Celo and Regenerative Finance

[sep]

Hi All!

I posted this note as part of the discussion around CGP30 (adding voluntary carbon credits to the reserve), and @Slobodan suggested that I elevate it to a new topic, so as to frame a broader discussion on the potentiality for Celo to foster an ecologically regenerative financial system. This post defines the idea of natural capital backed currencies, and why I see natural capital backed currencies as so important for our shared future.

The narrow problem

Much of the current discourse around the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies centers around the carbon footprint of bitcoin. From this narrow perspective, Celo addresses the carbon issue in three ways:

First, the Celo consensus protocol uses an energy efficient proof-of-stake mechanism.

Second, the protocol offsets the carbon emissions associated with consensus at the protocol level.

Third, there exist tokenized carbon credits on Celo, that then enable composable ecological assets (for example, eBTC, that wraps cBTC with cMCO2 to create carbon-neutral BTC).

These three mechanisms address the carbon footprint considerations. But this narrow analysis misses the larger, more important point.

The bigger problem

The broader point is that the traditional financial-economic solution is responsible, in large part, for our current ecological crisis. In our economic system, economic health is defined in terms of production and consumption, dismissing the costs of pollution and natural resource consumption as externalities, depleting our finite natural resources as a consequence, with disastrous effect.

In this context, the real questions to ask are not the narrow ones around the carbon footprint of Bitcoin. Our current economic system running on a carbon-neutral bitcoin would still ravage the environment.

The real questions to ask are the deeper ones: how can we devise a money system that internalizes the costs of natural capital destruction (and internalizes the benefits of natural capital preservation and restoration)? How can we devise a money system wherein economic growth leads naturally to ecological regeneration? How can we devise cryptocurrencies such that their widespread adoption would reverse our current ecological crisis?

Natural Capital Backed Currencies

The original idea for natural capital backed currencies comes from Charles Eisenstein in his beautiful book Sacred Economics . Here, he observes that whatever backs money, people tend to make more of. When gold backed money, there was an intense incentive to mine gold, because it was, effectively, printing money. In older cultures where cattle backed money, there was a similar overproduction of cattle.

So why not, he proposed, back money with things that we want to see more of – pristine forests, clean rivers, etc.

This is a powerful idea. If, as a society, we were to denominate our economic activity in natural capital backed currencies, any economic growth – any increase in money in circulation, would lead to a growth in preserved natural resources.

Implementation

While the idea is a powerful one, its implementation in the context of fiat currencies (Charles wrote Sacred Economics before crypto) would be extremely difficult, involving interlocking agreements between local governments, regional governments, national governments, and international treaties.

But Celo Dollars can enable natural capital backed currencies in a different way.

The Celo Reserve

The stability protocol for Celo Dollars (cUSD) could be understood roughly as follows. If the price of cUSD on the open market is greater than $1, it suggests that the demand is greater than the supply, and the protocol increases supply to meet demand by printing cUSD, selling it on the open market for $1 in CELO, and depositing that CELO in a decentralized reserve. If, on the other hand, the price of cUSD is less than $1, then it suggests that the supply is greater than the demand, and so the protocol reduces supply to meet demand by buying cUSD on the open market for $1 in CELO, and retiring the cUSD. The reserve assets (and their target allocations) are decided through governance, and the reserve is periodically rebalanced so that the reserve assets meet their target allocations.

Natural Capital in the Reserve

With NFTs, it’s possible to tokenize real assets, including forests, farmland, and watersheds. Moreover, sensors and satellite imagery can be used in conjunction with smart contracts to ascertain (and create incentives for) preservation and reforestation of forests, increasing the carbon sequestration properties of farmland through regenerative agriculture, and remediation of pollutants in watersheds.

As natural capital tokens come into existence, a community is empowered, through governance, to choose to allocate a certain target allocation of natural capital tokens to the reserve – for example, the community may choose to allocate 40% of the reserve to forest tokens.

This would have a massive impact. The more Celo Dollars go into circulation, the larger the reserve gets. The larger the reserve gets, the larger that 40% allocation gets. The larger the allocation gets, the more the protocol programmatically preserves forests. There are currently ~$50mm cUSD in circulation. At a 40% forest allocation, the reserve could hold and preserve tens of thousands of acres of forest.

Carbon: the first natural capital tokens

Tokenized carbon credits are the only natural capital tokens that exist today, and it’s an important primitive in the ecosystem of natural capital tokens, for a number of reasons.

First, there is an existing use case (carbon offsets) and a liquid off-chain market for carbon credits.

Second, it lends itself to composable ecological assets – for example, carbon-neutral bitcoin (like eBTC).

Third, it is natural to denominate yields for natural capital tokens in carbon credits (for example, a tokenized forest NFT can be staked to yield carbon tokens commensurate with the carbon credits earned through its preservation).

Forest tokens and regenerative agriculture tokens

Allocating a portion of the reserve to carbon has the effect of the reserve acting as a carbon sink – as the cUSD-denominated economy grows, the reserve buys and holds more carbon credits, effectively sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere in proportion to economic growth.

While this is powerful, I don’t see carbon credits in the reserve as the long-term solution, because there are two asset classes (that don’t exist yet) that are even more powerful – forest tokens and regenerative agriculture tokens. From a mission perspective, holding these tokens in the reserve has beneficial effects beyond just carbon sequestration – for biodiversity and soil health, as examples. From a practical perspective, these tokens can generate a stream of carbon credits over the lifetime of the token, bolstering the reserve and increasing the stability properties of cUSD.

Design considerations for forest tokens and regenerative agriculture tokens

There are several important considerations in the design of a natural capital token ecosystem, and I would love to see these develop on Celo.

Tokens. These tokens will naturally be NFTs – they represent a specific parcel of a specific forest or farm. From a regulatory point of view, they would likely be seen as commodity tokens.

Staking Services. They should be able to be “staked.” Staking a natural capital token with a project administrator would allow the project administrator to add value to the land (protecting the forest, switching the farming technique to regenerative ag, etc) to generate ecological service credits (like carbon credits) that can be split between the staker and the project manager. In this context, staking would effectively be the equivalent of renting land to somebody who could use it to enhance the biodiversity, soil health, or carbon sequestration properties of the land.

Exchanges. There would need to eventually be an exchange for such assets. Because they are NFTs, they are less natural fits for DEXes like Ubeswap. But because of the specific nature of these assets, they are less natural fits for traditional NFT galleries, that are more focused on art and music.

