Building the Regenerative Economy

Transcript

uh ladies and gentlemen we now have a 45 minute panel on building the regenerative economy uh please welcome to the stage the moderator Lena hiti we have we have John Allison we have Mark Johnson and Gabriella Chang put your hands together everybody H got I have to give the mic okay hi everybody um very very excited to be here today uh we will talk about regenerative building the regenerative

and I am very very excited it's like not really great microphone quality I don't know hi okay this better hi great and I'm very excited about my incredible panel we have people with like years of experience in the refi um sector and so um without further Ado I would like to ask you to introduce you uh very quickly and the projects you're working on and um is this all is the m coming to all right cool yeah hey everybody uh John Ellison here Source Steward at refi da uh I found myself at the protection of

climate and crypto kind of by accident uh been an entrepreneur for about 16 years built a circular economy startup build software for governments in the US and was really looking for a greater point of Leverage to enact change in a way that people could actually verify greenwashing is so rampant people are so disillusioned with these promises of a better world okay um and yeah was really interesting hello cool um yeah mic trouble's in here so anyway that's me we'll drive into it more John Ellison refi out Mark bro hope the mic works better for you homie check check oh thank you um Mark Johnson I'm an

Environmental Solutions architect for protocol labs and I work specifically on an initiative called file Queen green um protocol Labs we build protocols and solutions uh specifically around like the data layer and we really uh uh build most of those based on a core primitive called content addressing data so some of our protocols and products if you're not familiar are ipfs and filecoin and nft storage and things like that um within our work at filecoin Green we really have a dual objective of making the filecoin network verifiably sustainable and also to build tools to better Monitor and mitigate environmental impacts not just within

our own network but across other networks and even other areas of economic activity so super excited to dive into all of this thank you uh I'm super happy to be again with all of you I'm Gabriela Chang co-founder of epab a financial inclusion protocol for unbanked small holder Farmers alive since 2018 I work for the Secretary of economic development in Mexico I live now in Spain and I was also an organic coffee producer so we are quite aware of the problem on ground and because I know that problem and also the problem of lack of knowledge about web tree I work a lot also for spreading word about the use of this amazing

technology for real stuff for real world so I'm very happy to see that there's a growing Community regarding refi space and business with purpose so thank you very much for being here with us thank you so much for being here all of you very excited um so I think my first question is going to be related to um how we like building the blockchain ecosystem we have like this issue of like understanding what do we have to like create completely new where can we take um kind of existing blocks from systems that work and um my question like related to refi and especially to

communities um my question would be Gabriel which um parts do you think we can take and which parts we definitely have to rethink in a new way to like um kind of avoid making the same mistakes we have in web 2 yeah thank you I would start pointing out what I think are the worst mistakes made in web 2 first started we have a global system that systematically excludes one out of every four human beings according to the World Bank a quarter of the world population is excluded but not only from the financial system from the carbon credits and for the certification system and mostly everything that needs internet to connect that needs digitalization let's

think the people who has not access the the small holder Farmers 1.2 billion is the same number of the people without access to electric grid so it's the same people so exclusion I would say is the main problem so in order to avoid repeating this problem I ask all of you Builders supporters users every every time you think about a solution embed into it inclusion but not from the European point of view that inclusion it's including women and minorities but think keep in mind that a quarter of the word is excluded from everything so let's try to to think about this and even when they don't have connectivity

we have proved that it is possible to benefit for them to benefit from blockchain even if they don't connect to the to a wallet it will come in in one year or two but you can design the proper incentives to make the actors of the system that are in contact with the farmers to reach them so it's about designing protocols and designing uh incentives Loops to make things happen even if not directly interacting with the technology okay amazing response and also um yeah I think it's so important that we understand we have to bring everybody to the table then we just don't look from outside be like oh you're a minority like from the global sou but everybody

has to sit on the table and and be part of that discussion to avoid these issues I hate the use of global North and Global South it's another form of discrimination like the poor there but Australia is there and it's not poor so it's not a very precise but it's again an euphemism to talk about this separation why don't we five a narrative that includes all the planet stop separating the planet because it's one bucket for all and and also systems might have to be differently adapted to different regions so we cannot just like decide for everybody so yeah great great response um and Mark like you have like so much experience

