs of the animals—for example, that a poacher’s snare needs to be removed—then recruits a nearby human to do the work and then issues payment once it task has been completed. So the gorilla is in the middle, between the budget holder and the care giver: not so much a P2P (person-to-person) payment system as a P2A2P (person-to-animal-to-person) system.(Incidentally, if you were wondering why I dismissed giving cryptocurrency to gorillas as silly, it’s not because I am concerned they will spend all of their money on bored ape NFTs, it’s because Rwandan mountain gorillas live in areas with poor mobile reception where an offline central bank digital currency might be a better choice.)with kind permission of Helen Holmes (CC-BY-ND 4.0)It is interesting to speculate where this might go though, especially in a more decentralised…Animal Hackers