Reserve. The reserve would likely need to start thinking of itself as a capital stack. NFTs are less liquid than fungible tokens, and it would not make sense for the reserve to sell them at every dip in cUSD circulation. Rather, the liquid tokens in the reserve should be the first out in dips in cUSD circulation, and natural capital tokens should be at the bottom of the capital stack.

Oracles. Over time, protocols that measure and report the ecological value of tokenized natural capital (such as number of trees, water retention properties of the soil, biodiversity, etc) using sensors and satellite imagery, will be useful for smart contracts that trigger on enhancing the ecological value of the land.

Coda

Assuming we are able to get to a meaningful portion of the reserve to forest tokens (say, 40%) in the few year time frame, the reserve would, at current cUSD in circulation, preserve tens of thousands of acres of forest. Assuming cUSD adoption grows to the level of USDC’s current adoption, the reserve would preserve (or reforest) tens of millions of acres of forest. In the long term, this has the potential to have a much larger and systemic impact, aligning economic growth with ecological regeneration. This is extremely powerful, and if we are to truly live into our value of connectedness, every bit as important as financial inclusion.

[papa_raw]

@sep

Design considerations for forest tokens and regenerative agriculture tokens

I want to jam on this part a bit: from a mechanistic perspective, we can push quite hard on the design side.

Tokens. These tokens will naturally be NFTs – they represent a specific parcel of a specific forest or farm. From a regulatory point of view, they would likely be seen as commodity tokens.

While natural capital currencies/tokens (NatCaps) may be NFTs in their least fungible state, we can imagine a number of state transitions for NatCaps — the most straightforward is sharding (the “making-fungible” of an NFT), but the reverse movement (the “making-nonfungible”) of an ERC20 is also of particular interest (e.g. Spectre). While this has traditionally been approached with an oracle-referenced buyout mechanism at some multiplier of market cap, I believe we can introduce more exotic conditions for the making-nonfungible of various NatCaps from sharded states. One example would be: some sort of price ceiling is hit, and growth of the original NFTs market is curtailed in favor of building up a new capital reserve to purchase more land – which is either added to the original NFT or designated as a new NFT and placed in a composable financial artifact with the first (e.g. ERC-998 or an N-dimensional LP token). This isn’t in principle different than what Terra0 proposed nearly five years ago – it just uses more sophisticated primitives to seamlessly automate NatCap area growth and liquidity formation.

But, moving back to the idea of state transitions for NatCaps: this seems to me to be biomimetic in nature, in that we’re trying to create some sort of homeostatic rhythm to market formation, expansion, and pause in relation to real-world states. We should scratch this itch and look to expand the idea of biomimetic markets – there seems to be conceptual room to re-imagine interspecies and ecological relations in terms of NatCap market-representations. Some (conceptually) related Lab work.

Staking Services. They should be able to be “staked.” Staking a natural capital token with a project administrator would allow the project administrator to add value to the land (protecting the forest, switching the farming technique to regenerative ag, etc) to generate ecological service credits (like carbon credits) [emph added] that can be split between the staker and the project manager.

I added the emphasis here as there are some regulatory and market arbitrage opportunities here that I think are worth probing – one example is blue carbon, which has struggled to gain legitimacy due to measurement issues. I think: as long as the data of a particular measurement is sound enough, the retail demand for these types of novel financial instruments (i.e. ecological service credits) is there. But we have to complement these types of models with money demand and adequate liquidity formation mechanisms (which the Celo reserve sort of does globally through the seigniorage mechanism in relation to its various collaterals).

One thing to keep an eye on is Klima DAO and the concept of protocol owned liquidity (POL) – if we DAOify the governance of various NatCaps, and have sufficient POL, mechanisms like underwriting the ecological state of a given area (as I describe in the Kolektivo whitepaper) become feasible.

Oracles. Over time, protocols that measure and report the ecological value of tokenized natural capital (such as number of trees, water retention properties of the soil, biodiversity, etc) using sensors and satellite imagery, will be useful for smart contracts that trigger on enhancing the ecological value of the land.

This is one of the bigger challenges and the least developed in terms of available tooling. This is a huge research area, basically. I don’t have a lot to add except I firmly believe having effective geospatial smart contract tooling (e.g. Astral Protocol) is necessary to accurately delimit and intervene into NatCap NFT geographies. Dark Matter Labs has a decent article articulating their thinking around this as well.

Assuming we are able to get to a meaningful portion of the reserve to forest tokens (say, 40%) in the few year time frame, the reserve would, at current cUSD in circulation, preserve tens of thousands of acres of forest… [emph added]

And maybe, for the sake of being nitpicky, I would respond here: we need to move past our terrestrial biases to have a successful NatCap program . Phytoplankton, seagrass, and the oceans make up the majority of earth’s surface area and require a lot of thinking and love as well. And frontier geographies that sit between land and sea, such as reefs, provide incredible ecosystem services by mediating storms and sea surges. Curve Labs is working on a specification for tokenizing Posidonia Oceanica in this regard.

[sep]

@papa_raw I love all of these ideas!

[Slobodan]

Great points @sep & @papa_raw - I love this discussion already. Let me add some thoughts from a reserve perspective while I digest the points that have been made so far.

One of the things that came up in the conversation around CGP31 (adding tokenized carbon credits to the reserve) was the question of what criteria should be used in deciding assets for the reserve. This is an important question as we start to explore natural capital tokens for the reserve, and @Brynly, @MarkusBerlin, and I put together some thoughts here to start a conversation.

The Celo reserve has a clear operational objective: to back and stabilize Celo-native currencies. To hold to this objective, the reserve should be decentralized, transparent and growing, and holding a diversified basket of reserve assets.

As such, below are what we think are ideal characteristics for assets being considered for substantive reserve allocation. Note that these are intended to be ideal characteristics; some assets may have some but not all of these. And for small reserve allocations, there may be a different conversation altogether.

This is intended to be a conversation-starter; please feel free to jump in with thoughts/comments/suggestions.

• Quality: The asset should be market-tested, trustworthy and of high quality. The asset’s assessment should include technological, financial, cryptoeconomic, legal, regulatory, and/or environmental aspects, the asset’s growth prospects, as well as its alignment with Celo’s mission. The assessment should take into account the Celo community’s perception of the asset, assessments of certification and verification providers, feedback from experienced industry and market participants, as well as professional expert opinions.