working climate Tech but also in web 3 and what have been like the biggest misconceptions people assumed like oh this is going to work and then it did not or like um where uh yeah or what worked really well of like actually like like transferring this into web 3 yeah that's a that's a great question um and very much my answer will very much align with yours uh in that in my experience and in our experience within file Queen green so many projects and or people come to the space and try to apply techniques maybe carried over from older types of systems or Industries and things like that and they think that

that uh web 3 and refi becomes a Panacea that solves all problems you just tokenize something and it's automatically a thousand times better and obviously I think we all know um from you know many trials and tribulations that that is not true and so we need to recognize that as we're trying to um really Foster This Global community of regenerative practices and embed it into our economic systems in a very local and Community sense but also from a global macro perspective that um even though we have these incredibly Innovative set of Technologies in the web 3 space we still need to apply them in the right Manner and make sure that

the use case that we're using it for um actually solves a real world problem and brings impact to those local communities great yeah I I think it's also kind of covering what Gabriel said like having macro systems and then combining this with with Micro Systems and that's what blockchain makes possible right so it's very cool um so John um oh I just realized hey I'm here still no um yeah um I think what my question to you would be just like um now that we got this um amazing intro but it's like can you for

everybody here um just give us the just a very quick intro like where are we in refi right now like what's the current state of like what still needs to be done or like what because you are such a like have such a broad um knowledge and and then your uh so can you give us a quick intro for it yeah sure so I think there's a few waves of this movement you know you have the Gregory Landa Dr Sean Conway of EXO region Network they kind of laid the foundations taking from you know many pioneers years of regenerative economics they built really you know Visionary software systems but were far ahead of their time and they didn't really hit scalability and there wasn't

a lot of attention there and then comes around defi summer all of these new money Legos are around Olympus da protocol own liquidity and then cadow and tan prepare to launch this you know money-making scheme on top of carbon credits which allow people to engage with this old world system that has exist exting value in the market and there was this explosion of innovation you know we saw 5% of the entire world supply of carbon credits come on chain in a matter of months a billion dollar market cap in under two weeks 60,000 investors coming into this promise of making money will do good for the planet and what we realized was actually this technology was far more powerful than we thought you know I know the guys at

Toucan thought they would do maybe a million tons in a year they did 24 this potential this mechanism design is so incredibly powerful and so what began as a you know maybe a dozen or two dozen projects in refi suddenly became hundreds and you know now there's a database at refi.com that we share with other partners like clim Collective with there 650 experiments looking at using web 3 to make an impact for the planet but I don't think really other than I'd say ethic Hub maybe impact Market I think gith you know gitcoin there's there's a handful of people who are really out there in the world providing volume providing Capital flow as a consistent mechanism because now after Vera has pulled the bridge and there's

no more incoming Supply there's this kind of stagnant moment in refi where we have to choose do we piggyback on the Legacy world and all of these old institutions these old financial instruments or to we really go beyond and to recreate the entire value exchange system and I think that's what's happening now and I'm really excited to see projects like open Forest protocol you know on near deploying Tech that's really quite frankly simple but actually allowing people to issue forestry credits natively onchain all over the world and to begin to see corporate adoption for this new type of asset that has no link to centralized intermediaries at all and I think we have this lull during the bear this

opportunity to build genuine deeply rooted thoroughly considered value mechanisms that actually work at scale and so I mean no discredit to this initial wave I'm only here because of this prom that tan and cladal provided of doing good while making money but I think this invitation is to really go deeper and to truly understand what are our value systems and how can we build technology that actually allows people in the planet to live together in harmony okay yeah I just just just one point because I very much agree with that um unfortunately a lot of projects in the refi space are focused around the speculative financialization of environmental assets refi is so much

