Animal Hackers

Extending financial inclusion beyond the human race.

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 chance 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).

Wallet 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 the 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 future. I have long been sceptical that truly decentralised systems can succeed — no sane person wants to be their own bank — because people lack the persistent competence necessary to manage their keys, so I doubt that giving gorillas their own wallets makes sense.

A custodial wallet is another matter though. But how, as I am sure you are all thinking, could transaction authentication work in that case? That’s a serious concern. I would have thought that gorillas would struggle with PINs—although I can imagine using symbols for things that they are familiar with (e.g., an apple, a banana, David Attenborough and so on) instead of numbers—but as that piece in The Economist notes, humans can make payments using facial recognition for authentication, so why shouldn’t gorillas?

Animal Authentication

Why not indeed. One facial recognition system for primates already delivers individual classification (ability to identify the individual) from 41 different primate specifies with 94% accuracy. As this result shows, animal face recognition is already quite a well-developed field and not only for gorillas. The open source BearID can already do facial detection (ability to find a face) with an average precision of 0.98 and an individual classification accuracy of 84%, I don’t imagine that given current advances in AI it should be that difficult to put together a GorillaID with facial detection up in 0.995 area and a face recognition accuracy of 98%. Similarly, CattleNet has cow face recognition up at over 91% and will undoubtedly continue to improve.

Pig face recognition, to choose another example, is a big business. There are 700m pigs in China, and the productivity gains that farmers can obtain from ensuring that each pig is fed optimally, that sick pigs are kept away from the herd (and so on) are very significant which is why there is a big business in looking for “bully pigs” that try to obtain a disproportionate share of barnyard resources. Face recognition systems can spot them chowing down when they shouldn’t be and flag for intervention so that all pigs get the right food and antibiotics and so on.

Similarly, the whole field of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is benefitting from advances in Deep Learning. Recent work on the Israeli Agricultural Research Organization (ARO) dairy farm exploits Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers to reach 98% face detection and a 96% accuracy in identifying cows.

(Of course, face recognition is not the only useful biometric in this context. Dogs, for example, seem to have pretty unique nose prints and at least one startup reached 95% accuracy in identifying dogs that had their nose-prints previously recorded.)

Animal Spirits

Thinking about animal payments gave me an excuse to point out that those of us in the digital identity community probably do not spend anything like enough time thinking about identification, authentication and authorisation in the context of the digital identity of animals. The identification of animals is actually a pretty interesting topic and animal biometrics — which can be used to recognise species and identify individual animals, as well as to track changes over time — is a pretty well developed field of research.

(And it’s a field with wide application - I had the opportunity to visit a research farm that was experimenting with facial recognition for dingos when I was in Australia recently!)

As technology evolves to bring together sensors, biometrics and AI of various types so the range of effective applications for animal biometrics will continue to expand and provide interesting new commercial opportunities, because the identification of animals and the association of a digital identity with individual beasts clearly has significant economic value which, in turn, means fintech opportunities.

(I’ve put forward a couple of suggestions myself — an app that flings virtual faeces at someone on Instagram and a sensor that counts how many nature documentaries an animal has been in, so that royalties can be distributed on some sort of blockchain — so I’ll see if they get back to me.)

There’s a serious point here. Digital identity isn’t only about people or companies or animals or their AIs. It is about everything, and we need to think about identity infrastructures that can support all of these users and their use cases. Each of the implementations will be different, of course, but they should interoperate within a framework.

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