Brazilian farmers tokenise dairy cows on B3, raising $20,000 in livestock-backed credit

Farmers in Paraná, Brazil, have become the first in the world to tokenise livestock and list the resulting tokens on a national stock exchange, placing ten dairy cows on the B3 exchange and raising nearly $20,000 in credit backed by those animals. The project is led by Brazilian agtech firm Cowmed, whose AI-powered Smarty Collar equips each cow with continuous health, behaviour, and location monitoring, converting that data into an encrypted digital identity registered directly against a B3 credit agreement.

The collars address two structural problems that have historically made livestock unreliable as movable collateral: fraud through double-pledging the same animal across multiple lenders, and mortality risk, which the system manages by allowing a dead animal to be swapped for a live replacement without breaking the credit agreement. By removing the need for physical inspections, Cowmed argues the process is simple enough to give small agricultural producers a viable alternative at a moment when local banks are tightening lending to agribusinesses.

Cowmed already monitors roughly 100,000 dairy cows across more than 1,000 farms, a herd valued at over $395 million. The company expects up to 20 per cent of that network to adopt the tokenised financing model, which it projects would unlock $77.6 million in fresh agricultural credit. That figure sits against a broader market backdrop in which total tokenised real-world assets stood at $25 billion as of March 2026, well below McKinsey’s $4 trillion forecast for 2030 and Standard Chartered‘s $30 trillion projection for 2034, suggesting the gap between proof-of-concept pilots and systemic scale remains substantial.