broader than that and regenerative economics is a whole school of thoughts and ideologies and systems where carbon credits and environmental assets are a tiny little sliver and they're a tiny little sliver because that's all they need to be right at the end of the day a carbon credit is just an economic bandid that does not solve the underlying problem of decarbonization so we need to make sure that we're taking that in account and don't put refi in a corner of just like carbon credits just rant over agree also just John um I think tuken did not promise money for doing good like tuken builds infrastructure and they like like built the infrastructure for this like hype um so just to clarify that also tuen is really

working on uh providing new Supply very soon so thank you for clarifying the promise um so my next question is um like um how can we like Foster collaboration in in web 3 and where do you already see it and where are you still missing it and then I would go directly first to John again because you build refi down you have like you yesterday told me like 19 subn notes and and you organized so many events and my question is like who of these stakeholders like um of the whole broad like f of all maybe who are these

stakeholders who do you still find missing in your meet apps and what are the main conversations you see happening in these meet apps yeah so I think there's two parts there like how do you Foster collaboration and so our invitation to every founder that comes into refi is to really find your unique contribution the gift that you are able to give the product you able to build that only you can really do based on who you are and your experience and to focus on doing less but doing it better and I think the idea of contributing a single money Lego to this incredible ecosystem with the intention that other people can build on top that you don't have to do it all is really the magic of this web 3 system that we have and I think you know

people often try and do way too much and they try and cover too many parts of the value system and it really inhibits collaboration because if you're covering everything from asset origination to the marketplace and to the derivatives like where can people build on top of you how are the network effects actually created and so I think you know fostering this web3 native mindset of Building composable Products is really important and accepting that you can't do it all and you need an entire network to succeed I think on the other side there's a lot of actors missing in refi and that's why we're Gathering locally every month in 19 cities around the world because we're trying to talk to elected officials corporate sustainability officers NGO Executives and in lisban in particular most of the

people that come are actually not from web 3 they're concerned about homelessness social inequality environmental degradation and they're curious about a community that is building Cool Tech to solve these problems in a meaningful way and I think doubling down on this really deep sense of belonging that web 3 Fosters has incredible potential and to just continue to invite people from outside this bubble to help us make something meaningful for generations to come okay amazing really cool um so Gabriel um how do you feel like um web 3 has an impact on communities like do you feel like they are getting more access like Farmers directly to stakeholders or what

where do you feel there's something some I feel you already like hinted at something but before answering that can I catch some of what John said because I think it is related uh you said about how we Foster collaboration collaboration means also reaching the end users on both sides uh it is quite of often said that web 3 is for uh collaborators when Web Two was for competitors so it's basically made to collaborate and this composability that we don't have to do everything or we do a very basic everything and then anothers come and complete it better so I think it's very important it's a concept I heard from Joe Brewer it's radical inclusion because we are among

people that thinks the same than us we are very comfortable here but this is quite endogamic the reality is that we are a niche within a eache so we need to spread word of it out of it and to reach I always insist on that the capital assigned for development in the world is way many times over the whole amount of uh resources that are in webtree it's a lot and it's the capital that is waiting there to be landed in the ground because they cannot without intermediaries so this technology enables the possibility to make a dam real on that barrier that has been separating that that part of the world so I think it's very important to keep in mind that collaboration is

key and building communities also and then connecting with the second question of of how to connect with the with the farmers trust everything is about trust e have relays on Circles of trust and theory of gain based on on blockchain so you need to reach them in a manner that they don't feel threatened or uh bet tried again you know because historically there has been a structure history and why this white people well I'm not that white so it helps but how these people is coming in a colonialism we are inviting you to be impact investors and support the activities that these farmers are

already doing and they produce one third of the world's food and 80% of the coffee that's the second commodity after oil it's a huge amount of value that is not recognized for the for the producers so I think it's very important to reach them with honesty and saying we're small business we are not having this huge Capital behind us we are not governments we are not foundations or engos what we are doing is convincing honest and hardworking people like you in the other side of the world to support you to invest in you to give you collateral so others can invest in you and they think like no nobody has told that before so we may try and little by little we start

growing then we need to make it exponential because little by little is too slow for the timing that is clicking down so I think spreading word making this Hy hyper connection this radical inclusivity will also make the users the end users not just the farmers without connectivity but also the end users like any of you and any uh citizen in the world to be connected with with this technology because we need to urgently spread word about its potential to solve real world problems okay amazing um just because you were talking about that like how do you think we can scale that because when you

