Here’s what we’re working on:

Enabling Profit Redistribution + Transparent Supply Chain + Community Ownership = Human Rights Impact
Hibiscus recently created the first ever on-chain profit redistribution contract for garment production - redistributing profits from FWB merch sales to supply chain participants. 

Hibiscus is looking to build on this by onboarding sewers, pattern makers, printers & other workers from the garment industry who are "stuck" working for a factory with no access to profit redistribution - giving them ownership over the value they create.

Building cryptographic profit sharing into our tooling enables the creator economy for apparel production by retaining and redistributing the value created in making and wearing apparel. 

Crypto technologies help share ownership with stakeholders:

• Community-owned ateliers vs. factories and manufacturers

• Fork-able concepts and tools can be validated and iterated on by community creators.

• Designs registered as on-chain vectors - enabling proper credit and compensation.

• Future royalties of products can be distributed back to creators and the community.

• Locally accessible physical design and fashion resources.

Building a Transparent Supply Chain

Creating open source, end-to-end apparel production supply chain + tech infrastructure that allows creators to easily create new garments on existing bases - via on-chain portfolios that can be forked, remixed, and recombined.

Creating “Proof of Ethical Production” + Oracles

Eventually, we want to create a system of producing clothes that uses consensus-driven blockchain technology to verify products are being made ethically.

Fighting Fast Fashion = Environmental Impact

As a part of our stack - we are working on the first solution for holding fast-fashion polluters accountable.

Supply Chain Accountability

Now we want to enable supply chain provenance and environmental transparency in the garment production process: create and test the first functional model for an open-source apparel supply chain to show how the garments were produced and the corresponding environmental impacts.

What does this look like in practice?

Launching the first open-source garment collection - with provenance and accountability around the environmental impacts of the collection.

We hope that our efforts will set a precedent for and can serve as a model for future apparel projects. The current landscape of crypto fashion is “merch” that encourages wasteful consumption, enablement of existing exploitative power structures, and no regard for environmental impacts.

Hibiscus seeks to change that by providing an alternative approach that enables sustainability which already either reduces waste or gives accountability around the environmental impacts of blockchain.

Open-Sourcing a Model for Ethical Clothing Production

This experiment will inform the development of environmental oracles that will allow any apparel project to open-source their environmental impact and adopt new environmental standards - all done via leveraging supply-chain metadata arising through the garment production process.

This supply chain experiment will be done with local supply chain participants in Toronto, Canada - with the hope of subsequently expanding out into other countries.

Hibiscus is creating and open-sourcing the first model for a decentralized, transparent supply chain in fashion. This will set the precedent for other apparel projects.

How = Utilizing L2s for Real-World Crypto Use Cases

Blockchain technology is often criticized by naysayers as not having real-world uses.

Hibiscus’ goal of creating an open-source, community-owned supply chain is one of the strongest examples of an IRL use case for crypto.

In order to create a truly sustainable, community-owned supply chain for clothing, Hibiscus needs to focus heavily on grassroots community work - onboarding sewers, pattern makers, textile producers, and other supply chain participants.

In many cases - these supply chain participants are members of underrepresented groups: people of color without much exposure to technology - who would be vulnerable to exploitation by traditional fashion industry structures and institutions.

These participants in the garment supply chain have never heard of blockchain before. Onboarding them onto Ethereum mainnet - and having them pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars in gas fees - is

What’s next on the roadmap?

We’ve hit our short-term goal to use protocols like Proof of Identity & liquid 0xSplits to experiment with redistribution contracts for primary sales for garment workers since the last Gitcoin grants round.

We seek to build on this success by creating garments made using a fully-transparent supply chain - proving our model for supply chain accountability. Through this process - we will onboard supply chain particip