Building a Research-Ready Circular Kefir Pilot with MyZubster

Over the last few days, we have been connecting several pieces of MyZubster that previously existed as separate experiments.

The result is becoming something more interesting: a real local circular-economy workflow that can potentially become a structured Living Lab research pilot.

Our first concrete use case is simple:

a person in Rimini offers kefir culture for free, another person requests it, and the physical handover can be documented digitally.

But the important part is not just the kefir.

We are building the infrastructure needed to distinguish:

a marketplace transaction, a physical-world event, technical evidence, participant consent, and research evidence.

Those things must not be confused.

What is working today

MyZubster already has a live Marketplace API and real listings.

We now have an active kefir donation listing in Rimini using:

• category: kefir_culture_donation
• exchangeMode: gift
• currency: FREE
• local hand delivery
• no payment requirement

The Marketplace can retrieve the donor through the public API using the location and category filters.

We have also implemented a dedicated handover state machine:

LISTING
   ↓
ACCEPTED
   ↓
HANDED_OVER
   ↓
RECEIVED
   ↓
RECORDED

Each transition represents an explicit action.

The recipient accepts the handover.

The donor confirms that the culture was handed over.

The recipient confirms reception.

Only after those confirmations can the event become RECORDED.

This is deliberately different from a normal e-commerce checkout.

A free kefir donation must not accidentally trigger a cryptocurrency payment flow.

During integration testing we actually discovered exactly this type of problem: a kefir request could enter the generic Marketplace path and open MetaMask.

That bug helped us clarify the architecture.

A gift needs its own workflow.

From a Marketplace event to verifiable evidence

We have also introduced an optional evidence layer.

After a handover reaches RECORDED, the backend can prepare a canonical event payload and calculate a SHA-256 commitment.

Conceptually:

Physical interaction
        ↓
Participant confirmations
        ↓
Marketplace handover record
        ↓
Canonical event
        ↓
SHA-256 commitment
        ↓
Optional blockchain anchoring

There is an important limitation here.

A blockchain commitment can help demonstrate the integrity or existence of a digital record.

It does not prove that the physical event happened exactly as described.

It also does not prove food safety, microbiological identity, environmental impact, or research consent.

We want those boundaries to remain explicit in both the software and the documentation.

Kefir provenance is not food certification

MyZubster already contains a circular kefir pilot model covering concepts such as:

• culture lineage;
• batches;
• quality checks;
• surplus;
• destinations;
• trace events.

We are now connecting that work with the real Marketplace handover flow.

But provenance has a precise meaning here.

Knowing that culture B was propagated from culture A provides provenance information.

It does not certify microbiological identity or safety.

The system therefore needs to distinguish between:

PROVENANCE
≠
BIOLOGICAL VERIFICATION
≠
FOOD-SAFETY CERTIFICATION

This distinction will remain part of the pilot.

The new Research Layer

The biggest architectural change is not actually in the Marketplace.

We have started building a separate Research Governance Layer.

We recently added:

docs/life/research/
├── README.md
├── RESEARCH_CANDIDATE_POOL.md
├── RESEARCH_CONSENT_PROTOCOL.md
├── research-candidate-registry.json
└── research-participant-registry.json

The fundamental rule is:

MARKETPLACE USER
      ≠
PILOT PARTICIPANT
      ≠
CONTRIBUTOR
      ≠
RESEARCH CANDIDATE
      ≠
RESEARCH PARTICIPANT

Someone using MyZubster does not automatically become a research subject.

Someone contributing code does not become a research subject.

Someone participating in a pilot does not automatically consent to research.

Research participation requires a separate process.

Our current proposed activation gate requires:

RESEARCH INFORMATION PROVIDED
        +
EXPLICIT RESEARCH CONSENT
        +
PSEUDONYMOUS RESEARCH ID
        +
DATA-MINIMISATION CHECK
        +
HUMAN APPROVAL

Only after those conditions are satisfied could operational events become eligible for research analysis under an appropriate approved protocol.

At the moment, no person has been automatically enrolled as a research participant.

Research consent will not go on-chain

Another design decision is that research identity and research consent must remain outside the blockchain evidence layer.

We explicitly do not want:

wallet address = research identity

and we do not want:

blockchain transaction = research consent

Research records should instead use pseudonymous research identifiers.

Where a mapping between an operational account and a research participant is genuinely necessary, that mapping should be protected and kept outside the public repository.

The Rimini pilot we are designing

The next document we are preparing is a dedicated:

MyZubster Kefir Rimini Research Pilot

The prospective research question is roughly:

Can a local circular exchange be documented through participant-confirmed digital events while maintaining clear boundaries between operational activity, provenance, technical evidence and voluntary research participation?

Potential technical/process measurements include:

• number of handover attempts;
• ACCEPTED → HANDED_OVER transitions;
• HANDED_OVER → RECEIVED transitions;
• completed RECORDED events;
• completion rate;
• duplicate/conflict rate;
• authentication failures;
• time between state transitions;
• evidence validation failures;
• consent withdrawal enforcement;
• technical incidents such as incorrect wallet routing.

These are process and system measurements.

They are not automatically environmental, social, nutritional or health impact measurements.

Those claims would require their own methodology and evidence.

What is still missing

There is substantial work before this can be described as formal academic research.

On the engineering side, we still need to complete and test the full kefir handover UX, remove remaining coupling with payment/wallet flows, improve participant-facing state tracking, connect culture provenance with handover evidence, test withdrawal/restriction behavior, and define a clean pseudonymised research export.

On the research side, we still need a formal study protocol, participant information materials, final consent wording, retention rules, withdrawal procedures, data-minimisation rules, publication/anonymisation rules, responsible researcher information and an assessment of the applicable ethics/institutional-review requirements.

And there is an important institutional boundary:

building research-ready infrastructure is not the same thing as receiving university approval.

Likewise, LIFE-aligned experimentation does not by itself mean EU LIFE funding, CINEA endorsement, consortium membership or institutional partnership.

Those states require separate evidence.

Why we are doing it this way

It would be much easier to put every event into one database and call it "research data."

We deliberately don't want to do that.

Instead, we are trying to build explicit boundaries:

REAL-WORLD ACTIVITY
        ↓
OPERATIONAL RECORD
        ↓
TECHNICAL EVIDENCE

──────── consent boundary ────────

VOLUNTARY RESEARCH PARTICIPANT
        ↓
ELIGIBLE PSEUDONYMISED EVIDENCE
        ↓
RESEARCH DATASET
        ↓
ANALYSIS

This makes development slower.

But if MyZubster is going to evolve from an experimental platform into a Living Lab capable of supporting reproducible research, we think these boundaries need to exist from the beginning.

Next

Our immediate implementation work is now focused on the Rimini kefir handover pilot.

The goal is to complete one small, real, auditable workflow end to end:

donor → recipient → physical handover → confirmations → digital evidence

while keeping:

payment, identity, blockchain provenance and research consent as separate concerns.

Once that works reliably, the same architecture could be evaluated for other circular community activities.

For now, the status is intentionally conservative:

Operational pilot: active development and technical testing

Research governance layer: draft implemented

Research candidates: preparatory mapping only

Research participants: none automatically enrolled

Formal university research approval: not claimed

EU LIFE/CINEA endorsement or funding: not claimed

The interesting part is no longer just whether we can build a marketplace.

It is whether we can build a marketplace whose real-world interactions can later become responsible, consent-aware and reproducible evidence without pretending that the technology proves more than it actually does.

That is what we are building next.