• Efficiency: The reserve should be able to hold and trade the asset as easily and cost-efficiently as possible. An assessment should determine where and under which conditions the asset can be held (security, availability, custodial setup ) and traded (availability of exchanges, trading conditions). The blockchain environment should be considered (e.g. chain reliability, bridge availability, gas fees, etc.), as well as the asset type (fungible vs non-fungible, ERC20 compliant, etc.). We believe there should be a preference for Celo-native assets primarily, as well as assets on chains that are connected to Celo via efficient bridges secondarily, because they can provide for efficient and trustless on-chain reserve rebalancing.

• Transparency: Ownership and value of the asset, including any underlying asset(s) in the case of wrapped assets or asset derivatives, should be publicly verifiable. Assets should be on-chain, or if a distributed ledger is unavailable, tracked in a public and open registry. The asset’s value should be directly or indirectly available from public sources, such as DEXs, CEXs, information providers, registries, aggregators or other market sources. If public market prices are unavailable, the asset should provide for an alternative pricing mechanism that relies on publicly available information.

• Liquidity: The asset should be traded in a liquid market, on which the reserve can trade frictionless with limited market impact. Possible metrics include measures related to total and daily trading volumes, percentage floating, percentage held by reserve, order book depth (CEXs), slippage (DEXs), and spreads.

• Stability: The asset should add to the reserve’s stability. This can be achieved by introducing low-volatility assets or by adding assets that contribute to the reserve’s diversification. Metrics can include historical and expected volatility measures, estimates for the correlation with existing reserve assets, estimates on the asset’s tail risks (e.g. on the likelihood and the conditions under which the asset would come under severe distress) and other idiosyncratic risk components (e.g. whether the asset behaves differently if markets trend upward versus when markets trend downward), as well as qualitative and/or technological information on the asset’s stability and diversification aspects.

Many assets are unlikely to satisfy all criteria simultaneously. For example, real estate could add valuable diversification but could decrease overall liquidity. By applying the criteria to a particular asset, the community can weigh and discuss all these criteria and assess the expected effects on the reserve as a whole. The reserve may be “short” on one criterion and “long” on another, so adding an asset that does not tick all the boxes could still be beneficial for the reserve overall. And finally, for small allocations, we can imagine other criteria coming into play – for example, helping to develop an asset class that will be important for stability in the long term.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Brynly, Markus, Slobodan

[papa_raw]

I would add to here that asset governance is also of interest: assets with centralized governance are far more risky than assets with a robust decentralized governance process. Evaluating the trust assumptions around each asset is a useful exercise to understanding whether or not it’s going to stick around in the long-term. Security/technical reqs are also extremely important – can probably reference some third-party scorer like Prime Rating or DeFi Safety here.

Re: Liquidity – definitionly need something like MakerDAO’s risk dashboard as well as their collateral on-boarding process (honestly just forking this for the purpose of Celo’s reserve would go 80-90% of the way towards a better process…). Realistically an interface spec needs to be created for the former and a methodology for the latter.

[Brynly]

Natural capital tokens are a new (and exciting!) type of crypto asset, and we are encouraged and excited about the many different possibilities available, from tokenizing high quality carbon offset credits to new and exciting approaches to tokenizing natural resources and assets, while also working to meet the asset criteria of the Celo Reserve. In addition to the work of Moss with mCo2, I thought I’d share some examples that we’ve either been working on, or that we’ve seen in the community. This is by no means an exhaustive list - but intended to be a starting place. And a big thank you to Seth Baruch - who has been instrumental in this work and research.

Natural Capital Partners (NCP). We - Markus, Slobodan, Seth Baruch (CEO of Carbonomics, a company focused on greenhouse-gas (GHG) reduction opportunities), Jake (cLabs’ legal) and me have been working with NCP, a leading developer of high quality carbon offset projects with two decades of experience creating projects that not only sequester GHG, but also provide important co-benefits of health and human development. As a first step in tokenization, NCP is constructing a global portfolio of forest conservation in a range of countries, including Brazil, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Indonesia and Panama. These projects all aim to prevent deforestation and have been developed in partnership with local indigenous groups. Just as one example, 90% of Brazil’s Acre state is forested, but current rates of destruction mean by 2030 this could decline to 65%. The NCP work aims to prevent deforestation across more than 100,000 hectares of pristine rainforest in the Amazon basin, protecting some of the world’s most biodiverse habitats. With the support of carbon finance, the projects are also developing conservation-based agricultural practices which avoid destruction of the forest.

Carbon offsets are not the only environmental asset to consider, but in the near term they can meet many of the criteria for the Reserve: offsets can be traded (liquidity) in an efficient manner on a blockchain, with transparency in the form of registration on publicly-available platforms, such as Verra and the Gold Standard. The ability for users to query both the blockchain and the underlying registrations with a certification platform can provide multiple layers of transparency.

Finally, these projects undergo a rigorous certification process that requires an independent verification by an outside auditor to confirm all of the quantification of carbon reductions. That is required of all voluntary carbon market projects because offset buyers demand that validation. These projects – in addition to being certified under the Verified Carbon Standard – are also registered under the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) program, an extra certification standard that demonstrates the projects have additional co-benefits as it relates to biodiversity.

The goal with all of these carbon offset projects is to go a “step beyond” – to support the best possible carbon assets, which creates more demand for exactly this level of environmental improvement.

Loam
Loam creates incentives for farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture. The project helps farmers who are looking to plant cover crops for carbon sequestration, transition to organic farming, and change seeds from GMO to non-GMO to implement truly better climate changing practices that will produce better quality food and help mother earth’s soil health. For context, $80T of farmland exists globally, and we’ve lost 100M acres of farmable soil in the US due to losing carbon richness that used to exist in the soil.

Loam is building on the Celo blockchain, using deep ag technology, and leveraging an extensive network of farmers and ranchers around the globe, Loam is creating a global marketplace, tokenizing incentives for behavior change with Loam tokens that will enable farmland, timber, pastures and all of nature’s assets to offset carbon, while promoting healthy foods, soils, clean water and air with a shared incentive. With a 5% global adoption rate, Loam can sequester over 1 billion tons of carbon per year (nearly 20% of all US emissions). Ahead of its public launch, Loam is looking to grow its early adopter base, both on the supply/farming and demand side.

Regen Network
Regen Network is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain focused on ecological data, assets, and agreements. Regen Ledger provides a decentralized business solution with two core capabilities: the tracking and analyzing of data about Earth’s ecology; and a DeFi solution for sustainability, including the issuance and management of carbon credits that give liquidity and auditability to the ecosystem services market.

