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traded domestically this year, according
to the Department of Environmental Af-
fairs.)
Rhino Coin was launched earlier this year
to simplify the process of legally trading
horn and to create a revenue stream for
rhino owners and rhino conservation in
general. “Our concept was that it would
be like the gold standard,” says Wil-
cocks. But his plan uses cryptocurrency
traded on the Internet instead of paper
dollars, and rhino horn instead of gold.
Most Rhino Coin buyers are speculators,
betting that the international rhino horn
trade ban will one day fall away, and that
horn can then be sold at a stupendous
markup in Asia.
Under the Rhino Coin scheme, a horn
owner places horn into the Rhino Coin
system by legally selling it to Cornu Lo-
gistics. The horn is weighed to the near-
est gram, audited, and placed in Cornu’s
vault. One digital token — a Rhino Coin
— is created for each gram of horn via
blockchain technology, a means of cre-
ating a distributed database of records
that are verifiable and resistant to cor-
ruption. Rhino Coins can be bought with
South African Rands by domestic and
international buyers and traded on the
Cornuex exchange, where their price
fluctuates according to supply and de-
mand. The horn owner is given 54 per-
cent of the Rhino Coins and can retain
those tokens or sell them on the ex-
change for cash at any point. The rest of
the coins are allocated to a conservation
foundation, a children’s home, and ad-
ministrative costs, such as horn storage.
Wilcocks says that all the coins gener-
ated from the 108 kilograms of horn in
Cornu’s vault are in circulation, but that
trade volumes have been low because
they’ve not been doing any promotion
recently. No coins have been redeemed
for horn yet. He says he plans to launch
a publicity campaign in January to in-
crease interest in Rhino Coin, and an ad-
ditional 500 kilograms of horns are wait-
ing to be audited to add to the system.
It’s become common for reserves and
ranches to de-horn rhinos to lessen the
animals’ value to poachers and allow
horns to be harvested. Rhinos are typi-
cally tranquilized with a dart gun by a
veterinarian and their horns painlessly
cut off with a small chainsaw a couple of
inches above the base. This can be re-
peated every two or three years as the
horns regrow. Jones of the rhino own-
ers’ association estimates that roughly
30 tons of horn are now stockpiled in
South Africa — about 10 tons collective-
ly owned by the private sector, and 17 to
20 tons sourced from national parks and
other state-owned reserves and held in
government vaults. Jones says that horn
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from this stockpile, continually replen-
ished from rhino farms, could generate
a colossal 65 billion Rand (about $4.5 bil-
lion) over five years if legally sold in Asia.
(More conservative estimates place the
potential value of South Africa’s stock-
pile at more than $1 billion.)
Many rhino custodians — including cer-
tain government conservation agencies
and the majority of private rhino owners
in southern Africa — feel strongly that
legal trade can further incentivize rhino
conservation, and that Asian markets
can be managed so that uncontrollable
consumer demand doesn’t lead to runa-
way poaching.
But conservation organizations often
cite a 2008 legal sale of elephant ivory
from Botswana, South Africa, and Zim-
Figure 4: Rhino horns being weighed
and stored at John Hume's ranch in
February 2016. Hume is the leading
contributor of horn to the Rhino Coin
system. Photo: Mujahid Safodien/AFP/
Getty Images
babwe to China and Japan as a reason
not to sell rhino horn. Like rhino horn,
the international trade in ivory had long
been forbidden, but in 2008 CITES al-
lowed a strictly regulated “one-off sale.”
Even though China rolled out sophisti-
cated safeguards to monitor and control
ivory from this sale, these failed, says
Colman O Criodain, policy manager of
wildlife practice for WWF International.
Numerous unaccredited stores and
ivory-carving workshops sprung up to
take advantage of revived consumer de-
mand, and “there was a parallel illegal
market that they were either unwilling or
unable to control.”
Elephant poaching and ivory traffick-
ing skyrocketed to supply these illegal
outlets; by 2011, at least 15,000 African
elephants were being killed annually.
Following international pressure, Chi-
na has cracked down on illegal trade
and banned the domestic sale of ivory;
elephant poaching rates have since
dropped.
Although Hume portrays himself as a
March 2019
rhino-loving conservationist, his motives
have often been questioned. He owns
tons of horn, and might make hundreds
of millions of dollars if he gets to sell it
in Asia. He has in the past sold rhinos to
be shot by trophy hunters and also has
sold the animals to two brothers, who
are suspected rhino poachers and horn
traffickers, according to the Organized
Crime and Corruption Reporting Pro-
ject.
Rhino coin is “not
really mainstream
conservation in any
sense of the word,”
says one expert.
Some observers say that since buyers
can purchase tokens from anywhere,
CITES might view Rhino Coin as a form
of international horn trade and try to
constrain it; after all, the treaty’s text
regulates wild species “and their de-
rivatives.” Tom Milliken of TRAFFIC, the
wildlife trade research organization, says
“I don’t have a lot to say about Rhino
Coin other than it is an attempt to get
funding to support a private rhino farm-
er who is quite a controversial figure, but
it’s not really mainstream conservation in
any sense of the word. It will probably
not demonstrate any traction in financial
markets as time goes by.”
WWF’s O Criodain says he would not
bet on the trade in rhino horn being le-
galized internationally or within China
because of powerful global resistance.
Rhino Coin speculators may never real-
ize a profit, he says. He points out that
on October 30 the Chinese government
announced that it would be lifting the
ban on rhino horn use in Traditional Chi-
nese Medicine (TCM), a possible first
step to open trade. But it soon backed
down under a storm of protest from con-
servation organizations, announcing on
November 12 that “the detailed regula-
tions for implementation” of the Octo-
ber legal change had been “postponed
after study” and that the strict ban on
sale and use of rhino horn remained in
effect. It’s not clear whether regulations
to allow TCM use will ever be written.
Although rhino deaths appear to be de-
clining slightly in South Africa this year
due to better anti-poaching measures,
recorded incursions into reserves and
attempts to poach continue to rise be-
cause transnational criminal syndicates
are still buying horn. Meanwhile, private
and government stockpiles continue to
grow, further increasing the incentives
to sell.
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