say like let's do it so fast how is that scalable like this community work on the ground well I would like to say that's like a recipe that I can improvise here for every one of you but it's not there's been a lot of work behind our toomics for example but the key in our case for scaling it's figuring out what's the factor of extrapolation in our case we've been working very hard like turning Pebbles how they in Spanish they say breaking Stones until we we made it no so for five years we've been hard working with retail users and finally we make a connection with hayfer International a huge NGO focus on reducing poverty and they are working

with thousands of farmers so they are this filter of trust and we will on board massively this this farmers community so once haer is inside we break a we set a precedent so then some other very traditional institutions will come over also so I think every project needs to find first a way to prove they they are working they are needed to give results and then to scale those results based again upon collaboration with the right Partners we are also partnering with tuken protocol for doing with a lot of pro I I won't start saying names because I'm sure I'm going to left out some but I think this is a a very collaborative uh space and has to be like that yeah I agree I think it's very

beautiful to see how how the protocols and projects work together and as John said like um I think that's kind of also one of the success of stories of like tuen that they really focused on the tokenization and CLA da did the whole all liquidity and like the whole um other part that was very important um so Mark um from like the perspective because now we heard the perspective from communities how like this collaboration changed or like what kind of impact it had but like from the the perspective of big institution how just having access like like direct access to the local communities or like kind of like taking

out middle and um has an impact or like how does that changed yeah totally great great question I like thinking about it from the community local level and from the macro level we as we've talked about before and from these big institutions um I mentioned earlier right our core network is the pcoin network it's the world's largest decentralized data storage Network um it's launched in like October September October of 2020 um and since then it has grown to about 21. five exabytes of uh quality adjusted storage capacity like 13 xeyes of raw bite storage capacity to put that in a perspective that's like

85,000 copies of all of Wikipedia or like 10% of Amazon web service it is a massive massive globally distributed storage Network made up of more than 4,000 independent what we call Storage providers or nodes in the network that are contributing um storage space to the network and storing uh data on behalf of clients we have uh data sets from NASA from Noah from CERN from um un systems for ma major academic institutions the black hole images from UC Berkeley are on filecoin which is one of my favorite data sets um and also we have piloted some projects with large municipalities around the world um one

that comes to mind is New York City's public data sets are all on filecoin and what that enables by content addressing that data putting it on an open data platform and and you know crucially once again having it content addressed it allows for people to create --ad audit Trails of State changes made to that data over time so as more of this public data from New York City or any other city in the world comes onto the network and you know there's newer versions of it and since it's all content addressed you can see how that data is changing over time which helps policy makers and informed citizens to make more um informed decisions about the state of

these systems within their local right so for instance with New York City we've worked with local policy makers to help them craft new policy objectives based on those State changes made to data and that's where I see so much promise and working from the data layer and using these innovative techn techologies that web 3 enables for us to you know Foster some of these regenerative practices and create a uh new forms of economic systems that allow for us to really replenish and renew uh our forms of economic activity okay so like the connection is data for you between everybody I mean data is the life blood plain and simple um yeah and just

sharing this data and all everybody having access to it I I agree um so so the next question and um uh would be about like accessibility and onboarding I think um we're not going to talk about UI and your ex because we all know that needs Improvement and it will get Improvement so it's more about the refi space the refi space is one of the most diverse spaces in web 3 we we assume or we think or we know um but I think we all know it still has huge issues and um I think so my first question would go straight to you um gabri like where do you see the biggest issues in in

creating a decentralized regenerative um economy when we don't have all of the actors at the table and how are we going to change that like I by by creating examples that are easy to understand as as I was saying the the protocol before us that we're talking here EXA guys it's amazing what they are doing but it's quite complex to communicate it's very relevant so all the projects we are doing are very very relevant I think there are game changers the refi space is especially disruptive because the problems we' had for many decades even centuries won't be solved with the same methodologies you know this sentence you