Regen Ledger is an independent blockchain in the Cosmos family. Together with the introduction of the Donut hardfork, bridging between the Cosmos ecosystem and the Celo blockchain is now possible. These two events make it easier for ecological assets from Regen to be used as primitives on Celo, as well as for ecologically sound stablecoins built on Celo to be used by the broader Cosmos community. This creates opportunities to develop a cross-chain marketplace and currency system in service to ecological outcomes.

Looking forward to hearing more about other projects!

[Markus]

In addition to these examples above, I’d love to start a conversation about resources available for these kinds of projects. The Celo Foundation grants program and the Polychain Celo Ecosystem fund are natural places to look for funding for projects like this - and you can find information about these programs here:

• Grants: Celo Experience / GrantKit
• Community Fund: Celo: A global crypto community building prosperity for all

We encourage more posts with ideas for further funding. And if you are open to being a technical resource (or natural capital resource) for people working in this area, please also add to this thread.

[nirvaan]

Hello all, glad to be here!

@sep

The real questions to ask are the deeper ones: how can we devise a money system that internalizes the costs of natural capital destruction (and internalizes the benefits of natural capital preservation and restoration)? How can we devise a money system wherein economic growth leads naturally to ecological regeneration? How can we devise cryptocurrencies such that their widespread adoption would reverse our current ecological crisis?

Just want to restate the wonderfully phrased goal here before diving into the details. In an ideal world, all financial systems could support Dr. Raworth’s proposed “Doughnut Economics”, where we strive towards supporting the inner circle and mitigating the outer. Celo as an organization is doing excellent work on both fronts.

We must remember that it’s not just about CO2 sequestration: there is so much room for earth-improving initiatives. In fact, most carbon offsets are measured in tCO2e (ec.europa .eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Carbon_dioxide_equivalent), or “tonne of CO2 equivalent”, which could also be nitrogen, methane, energy watts, chemical volumes, water body purification, etc. This equivalence is calculated based on associated metric Global Warming Potential (GWP), which will be important later for exchanges. All things considered, CO2 is arguably the most crucial and impactful to sequester, and this base unit (1 tonne of carbon) is the backbone of our regenerative economy.

I think the first rule of NatCap in the Reserve should be “No Vintages”: in order to create future-friendly yield-bearing carbon assets, we cannot onboard credits for historically sequestered CO2. I recently tried purchasing Carbon Removal Tons on Nori (P2P marketplace with blockchain integration, easily accessible to retail investors) and ended up with 5 “NRTs” of Iowan carbon sequestered in 2015. This credit has no future appreciation in value, and would trade at a discount on any secondary market. “Vintage Futures”, on the other hand, are valuable institutional products that hedge our overall exposure - there is little doubt companies will need to offset carbon produced this year.

Now onto the topic at hand: a regenerative financial architecture for the Celo reserve.

@sep

While this is powerful, I don’t see carbon credits in the reserve as the long-term solution, because there are two asset classes (that don’t exist yet) that are even more powerful – forest tokens and regenerative agriculture tokens. From a mission perspective, holding these tokens in the reserve has beneficial effects beyond just carbon sequestration – for biodiversity and soil health, as examples. From a practical perspective, these tokens can generate a stream of carbon credits over the lifetime of the token, bolstering the reserve and increasing the stability properties of cUSD.

In a nascent, fragmented carbon offset market dominated by corporate giants bulk-buying allowances with dubious impact (as I outline in this article), I totally agree that generic carbon credits are not the solution, and how could they be? Each offset represents bootstrapped funding for a unique operation such as forest conservation, sustainable agriculture, or carbon capture. @sep listed forest and agriculture tokens, and I think we should add all the primitives that can be mapped to CO2 equivalence through Greenhouse Warming Potential (GWP) or otherwise.

Carbon offsets are priced by estimating the logistical cost of sequestering 1 ton of carbon for several years based on operational requirements, location, environmental risk factors, and there are many other factors to price in.

[Page 15 of report: Standard, Methodology, Attribute framework]

The “Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets” (TSVCM) published a superb report in July that I highly recommend to anyone here, and will be referring to throughout this post. They want to ensure quality and clarity in the carbon market so that defunct 2011 wind farms and already-protected forests don’t slip through; and have produced a useful framework for judging “Core Carbon Principle credit” (CCP) thresholds. They are implementing what amounts to predefined project templates with endorsed verification Standards, accounting Methodologies, and legal Terms of Use. This is particularly important for onboarding indemnified assets and scaling the Celo NatCap reserve.

[Page 11 of report: Standards packaged with Limitation of Liability, Dispute Resolution, etc.]

“Harmonized Terms of Use across Standards enhance clarity for buyers over what conditions they are bound by when trading CCPs with different origins, making credits more fungible”. I would replace fungible with “poolable” on Toucan, a partner of the Climate Collective. As @Slobodan pointed out in about Liquidity, we need a frictionless market in which to trade such assets. A common denominator of CCP certification would help baseline credibility and market price discovery. One could also pool assets into a liquid carbon index, or more exclusive “curated carbon pools” that will help us identify which attributes are seen as key differentiators by the market.

The Taskforce’s predefined Attributes are where CCP credits get a major value boost. Anything tagged with ESG, CCB, SDG, W+ is worth substantially more to corporates, and of course removal is more valuable than avoidance or reduction. Association with Chartered Accountants may inspire more confidence for some, while tech-based solutions may be a publicity priority for other firm.

[Page 17 of report: Attributes including Type, Removal/Reduction Method, Storage method, Co-benefits, Corresponding Adjustments, etc.]

And this is where we get back to NFTs:

@sep

Tokens. These tokens will naturally be NFTs – they represent a specific parcel of a specific forest or farm. From a regulatory point of view, they would likely be seen as commodity tokens.

More than a parcel of farm, this NFT should represent all relevant attributes such as type (removal/avoidance), vintage (>2020 or later), region, those mentioned above from TSVCM, and many more. I think this lends itself to restricted generative NFTs like Loot or NFT World::

[See this collection opensea .io/collection/nft-worlds]

I feel this fictional NFT is a decent mock-up for a real-world carbon-and-equivalents sequestration parcel. As @papa_raw pointed out we need some sort of biomimetic market that follows real world state, and perhaps Chainlink Keepers can maintain Dynamic NFTs (blog.chain.link/create-dynamic-nfts-using-chainlink-oracles/) that update with real world data.

