Regenerating the World with Ecological Assets in Decentralized Finance

Transcript

I think now we're ready for our first presentation so I would like to welcome to the stage jacket moment and we're going to be hearing about regenerating the world with ecological Assets in decentralized finance um welcome come come here um do you want to sit at the table or you want to stand here um so we'll find out what stands behind the promise of tokenized natural assets but also dig deeper deeper in the concept of D5 for the worldwide distributed regenerative movement thank you

can y'all hear me okay cool um I don't know about the presentation it's not showing up but uh I can still give this thing regardless um all right I'm gonna have to oh there we go all right great thanks for bearing with me I only have 20 minutes I live here it's great to see all of you here I've always wanted to have one of these just at my doorstep and it's happening so I'm super excited um who am I real quick um I'm uh I just co-founded Cerulean Ventures which is investing in regenerative finance and so in a solar Punk future

that's a big theme What's Happening Here uh the refi movement has kind of been memed into existence in recent years uh super excited to be a part of it I want to tell you all about what I see for this thing right how do we make it real I'm also a steward of prime down and knows this Guild so if you're into Dallas come talk to me after always happy to chat um so the overview of today is going to be we're going to look at it sucks to go after people who are so happy and cheery I'm going to start by getting really real for a second about what the actual problem is what we're trying to do about this thing then I'll kind of look at tokenization and coordination all these words these Concepts we throw around I want to make them real and concrete for

us I'm going to point to some facts in the world about how they're being used and how they can be used for good and then uh right we'll end there and we'll hopefully keep this in 15 minutes here we go all right so we're in a climate crisis it's pretty bad carbon is a major part of it you're going to hear other folks here like toucan protocol folks like that if you're going to be talking about tokenizing carbon making it fungible why that's a good idea all that it's actually very critical right and we must not only mitigate and make markets around carbon we need to actually remove it we need to create incentives to remove it this Century or we're really deep in the right so um there's also much more to it than just carbon right there's watersheds there's top soils there's oceans air

quality all of this is happening at the same time right so Watershed health is critical for food supply in the United States this Century basically 50 of them are going to disappear topsoil is rapidly eroding uh 16 of the world's topsoil only has 100 harvests Left Right ocean health is rapidly degrading the oceans trap 80 of carbon on Earth as the oceans heat up they will trap less so it's kind of like an interlinked complex system where you try to intervene here and something else happens there it's very very difficult to even get a hold of air quality is already responsible for 7 million deaths annually according to the who that's only again only going to get worse if we continue growth on a fossil

fuel-based economy and everyone who's kind of in charge has failed to act right we're on a year last year was cop 26 this year will be 27. uh we are pretty much currently as you can see on this chart here on target for 3.3 degree warming in this Century that's uh a not habitable planet in 150 years so this all sounds really Grim why has it been so difficult to act we're at a crypto conference usually we're going to hit on something like incentives coming out of this last bull market incentives for a lot of us means dilutive uh incentives money right I'm probably gonna tell you I think that with the value of natural Capital assets money is probably not the problem if you talk to most economists they're looking at when

they try to look at what is the input of the ecosystem to economies it's about 16 to 54 trillion dollars right but that's not stuff that we can make legible yet right it's really it's kind of hard to get a cap hard to get a hold of like what does that mean from where to whom um this is where you kind of get on you know that's a huge number great let's get people to work on it it's hard to measure right like you can't actually say a tree if I cut it down and sell it for palm oil very obvious what it's worth but it also traps carbon it creates oxygen it prevents erosion it creates biodiversity what is the price of that how can we say don't cut down your tree do this instead all right it's actually also hard to price right

because backing into that if I was going to tell that person who might have you know a might have a palm oil Plantation in Indonesia if I tell them hey don't do that thing you're about to do with your mangroves and your palm trees he's going to say what should I do instead right and we can't price that today and lastly there's a handful of entities who are charged with also coming back and verifying the impact of these things I'm not trying to pick on these people right they're very small there's Vera is one of the biggest ones they have about 50 employees right like we're relying on these people to say some folks planted trees they try to regenerate the Earth did they do that thing they said they were going to do five years ago did it have the impact it did we are kind of you know when we look