want something different don't do the same because you will get the same results okay so I think in that sense the the projects are very disruptive but because of that are difficult to explain because people want a parallel what oh what are you doing it's like it's like nothing else similar so I think the narrative needs to be improved quite often we are very in love with the technology and we start talking like I don't know aliens so we need to filter nobody talks about internet when you're talking about e-commerce or about uh WhatsApp yeah chat jpd that that's a very good example uh AI it's getting broader adopted than blockchain because it uses

a human language you can interact with a powerful machine but you don't know because language is natural to you so you just prompt the proper thing and you get amazing results that's very easy to interact and so as you say we won't talk about ux because that's evidently the main problem but if you you create incentives to overcome that difficulty you will do it so by providing purpose to what you're doing you will make people engage I mean with us you need to download metamask in your computer five years ago you know that's love people also made a master just to put 2020 and another example I would put when my daughter was uh learning to play

these axi Infinity little things she didn't want to hear anything about wallets and that but the moment she want to play she forgot about all the difficulties to go through so we need to set a very attractive result goal for the entities the institutions anyone to overcome the difficulty of the the technological barrier to come to a result and we have to evolve or narrative or language to explain what we do now that is easier to to tell something and say it's with web tree and you don't have to explain web tree as five years ago I I agree that's great and but I still want to go into something we talked about yesterday that

you say like most of the farmers you work with they don't have a phone they don't have access to Internet and still you manage to like make them part of the process and distribute funds and maybe you can just tell us like how are you doing this like probably also with the incentives so kind of you explain this but maybe you can get a bit deeper into that yes the first two years we went to leave to Mexico where most of our operations are we are already in in six countries in Latin America so we start working with small groups of farmers and we asked them to name one representative who would come over to the city three hours drive and more walking and we would give them our computers to access

their Wallet not scalable but we learn a lot so when we grow and we have 300 families we organize a cooperative and then this legal entity has one legal representative who had access to a bank account and who has access to the wallet from or smart contract so he gets she gets the the funds converts them to the local currency and distribut it and when they pay back it's the same way on the on the other side and on the other way that's the the strongest part of her protocol this crowd collateral they are very good payers but people doesn't know so we have to provide Comfort to them and we created what is known as

uh uh Blended Finance collab so a lot of people put the collateral that's our token to provide Comfort to the lenders because default is less than 1% the people doesn't know that Global default is less than 3% they put together small holder Farmers with micro Finance microf Finance Finance quite often is for consumption so default is very high but people doesn't know they are good payers so we provide disconfort and also at the beginning we asked them The Cooperative to buy tokens and state them and say forget about it just give me 20% of the collateral and we do this all for you it's a learning process because we are very enthusiastic about being

decentralized and but at the beginning you have to set the lines in order to make the road easier for everyone so so interesting to hear I like it's great everybody can learn so much from ethic that's it's so great um so John like at the refi um D meetups you already said like most most people are not even from the ecosystem and I think like you're making a really great um case and like addressing like refi is actually something that is very interesting to people from outside of web 3 and like how are you like advertising your events or how are you getting people there and like where do you feel like that people are still missing maybe that that you

would like to see see where you don't know how to get them to to your meetups yeah I think so you know we have a strategy of just meeting regularly same time every month third Thursday we hang out we choose different Community locations different parts of the city to attract different demographics you know nonprofit impact Hub startup Hub um you know close to local government and who you bring on stage often has a big impact on who shows up they often bring their community and I think one of the cool things we experimented with during the last gitcoin round was this idea like a coordination game where we had many cities at the same time hosting gitcoin activation stations to get people set up for the first time with a crypto wallet and try and mint a gitcoin passport which sounded great in theory

but actually like the way the mechanism designed is like unless you're crypto native you can't really get a high enough score to get match funding which sucks but the cool thing is actually watching Total new people engage with this technology and seeing how genuinely confusing it is and how hard it is and you might be you know discouraged by this but actually this is where Community comes in because if you can help people through hard experiences and make them feel like they've done something difficult and achieved some sort of meaningful outcome at the end and they've made a relationship with somebody else alongside they feel a part of a community so I think this can actually be a real superpower of web 3 of saying hey hey if you're not techsavvy it's totally cool just show up Min to wallet maybe you can give five