@sep

Oracles. Over time, protocols that measure and report the ecological value of tokenized natural capital (such as number of trees, water retention properties of the soil, biodiversity, etc) using sensors and satellite imagery, will be useful for smart contracts that trigger on enhancing the ecological value of the land.

Now as you all rightly pointed out, real world data is somewhat tricky. dClimate has a lot of data that is used by their partner company Arbol, a parametric insurance provider (which we should definitely look into for the reserve assets). This data is already on-chain and we should be able to integrate between Celo and Chainlink’s overlapping fall hackathons. I also want to highlight a few cutting edge solutions that will eventually help enable a more data-driven and trusteless marketplace:

• Pachama: Lidar, Satellite, AI, machine vision, to measure and model carbon capture in forests
• Yardstick: Scalable soil carbon IoT measurement tool

But for now, these live-carbon updates would presumably be projections or periodic measurements. I like @papa_raw idea of using Spectre or Dodo to fractionalize a NFT, establish a liquidity pool, and engage in “price discovery”. Until a point:

@papa_raw

One example would be: some sort of price ceiling is hit, and growth of the original NFTs market is curtailed in favor of building up a new capital reserve to purchase more land – which is either added to the original NFT or designated as a new NFT and placed in a composable financial artifact with the first (e.g. ERC-998 or an N-dimensional LP token).

I am not sure of the mechanics here, but I feel this could be accomplished with ERC721 (or perhaps ERC1155) like Uniswap v3 NonFungiblePositionManager(docs.uniswap. org/protocol/reference/periphery/NonfungiblePositionManager#positions). I am putting together a better architecture diagram but I think this ties into crowd-funding and “liquidity bootstrapping”.

Though I agree with the concept, I think “staking” is potentially misleading because the DeFi community is accustomed to redeeming their not-so-locked tokens or liquidity at a moments notice. OlympusDAO pioneered the crypto Bonding (olympusdao.medium. com/a-primer-on-oly-bonds-9763f125c124) model which ensures enduring liquidity and reserve assets, we should learn from their journey.

@sep

Staking Services. They should be able to be “staked.” Staking a natural capital token with a project administrator would allow the project administrator to add value to the land (protecting the forest, switching the farming technique to regenerative ag, etc) to generate ecological service credits (like carbon credits) that can be split between the staker and the project manager.

I wonder if we can extend this to something like PoolTogether pools. What if a Pod staked tokens (for say 6 months, long enough to call it a “Bond” in DeFi), and periodically donated its collective interest to a project via its NFT? This may not be enough to bootstrap a project, but could provide a steady source of additional income.

That’s all for now, will come back with some cool diagrams and further thoughts! Hopefully, next time I can post more images and links…

[Terblig]

Hi Nirvaan (and others reading this):

Let me start by saying that I am SUPER enthusiastic that the community wants to think about this. There are a lot of block chains paying lip service to climate and environment, but I haven’t yet seen any that are genuinely approaching it with the level of reflection of leading companies (which is not exactly the highest of bars). In terms of my own background, I have worked in the environmental field for a long time and crypto is an interest/hobby.

I would also say that doughnut economics is a great reference and highlight that climate is one core impact, but block chain and associated e-waste impacts a number of other critical thresholds. I haven’t seen other block chains addressing these other dimensions, so maybe we can be the first.

With regards to the specifics of the reserve and credits, I would first ask the question of what is the theory of change that people have in mind for climate? How are voluntary credits going to help? The United Nations and most of the scientific community has given us two reference points. First, we need to reduce absolute global emissions by about 50% before 2030. Second, we have to start REMOVING existing carbon from the atmosphere at a rate such that we have no further increase in carbon concentrations after 2050. This is what they mean by “sequestration.” Today, the only proven means of sequestration lies in nature (i.e., forests usually and sometimes oceans and soil). We have some pilot technologies that also do the job, but none that can economically be deployed at scale.

So before getting into details of accounting, I ask the question of what we hope that voluntary credits will achieve? The carbon credit markets were always designed with the idea of allowing people who couldn’t slow their own emissions to pay others to accelerate that own mitigation efforts. As such, voluntary credits don’t necessarily remove carbon (i.e., sequester) and they don’t even guarantee that absolute emissions will decrease. They are just an instrument to help move capital from Party A to Party B so that climate impacts will be a little less bad.

If Celo wants to really reverse climate trends, then we need to look beyond credits to find incentives and tools to move the entire network of nodes to clean energy. This could be done by either educating our node operators or, in some jurisdictions, by purchasing renewable energy credits from the grid. This approach pays utilities to shift to clean energy sources and actually CAN lead to absolute reductions. We could do this through a combination of the Celo Foundation and Smart Contracts.

In terms of voluntary credits and the reserve, I would say that we have to consider a couple things. First, voluntary carbon credits were NEVER intended to be long-lived financial instruments. They were supposed to incentivize short-term payments and then lead to retiring the credits. If Celo wants to achieve environmental contributions, then it should be buying credits and retiring them rather than treating them as an asset with an enduring value.

Second, some credits are tied to sequestration projects, but credits are only a snapshot in time. A project may generate lots of credits this year and very few next year, especially if they are land-based sequestration credits which are often directly linked to land stewardship practices of people with access to the land. Lots of big NGOs have experience with this challenge. If we want to be supporting sequestration, then we should be looking for means to support long-term land stewardship projects that have strong local community involvement and a defensible legal foundation. We should be looking at something like the Conservation Notes issued by the Nature Conservancy rather than carbon credits.

As a final thought, carbon credits were never intended to be a financial asset in a way that is similar to bonds, tokenized properties that generate cash flows, etc. The closest analogy might be an NFT image of sports moment or a contract. Carbon credits were meant to be a memorial of a moment in time that would have value during the fiscal period of a given financial year or single year in a mandatory emissions trading scheme (e.g., EU), but not beyond that point in time. Therefore, to my view, they are not the best choice for a financial reserve instrument nor would they achieve the environmental objective if they were treated as a permanent credit that multiple people could claim over the years. This would mean that I save 1 ton of carbon and then sell the credit to person A who sells to person B who sells to person C who holds because it has value to sell to Person D. But what does this mean from an environmental perspective? It means that we pay 4 times to remove one of carbon and Persons B, C, and D have no additional contribution to solving climate change even though they are spending money on it.

