This sounds like a bad line in a “Planet of the Apes” film, but there’s now a cryptocurrency based on bananas.
It’s called Bananacoin, and was co-founded by entrepreneurs Oleg Dobrovolsky and Alexander Bychkov.
They distribute “tokens” using the Ethereum blockchain, a decentralized data application often used for cryptocurrency.
Every token ― equal in value to the current export price of 1 kilogram of bananas ― is essentially stock in a real organic banana plantation in Laos, where the creators are based. Those bananas are harvested and sold in neighboring China, where the Bananacoin group says the fruit’s demand is larger than the supply.
Bananacoins have been available since their presale in September 2017, but most of the internet heard about them this month thanks to this tweet.
Should you lose interest in Bananacoin, you can sell your token back for the market value, or if you’re hungry, you can exchange your token for an actual kilogram of bananas.
As an investor, the website says, you also have the right to personally visit the environmentally friendly plantation in the Vientiane province of Laos. The founders even shared its Google map coordinates if you want to look at it (from space).
If you found it hard to grasp the idea of cryptocurrency before, this will probably make it a bit more ... slippery.