at this we're like coordination failures difficulty measuring illiquid assets middlemen this is all the stuff that we like to talk about that blockchains address right so you know luckily even you have to forgive me it's 2022 these graphs don't look that nice anymore on the Left Right but it's still true that liquidity in crypto markets is rapidly ascending and D5 is important in two ways for prices covering liquidity and those things are still there right you go to unisoft today that stuff is still happening right it's very healthy still and on the other side of this demand for voluntary carbon credits which we're going to focus on a bit is rapidly ascending that's going to be a 300 billion dollar market by the end of this decade right it was a billion dollars last year so the demand is huge it's just a supply that we have to figure out

and we and for that we need scale right so you remember this ecosystem Services thing in order for us to even get close to something like that 4.7 trillion dollar number we can't rely on those four little governing bodies to do this right if you think about what we need to do by 2050 essentially the ipcc and everyone says that we need to uh take 10 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere by 2050 to avoid the worst climate scenarios that would require reforesting an area 35 times the size of the UK right so if you're dealing with centralized uh entities that's going to be a pretty tall ask and then if you think about this from the other end with that huge number of

16 to 54 trillion and you look at the market cap of refi projects we're just getting started all right you look at that unit swap yesterday was under 4 billion look at these guys over here toucan protocol Sello who's trying to make a stable coin back a natural Capital asset backed stable coin a region Network we're just getting started the supply of these Eco credits is just coming online to make a more like solar Punk regenerative future right so what we do we need to do we need scale and we need to rapidly tokenize some of these things so we can get to what are they actually worth how can we incentivize people to take better actions right for all of us so why tokenization well I mean I feel like in this audience I'm repeating some of these arguments but transparent uniqueness rides along with that instant

access to global markets price discovering liquidity which is really really important to actually be able to build products on top of right like if I go back to that setting for this fellow in Indonesia maybe he needs carbon Futures maybe we need a way to pay him to take actions now because he already did something in the past but he might be able to do something in the future with a loan and there's no way for us to collateralize his land right and do it on his term so it's not extractive right um and lastly with tokenization you're going to unlock this some of this already exists right third-party verification of impact being able to say I have GIS data I have an oracle I can look at a forest and say is that Forest still there if it's still there I can pay this person because they clearly

kept it going right and lastly with tokenization sometimes you get decentralization and if I have to remind you if we can only achieve this with decentralization there isn't going to be like another you know amazing cross National nation state organization that's going to really take this seriously because in a lot of ways the nation-state depends on the fossil fuel economy so it's not that they're the bad guys they're just responding to the incentives in front of them and we have to create new ones so real world on-chain assets price Discovery and liquidity Global local scale what are we trying to do well you're going to hear this a lot it's a theme at Dallas it's a theme in all the Dow conferences we're going to coordinate right what does that look like well this is a I have eight minutes

left so I'm going to Breeze through this part all right basically we've already covered some of the things that we really need sovereignty interoperability national capital assets we also need a way to build new institutions right and we have these programmable institutions we've been talking about them for years now uh we need to now actually look to the past and to our own experiences from this last bear Market into this bear Market we're entering and say what can we learn for more adaptive governance because the governance from multinationals from nation states is totally broken it's in a spot where it can't really address these coordination problems so a regenerative economy for me means that we have sovereignty interoperability and composability of ecologies and really what that means is a lot of folks are

building on polygon a lot of really exciting things are happening on starknet a lot of interesting things are happening in Cosmos you need to if you want to actually do good you have to step back and say what complexity am I trying to make a legible that's currently illegible what are the tools on hand and how do I do it so sovereignty in particular there's some really interesting developments happening on polygon with polygon supernets Cosmos has that baked in from day one it really lets you think do I need to ride along other dap infrastructure on day one do I need to actually think about what is the transaction volume and interaction of the part of the environment I'm trying to regenerate there's a lot of things that you have to think through uh thoughtfully right and lastly as I mentioned institutional Innovation we have to have anti-capture and incentive