In closing, I do think that there are financial instruments and strategies that can have a long-term climate and environmental benefit that Celo could support through community policies and carbon contracts. But they require more attention and active management than we have in place right now. I would love to see the community approach these and would be happy to work with others on these ideas.

But I think that the current proposals might not achieve our intended aims.

[Dan]

How do i back this project (protecting natural assets through crypto investing ) do I purchase CGLD or will there be a separate coin/token/NFT specifically for this idea. And if it is a separate Coin/NFT when will they be available and where can i buy them. Who came up with the idea and when as it is great and well done to the Celo.org. The planet thanks you.

[Terblig]

I am a big supporter of Celo Gold, so please don’t get me wrong on that point. However, if you want to support conservation of landscapes, then the best route is to directly support an organization (like a major NGO) that has a project, relationships, and rights to steward land. I don’t think that purchasing Celo gold will be a direct contribution. If anything can be achieved directly through a block chain, then it would have to be a chain with a specialized function. The direct route that could be achieved with Celo Gold would be for the community to vote to direct a portion of fees generated from transactions for the foundation to grant to NGOs working on environmental projects.

[Terblig]

I’m not sure if I understand your comment. Yes, tree planting projects do lead to ongoing carbon sequestration each year, but I am not sure that the rest of your analogy holds and definitely think that there is not an analogy to bitcoin.

There are two types of sequestration situations that environmental and environmental finance professionals work with. First, you have standing forests and other ecosystems that have been sequestering carbon for as long as they have stood since that is how natural systems function. However, these natural services have no market value under today’s system of rules and regulations. We do need to change this such that a forest has an economic value when left standing and intact for the sequestration, water filtration, temperature regulation and other natural services that it provides. That will require substantial policy and regulatory changes, but, if combined with permitting schemes as has been done with wetlands in the United States or species banking, then it could indeed become a scarce resource that would demonstrate some of the dynamics of bitcoin. It’s something to hope for, but it is not a system that exists today for the Celo chain to leverage and it would be a mistake to invest into any crypto currency thinking that it was somehow generating a cash flow that would directly protect landscape or that a representation on a block chain actually means that a landscape is being protected. Even once you have legal rights, ensuring protection of landscape still requires a lot of work on the ground to make sure that it is not subject to illegal extractive activities, impacted by other nearby projects/communities, etc.

The more common example is offsets from people who undertake projects and commit to doing something above and beyond what they had originally planned if someone else will subsidize the effort. Carbon credits serve as the instrument for this exchange, but they only cover the different between what would have normally happened and what the project owner can argue is happening.

In your tree planting example, I suppose that someone could plant forests on degraded land and apply for a certification company to verify an improvement and their estimate of carbon credits generated. So I would get a set of credits for 1 ton (for example) for 2021 and could apply for another credit in 2022. However, for the system to work, that credit from 2021 has to be retired. There is no value to the environment or the project owner if that credit from 2021 continues to trade back and forth from you to me to someone else. If anything, it risks working against the environment because the project needs to sell another credit in 2022. If the secondary market is full of people trading credits stretching back for years, then it becomes harder for the project owner to sell a new credit in 2022 and the price likely gets driven down. Unlike bitcoin, carbon credits were never designed to be something that was a long-term store of value or a financial instrument similar to stocks or bonds. They were designed to be part of an annual permitting system intended to place a cap on absolute global emissions.

Further, in your example of the person who owns 100 trees, they could indeed sell credits to other people as long as the trees were newly planted and that is how the system was designed. However, it should also still work as I outlined above - sell credits each year and then retire them. Otherwise, if a single 1 ton credit gets purchased and resold multiple times, we are moving a lot of money, but still only removing 1 ton.

[Terblig]

Thanks Dan and I also appreciate your trading views back and forth like this. Thanks also for sharing the video. So thoughts…

First, I understand your idea better on the tree example and carbon credits. If they are being retired and not re-sold, then I agree that they can serve a climate benefit. I don’t know how that would interact with the reserve, however, since retired credits have no further financial value and therefore would not serve a financial purpose in a reserve. I think that Celo could create other smart-contract based mechanisms to purchase the credits as part of addressing its own environmental footprint.

In terms of the video and the point on NGOs, I was not very careful with my choice of words and did not mean to imply that NGOs are the only partner. There are entrepreneurs that try to build business models around some aspect of conservation and these have the very valuable trait of being self-sustaining for as long as the business remains viable. If we want to scale such initiatives, then buying credits is often an indirect way to do so and I would rather ask if there is a way that Celo could help direct debt or equity to their businesses. However, the experience of the last 50 years has not seen these types of businesses find pathways to scale to compete with the less environmentally friendly solutions (e.g., clear-cutting a forest, industrial-scale agriculture, intensive aquaculture). There is lots out there in terms of case studies and literature on it. Happy to share some of the stuff that I have seen if interesting for you.

In terms of the video specifically, there are two points that I don’t follow in his model. The first is how the voucher system would lead to a steady stream of capital flowing to entities capable of stewarding the locations. There is a passing reference to potentially having a “transfer tax”, but there seems a disconnect between the movement of vouchers and actually ensuring more capital is going to preserve landscapes. Whatever we do in Celo should result in increasing capital going to the people (whether public or private) who are implementing the conservation work if our primary goal is to address environmental issues. Secondary trading typically doesn’t do this.

The bigger issue is his closing point in the video. Having a voucher or token that is essentially an NFT for a distinct parcel of land will not guarantee anything about the actual protection of that land. That was the spirit in which I mentioned NGOs. Taking his pictures of rainforest as a cue, if you want to ensure that a square mile of forest remains a functional ecosystem, then you really need actual arrangements on the ground that incentivize stakeholders (government, industry, communities) to commit to land use practices not just for that parcel, but for all of the inter-connected parcels that are necessary to have a functional landscape (in the sense that ecologists refer to “landscapes”). Having a representation on block chain of a piece of land or a certificate that transfers value amongst users that may not even be in the same country as the land in question will do little to direct capital towards a viable development path that incentivizes and sustains an eco-friendly use of that land.

To turn towards possibilities, I could see block chains and a variation on the idea outlined as a potential more efficient way for organizations to drive cause-related marketing/fundraising. If people provide a donation and through a block chain can follow the changes (good and bad) to that land or otherwise feel that their donation is somehow more concrete, then I could imagine it helping someone raise money. That’s not a business model as you are seeking, but it is one use case.