bucks from a partner and then you can engage with our protocol and that's why I love what ethic Hub is done around Gathering farmers and representatives from these communities to you know a table share food and watch them engage with this Tech and build a human relationship through the technical hurdles that still exist and I think for us there's you know there's so many different people that we're not able to reach and so we're going to actually just go out into the City and reach them doing little popup hubs and just feeding people in the streets saying hey like there's so much abundance in this space economic prosperity like we've got more than enough to go around and I think the idea of giving freely of time of food of drinks of energy of attention to people

who have genuine need and then helping them find their way into the ecosystem connecting with whatever resonates with their values is a really powerful path and it looks very different in Lisbon than it does in midin or than it does in sou Paulo and we're just trying to embrace that diversity all around the world and share and propagate those learnings of what's working to onboard the next generation of talent and capital into this movement amazing you're doing really amazing job thank you um so I have very quick question for you because then we're going to start with questions from the um audience um so just to like tell us can you tell us more about um it's like we talked about

accessibility for communities um I think volunteer carbon Market is like a great example of um we said there's more than carbon markets but like let let's use that as a example for something huge with a lot of different stakeholders and where do you see like curent um as accessibility issues that we have um can you just sum up in one minute absolutely um I already did my Riff on the vcm so I won't say much more um other than the fact that uh whether it's the traditional vcm or any new type of tokenized credit that we create there is still a massive Mass massive um opportunity and misunderstanding about

the standards that are applied to these various environmental assets and not just within the vcm even in the renewable energy markets with renewable energy credits or re um and obviously within the carbon Market space um the uh ambiguity and some of the opacity associated with the standards and the methodologies that people are trying to adhere to to create these credit credits causes a lot of confusion so I think there's a lot of work to be done there in the traditional markets as well as in the web 3 carbon markets if you will yeah I agree uh just to for everybody who doesn't know about standards in the car market um there's a big standards like ver and gold standard and it's very

hard to access them as a small project and then a lot of smaller projects see web 3 as like a way to tokenize their carbon credits but then these credits are not as valuable as they don't like reach these uh methodologies or standards um but now we're going to move on to the audience questions and I'm going to start with the first one um AR inclusivity and refi also bandaids until a fundamental political shift in governance and incentives happens um who wants to take I think I'll take on that so to some yes and I think this

is where you know I spent three and a half years building software for city and state governments in the US and there is an incredible lever at a political lever to at a political level to enact change a specific example was a friend of mine had seven other volunteers $200,000 of donations and in two years they got the New York City government to ban natural gas and all new buildings from 2025 and onwards it's a 20 Megaton per year reduction in emissions because they replaced it by law with renewable Alternatives if you look at that from a credit issuance standpoint those are some incredibly impactful and valuable credits so yes these political levers are significantly important to initiate but

the reality is most politicians don't see a viable economic model to shift Capital to a regenerative principle so these experiments are essential to pave the way and say look this is working on the ground with coffee farmers in Mexico look this is working working on the ground with a regenerative Farm in alento outside of Lisbon come visit come taste and see it's not only profitable but it's economic it's social it's ecological and therefore you can feel confident as an elected official pushing towards this agenda because you know it's going to work so I think they go hand in hand part in parcel innovation has to lead the way but then we have to invite those government officials knowing what their constituent base needs to make the switch because it's

easy for them at that point okay um do you also want to answer because otherwise I would just like add the next question and then you can answer both because like the next fitting question would be like how to invol how to involve government the government without turning it into a centralized model maybe you can yeah yeah very very similar I guess you could say the only thing I was going to say and and maybe um add on to what John was saying is that government policies are always lagging and they need those bottomup solutions to inform them of what an appropriate top down policy measure is and many times even after they create that top- down policy

measure they still need some bottomup solutions to help them enforce and monitor those top- down Solutions so there is this great symbiosis between the top- down policy or governance systems and the bottom up innovative solutions and that's where there's uh an amazing opportunity to bring those two together