Extract

60-Second Pitch

You buy a bottle of vanilla extract labeled "pure" and pay a premium for it — but up to 80% of "pure vanilla" on store shelves is adulterated or completely synthetic, and there's no way to verify it.

Vanilla farmers in Madagascar earn $2–3/kg for a product that retails at $500+/kg — a 250x markup with zero accountability (World Bank, 2024)

Up to 80% of vanilla products labeled "pure" contain synthetic vanillin or undisclosed fillers (FDA enforcement data)

The global vanilla market is worth $4B+ but runs on handshake deals and paper ledgers controlled by whoever holds the pen

The entire vanilla supply chain is a black box — farmers get crushed, consumers get lied to, and middlemen answer to no one.

So instead of asking people to blindly trust labels,

We built Extract to make every handoff verifiable, tamper-proof, and publicly auditable — from the farm gate to the store shelf.

Here's how it works

Every handoff is written to Solana

When a farmer harvests vanilla beans, a journey begins on-chain. Every transfer between organizations — farmer, middleman, exporter, processor, retailer — is recorded as a dual-signed Solana transaction. An Anchor program encodes structured event data (weight, price, quality grade, GPS coordinates, lab results) directly into the ledger.

Our web app tracks every step along the supply chain

From the farm in Madagascar, to the curing facility, to the export port, to the processor, and finally to the retail shelf. Each hop shows the location on an interactive map with waypoints and route lines. Dual signatures from both sender and receiver at every handoff — no single party can fabricate a transfer.

In the end, the consumer scans a QR code and sees the full journey

Interactive map showing every location their vanilla traveled through. Green verification badges for confirmed, dual-signed handoffs. Lab authenticity results. Price at every step. Direct links to every transaction on the Solana explorer.

Organizations get trust scores based on on-chain behavior

Confirmation rates, price fairness, weight consistency, and lab authenticity results feed into a live, replayable score. Anomaly detection flags suspicious patterns — abnormal weight loss between handoffs, price markups outside regional norms, repeated authenticity failures. No black boxes.

For organizations, we built a full dashboard

Wallet-connected org dashboard for initiating and confirming handoffs. Reputation scoring replayed entirely from on-chain event logs. Consumer-facing journey pages with no wallet required — just a URL or QR scan.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had touched Solana before this weekend. We learned Anchor, PDAs, and event-driven architecture from scratch — while simultaneously building a full-stack app around it. Sleep was theoretical.

Solana devnet's faucet kept rate-limiting us with 429 errors, so we built the entire system to work against a local validator too, with a single env var toggle.