There is another idea that people in the environmental community have been trying to make work for 20 years around land owners receiving a stream of payments in recognition of the services that flow from their protection of ecosystems. The MEA laid out the framework for this by pointing how natural systems provide resources (provisioning) and provides stability necessary to economic health (e.g., regulating services such as pollination of crops, maintaining predictable weather patterns, etc.). The problem is that these services are public goods (in the economic sense) and governments have not wanted to implement the rules necessary to require companies and consumers to pay land stewards for the benefits that they enjoy from these services. That, however, would really be an economy where you could invest into a standing forest with no intention of ever cutting a tree and still have a financial asset generating income. The closet that we have right now are the experiments that have been done (esp. in the USA) with various kinds of permitting such as wetlands banking, species banking, etc. There was also a concerted effort for many years around a vehicle called REDD, but it has not grown to the scale needed to turn the tide. I think that this kind of a vision is what inspires a number of the comments in Celo Forum and this would make sense in a reserve fund. In my day job, I work with people trying to do this type of work, but nobody has landed it at scale yet. The closet thing are entrepreneurs that incorporate some aspect of healthy ecosystems into their business model (e.g., eco-tourism, payment for natural services schemes, etc.), but these businesses typically don’t scale in the way needed.

Personally, I think that block chains should start by looking for ways to get all of their own nodes running on renewable energy and to support recycling of the electronic waste that block chains will create over time. I think that there are also likely some use cases for block chains to use NFTs to create representations of places and nature that contribute to ecological awareness, but I think that we should be highly vigilant to ensure that any solutions which aim to transfer value are actually transferring that value to the public and private sector entities that are doing the work of ecosystem preservation rather than moving value between unrelated parties.

[jose_u]

Hi all,

This is a great thread. I’m Jose, a Chilean founder of Activate Inc., an Alliance member working on bringing Celo to miners in Chillepin, Chile.

@papa_raw, sharding an NFT linked to a piece of land sounds interesting. I’ll have to do some reading. How do the ‘shards’ interoperate? If we shard NFT A and then later NFT B, could an NFT A shard interact with an NFT B shard, for example?

@nirvaan, agree with Terblig, nice call out on Doughnut Economics. Fully agree on your concern with the backward-looking nature of VCUs. It’s what we have today, but we’re thinking that a ‘full stack’ approach could be a way forward (among many), meaning from the landowner through tokenization, so it can trend toward things like deforestation avoidance or other forward looking projects. Like active carbon sequestration projects. On rules for the Reserve, imho, diversity best serves a portfolio, so we should consider all types of nature-backed digital assets, fungible, non fungible, VCU-based, satellite-tree-based, ocean-floor-based, you tell me.

Getting to Terblig’s comment on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, my colleague @djlera (check his piece from 2017) and I are thinking that avoidance and potentially decentralized monetizing of inactivity on land is a compelling new type of economic activity we would like to explore. As you say, “​​natural services have no market value under today’s system”. We may have the tools now to change that.

Like VCUs, avoidance units will have some finite timeline, retireability, and declination of value, so a continuous in-flow or maintenance of value is something the economists could model Slobodan what is the thinking on this generally?

Brynly we at Activate would like to learn more about the tokenization aspect. Could you connect us with any of those projects you mentioned, so we can learn more about the state-of-the-art?

sep thanks for kicking this off!

For more info on us:

Activate is a strategic assessment company on ‘environmental, social and governance’ (ESG) initiatives, focused on ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) between local stakeholders and major companies whose operations impact large territories and local communities. Activate’s solutions seek to include and empower communities who have not been fully engaged by the economic activity in their backyards.

Activate has collaborated with big enterprises in Chile and USA along the last 9 years. Activate has worked with the biggest food truck network for small businesses in the USA (Off the Grid) it has helped the cafeterias network in Google Campus in Silicon Valley (NYSE GOOG) through algorithm of distribution efficiency in order to involve communities in the operation. In Chile, Activate has worked with Antofagasta Minerals (ANTO:LN), by building a food production plant owned by a local cooperative that provides a food service for the company’s operation.

Recently, Activate joined the Alliance for Prosperity, implementing a fast payment system in Chillepin, Chile, for local lodgings (‘residencias’) that offer their services to copper miners contractors, based on cUSD. This alliance couldn’t have come in a better time considering the current political and economic context Chile is now facing.

2020 was a critical point of inflection for Chilean history, as a social uprising arose against the established political and liberal privatized economic system implemented by the “Chicago Boys” during Pinochet’s government. Even though this system was effective in boosting Chile’s wealth and reducing poverty over the past 30 years, the Gini Coefficient shows that the country’s economic wealth has been captured only by a small group, which led into a social movement that ended up with a referendum to change “Pinochet’s constitution”.

In alignment with the social petitions that came up with the social uprising in October 2019, the selected person to lead the constitution architecture was Elisa Loncon, a woman from the Mapuche community (Chile’s largest indigenous group). Moreover, even though this indigenous group’s opinion has an impact in the new constitution’s writing, they claim the vindication of the land they used to inhabit, but that is today owned by companies that represent some of the biggest holdings in the country, based on the exploitation of natural resources from trees like timber frame, pulp, MDF, cross laminated timber, among others.

We at Activate are thinking how this new tokenized economic ‘inactivity’ could help. As a first step, fully acknowledging the insufficiency of VCUs, maybe we start with the creation of a fund to buy ancestral land from Chilean timber corporations and tokenize them through local VCUs, built on top of Celo.

To do this, Activate proposes to turn certain land portions into NFT’s (sharding @papa_raw ?), allowing them to be staked and to receive a certain token, depending on the land’s characteristics, returning value to adjacent Mapuche communities.

Connected to Activate’s ESG strategies, we’re looking forward to implementing a prototype, implying land acquisition to be converted into NFT’s, stake them and tokenize them in the south of Chile. Our economic approach would strive for a percent of the flow to go to local Mapuche communities giving a possible economic solution to the conflict, among others.

Considering the connections we seek to establish between communities and companies, Activate is looking forward to finding the best financial suit for an NFTs-land tokenMVP, favoring the Mapuche community. We’ll be thankful any connections with contacts that might be interested in our model.