design built into our programmable institutions and what does that look like then when we have those what are the pillars we need here it's pretty simple we need a way to monitor stuff we need a way to validate and verify that something happened to an ecology ecological State verification right if I went to you know I'm standing on real grass apparently right if I actually wanted to do something else with this grass I've got to wait and I've got to have a way to know what was it like before I took an action what was what happened afterwards so that I can produce an ecological asset based on that change right um and then lastly a governing sanity or Institution luckily this is already happening so in some ways toucan toucan is blazing the trail here as well as other folks

like Regent Network I wanted to kind of call attention the fact that this has already happened so region Network and the nature carbon ton which is what toucan has developed that's being uh there's a pool put together that's going to be launched soon or it already has been launched on uh Cosmos that's going to let any Cosmos chain come in and say I would like to with interchange accounts offset my entire carbon my entire carbon production since the beginning of time with NCT so what happens when you buy an NCT it's like honestly it's like magic right you go to any decks in the future or any of the ones that are being developed and polygon what have you you buy one of these credits on the other side of the world there has been someone who has looked at attractive land looked at the

methodology for regeneration they looked at how much carbon it would be sequestered by the soil or the tree or what have you and has issued a credit saying this thing exists that liquidity is now already on Toucan in other places when you buy that say you wanted to buy it from you know flying here and offset your carbon you've literally paid someone to take a better action on the other side of the earth and it's a bit better than what came before it because of it being uh because blockchains can address the double spend problem and stuff like that so this is already happening there's going to be a regen NCT pool on osmosis soon and there will be incentivized pools to actually get people to interact with these and hold them retire them right that's really important because what does it mean it means we've actually proven out that you

can establish a bottom-up market for regen for ecological regeneration right this is not some like Pie in the Sky thing that doesn't exist it's already happening and the protocols themselves can sit here and say I don't want to design the Ponzi nomics that just came out of the last uh you know bull market to be clear most things are Ponzi so I'm not necessarily saying Ponzi Donuts are bad we just need to make sure that we're doing this thoughtfully right but we've come out of this and we have two brewpoints already right so we need your help right if you're here in your building and you're interested in this a lot of stuff doesn't exist today we need decentralized monitoring reporting and verification Technologies we need new oracles Beyond carbon right we're very carbon-centric right now there are other things happening in colleges that are

very important natural Capital asset Futures to get people involved saying what are other ways that I could actually do these things and get paid for them now so I can take actions of the future all these things don't exist yet some are being actively worked on if you'd like to know more about them you should come talk to me um and also we're building a network that can help you do this right so Florida Ventures uh great great co-investors they're building a lot of stuff in financial inclusion and regenerative Finance we've got regen network uh primed out Nosa skilled for for to really help people build new patterns of program institutions all the tools are there right so we're you don't have to do this alone so some quick conclusions we're in a climate emergency we've learned a lot from defy I think in the

last few years really important stuff around price Discovery and liquidity which is going to be very important for natural Capital assets ecological State Innovations are in are currently being tested science by scientific methodologies all all across various blockchains it's really exciting work and with this we might be able to Spur a movement from DJ into region right so that's kind of the whole point and that's it I have two minutes it's probably enough time for one question if anyone has a question and I can't see you so you have to raise your heart your hand or something all right no questions

oh one question cool I'm curious like when it comes to like regen Network and you're working the refi assets like does it go beyond carbon like in terms of tracking temperature warming yes absolutely I'm glad you asked that question I didn't touch on it here there are Eco credit classes being developed on regen Ledger and across on various other ethereum based chains as well but specifically with regen there's a biodiversity credit that's already verified through two non-web free non-blockchain governing organizations one for Jaguars and there's another one I don't remember that one that's being developed but essentially if you own attractive land or you're a state and you want to get

paid for preserving it you can basically say there's a methodology developed for Jaguar activity in a particular area if you actually can verify that activity going forward in the future you get you get the acre credit unlocked and you collect that payment so that's actually going to be on region very soon it's biodiversity Eco credit great question oh absolutely for and not just non-human diversity all everything right like making non-humans absolutely we should talk after this I could talk about this forever all right well if there are no other questions that's me find me on telegram Twitter or shoot me an email thank you for your time [Applause]