Best,

Jose

[Dan]

Hi Jose don’t know if you have seen this . Celo, I believe it is going to buy a forest and tokenize it. It will negate the whole argument that crypto is bad for the environment. Hopefully it will be the tesla of crypto

Introducing the Celo Climate Collective

[Terblig]

Question:

• How would the commission get to the custodians of the forest? In some countries, there might be a land trust that has legal title to the land and staff to oversee a land management plan. However, this kind of infrastructure does not exist for much of the world’s landscapes and there is a lot of conflict in places like the Amazon over who has rights to make decisions over the land (not to mention illegal incursions happening regularly). So how would Celo and smart contracts be able to navigate this?

• How does the existence of a voucher for a plot of land make it a business model or prevent a run on the bank? To my thinking a business model means that you have a service proposition from which you can generate a recurring cash flow for an indefinite period of time into the future. If the token simply represents an association with a place, I don’t see a service that people would pay for other than perhaps a desire to show that they donated to a place. But that is just a more complicated way to do traditional charitable donations (e.g., adopting a gorilla). There is nothing wrong with this as a strategy, but it is charity and not a business model and I don’t see how it scales or why any of it should go to the Celo reserve. It seems that we are then inserting ourselves as an intermediary diverting royalties/payments that should be going 100% to the custodians. If we want to help make traditional charity more effective, then let’s convene an AMA with a bunch of charities to ask how Celo could help them.

Regarding the video, the thinking is hard to follow from an implementation perspective. Essentially, it is inviting charities (or others) to estimate the sequestration benefits of their projects and post these results to a block chain and then associate those with coins. The person is trying to take a typical blockchain model and swap in environmental actors. Presumably, these results would have to be third-party validated to prevent scams and false information, which would essentially be the process by which voluntary carbon credits are created. So I don’t see it as creating something new as much as perhaps adding another sales channel and packaging.

The idea about “renting out coins for a carbon tax credit” sounds odd to my ears. It would only help the environment if the credit was retired at the end of the year. Also, if it is a “tax-credit”, then it is also dependent on the national tax policies/regulations of countries around the world and there is no uniformity in how tax authorities have chosen to address carbon (or whether they even have an interest in doing so). The tokenomics get very complicated because you would have to burn the coins representing 2021 credits at the end of each year (which could only be done if there is a way for the protocol to reclaim the tokens?) or create NFTs and hope that people would not want to purchase past vintage coins even as you issue even more new vintage NFTs. The system would only help the participating charities if it led to a new stream of payments each year and it would only help the environment if those payments were in recognition of a new, direct action within a calendar year. It seems like an overly complicated approach to replicating a market that currently already exists.

The point on natural sinks is an important one, but there are two different ideas. The first is supporting projects that take actions in a given year to reduce the damage to a sink that otherwise would have happened without the projects. Voluntary credits typically cover this. It is helpful, but, given that the IPCC says we need to reduce absolute emissions by half before the end of the decade, we really need to focus on whether or not projects are driving down absolute emissions rather than whether they are better than what might have otherwise occurred. The second is the idea that the earth has to stay within a fixed carbon budget, which will require a minimum level of sequestration capacity by natural systems (mainly forests, oceans, and soil) and that we need to protect a minimum level of the “stock” of our “natural capital.” This is the real bottom line for all life on the planet, but we currently lack the legal models, macroeconomic policies, and agreed scientific standards for measuring sequestration across biomes to do this. However, quite a few advocacy groups have been working on pieces of this puzzle, so I would say to work with them on how/whether block chain technology can help them.

I do believe that Celo can be helpful, but would think more about policies on how we could extract value from the reserves and direct it towards projects. Fundamentally, block chains are about transfers and transparency of transactions (and, to some degree, data). However, the deterioration of our natural capital base is a problem of public policy, economic externalities, and incentivization. We should be looking more towards how block chains might support the work flows of the many actors deep in the project work and allow them to scale, but they will be more about directing wealth towards the projects than transferring wealth amongst block chain participants. The idea of creating NFTs about places to support contributions to project owners with a transaction fee to operators of a network would be an example, assuming that we could solve for the validity of the information posted. I know that is a charity model rather than a business model. There are some more complex ways that you could link this to brand and reputation for NFT owners, but those are hard to explain in a static forum posting.

The video has some good ideas, but I can’t tell how much the person has really spent learning about the work done over the last two decades on carbon trading systems (both voluntary and ETS schemes), payment-for-ecosystem services
business models, community-based land stewardship models, land trusts, natural capital valuation methodologies, and other approaches that generate relevant projects and have tested different models for applying market-based solutions.

[Terblig]

Tokenizing the rain forest does not protect it. It is just a digital representation of a place that may or may not remain as the token represents it. Protection is dependent on:

• Legal frameworks that allow for protection; and
• Economic reasons existing for communities, commercial land developers, and extractive industries to undertake land practices that protect the rain forest.

I am not seeing how the creation of token that sits in the Celo reserve will lead to a steady flow of economic payments that will lead the relevant actors in countries with the rain forest to conclude that an intact forest is more valuable than cutting it down for the trees to create grazing pastures, agricultural production, or other uses.

If we don’t have that explicit connection, then we shouldn’t claim that a token in the reserve protects the forest.

[Terblig]

Hi Jose,

Thanks for the detailed thoughts. One point - avoidance units and sequestration (removal) are not the same thing. If I built a solar utility rather than a coal plant, I can claim to have “avoided” emissions. However, I also most likely have increased absolute emissions and I have not removed any carbon/GHGs from the atmosphere.

Our goal should be to create a mechanism that:

1. Generates a stream of economic payments for the natural services provided by intact landscapes; and
2. Make it large enough to be more attractive than the alternative economic activities that would ruin landscapes.

Wetlands banking in the USA is a moderately successful example and is the type of thing that could use a block chain as an medium. It depends on having a public policy in place that creates a cap and trade market though.

I think that I follow your idea on the NFTs, which is probably similar to some of what I wrote about above.

What is your thought on what would motivate people to purchase the NFTs? Who would be the buyers and why would they want to own such an NFT?

Depending on your answers, I might have some thoughts for you on contacts, but not sure how to make contact outside of the Forum.

[Dan]

Hi TerbIig
I do not want to repeat my self as we have discussed most of these in the previous conversations.
I think we will have to agree to disagree .
So, to summarize i think instrically linking Coins/token to natural assets will be a massive success through a hybrid donation/investment model like Celo’s concept.
Where you from your arguments you think it will not and prefer the status quo.
Let’s wait and see who is right

[Terblig]

We can do so. To be clear, I am not a fan of the status quo since it is not stopping ecological decline. So please take my comments in the spirit of thinking about how to make an intervention from a block chain successful. Thanks for the dialogue on this.