Regen Network
Description
1.
"The aim of Regen Network is to imbue the economy with ecological sentience.
The model of production of ecological knowledge—what and how we know about what is happening in a given ecosystem—is the foundation for achieving this aim. Therefore, a community dedicated to maintaining a decentralized open ledger of ecological health information to serve as the basis for conditional agreements between parties is an essential building block for a new phase of the global economy that accounts for ecological health and invests in ecological regeneration as the cornerstone of healthy business and governance. On top of this ledger, a new economy of ecological value will be built.
The “Regen“ in Regen Network is short for regeneration. But what does this mean? When we use the term, we‘re drawing on the work of business development consultant and educator Carol Sanford. We refer to regeneration as actions that increase the capacity, viability, and vitality of both the agent and system being acted within or upon. As these concepts can be elusive, it may be useful to ground our working definition in the sphere of regenerative agriculture. As defined by our sister enterprise, Terra Genesis International, regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that enhance ecological health [Ter19]. This could be contrasted with conventional agriculture, which degrades ecological health. Public good outcomes of Regenerative Agriculture include carbon sequestration, clean water and biodiversity. Private good outcomes include increased economic prosperity for land stewards and other network participants." (https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf)
2.
"Regen Network‘s token model creates a protocol-level incentive structure to operate and maintain the key elements of a trusted and secure platform for reporting and sharing ecological data and making ecological claims. The native token, $REGEN, is used for staking validators and oracles—the two foundational service providers in the network. Regen Network generates utility through a protocol for making claims about ecological state and agreements based on those claims. These agreements may result in the formation of cryptographic tokens that are fungible or non-fungible, depending on the context and agreement. The token model of Regen Network secures the network against attack and censorship making near perfect information about ecological state available for the public and for users. Regen Network‘s aim is to bring ecological sentience into the economy. A side effect of this will be the mainstreaming of ecological accounting, making it pervasive and affordable. By doing so, this technology creates a viable pathway toward the global recognition of ecological stewardship and a pathway toward planetary regeneration."
Discussion
W. Szal et al. :
"The aim of Regen Network is to imbue the economy with ecological sentience.
The model of production of ecological knowledge—what and how we know about what is happening in a given ecosystem—is the foundation for achieving this aim. Therefore, a community dedicated to maintaining a decentralized open ledger of ecological health information to serve as the basis for conditional agreements between parties is an essential building block for a new phase of the global economy that accounts for ecological health and invests in ecological regeneration as the cornerstone of healthy business and governance. This paper outlines the economics and governance of the community that will maintain this open ecological ledger. On top of this ledger, a new economy of ecological value will be built. We will explore the economics of this application layer in subsequent papers. The “Regen“ in Regen Network is short for regeneration. But what does this mean? When we use the term, we‘re drawing on the work of business development consultant and educator Carol Sanford. We refer to regeneration as actions that increase the capacity, viability, and vitality of both the agent and system being acted within or upon. As these concepts can be elusive, it may be useful to ground our working definition in the sphere of regenerative agriculture. As defined by our sister enterprise, Terra Genesis International, regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that enhance ecological health [Ter19]. This could be contrasted with conventional agriculture, which degrades ecological health. Public good outcomes of Regenerative Agriculture include carbon sequestration, clean water and biodiversity. Private good outcomes include increased economic prosperity for land stewards and other network participants.
Financial capital is often created by liquidating ecological and social capital (for more on this subject see [Sza19a]). For example, the vast majority of palm oil plantations are sited on clearcut rainforest. Timber is often harvested using clearcuts, and fisheries extract so many fish that the populations crash.
All this is driven by short-term profit. While it is clear that these processes create some form of value (especially financial capital), it is also clear that there is something important that has been lost along the way, and that the true wealth of the system is undermined. As these losses keep adding up, we find ourselves in a state of both societal and ecosystems collapse. If we want to address ecological degradation systemically, we need to intervene somewhere in the economic process. Regen Network aims to reinvent the economics of agriculture, and land use more broadly by bringing ecological state information to agreements and contracts to ensure rational choice and more efficiently price externalities. Beyond rational choice and pricing externalities, ubiquitous access to high quality ecological information will have an enormous impact on the quality of the relationship between the human economy and the greater than human living world.
Near real-time access to high-fidelity ecological state information is now possible. This capacity has not been a common part of the human experience since the poorly-understood and nearly-forgotten evolutionary arc of small bands of hunter-gatherer Homo sapiens. Early humans and intact cultural traditions maintained (and sometimes still maintain) intimate individual and cultural connections to landscapes and ecosystems. We can now regenerate that missing capacity to attune our human economy with the health of the ecosystems that support us. Regen Network is making this leap possible.
How can we ground these grand aims in a tooling that brings these ethics into an actionable sphere? Recent developments in blockchain architecture—such as Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithms—have enabled a new form of decentralized governance in a data commons. To build on this foundation, we introduce a community staking model to even further decentralize decision making and align it more deeply with the community of users. Built on the Cosmos SDK, Regen Network is one of the first of a third generation of blockchains that leverages the governance mechanisms and data provisions for real world commons management." (https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf?)
Governance
"Recent developments in blockchain architecture—such as Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithms—have enabled a new form of decentralized governance in a data commons. To build on this foundation, we introduce a community staking model to even further decentralize decision making and align it more deeply with the community of users. Built on the Cosmos SDK, Regen Network is one of the first of a third generation of blockchains that leverages the governance mechanisms and data provisions for real world commons management."
Status
Gregory Landua:
"Regen Network joined OpenTEAM two years ago which is now composed of more than twenty organizations and led by Dr. Dorn Cox of Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR). OpenTEAM offers field-level carbon measurement, digital management records, remote sensing, predictive analytics, and input and economic management decision support in a connected platform that reduces the need for manual data entry and simultaneously improves access to a wide array of tools. Over the past few months, our science and engineering teams have been hard at work participating across the OpenTEAM working groups.
The team participated for the second year running in the Open Climate Collabathon, a gathering of software developers, scientists, policymakers, students, and activists working together for a radically open climate accounting system. We focused our attention this year on presenting tools for accounting for and bringing to market our carbon plus credit class as well as showcasing the emerging Regen Ledger SDK and blockchain solution for open ecological accounting." (https://medium.com/regen-network/building-open-source-tools-for-the-regenerative-agricultural-revolution-1a87dfe48af6)
Discussion
Ecosystem Service Markets and Agreements
Gregory Landua et al.:
"Current ecosystem service markets such as carbon offset markets (voluntary and compliance), are deeply flawed. We feel strongly that the foundation upon which ecosystem service markets—as well as non-market agreements between stakeholders to govern ecological commons in a sustainable, and if possible, regenerative way—will depend on in infrastructure of trust that we refer to as an ecological knowledge commons.
The layers of technology that generate security, durability and integrity around data, compute functions and algorithms are the foundation for a trusted monitoring and verification system of ecological state. This trusted monitoring and verification system in turn is the foundation of any agreement between parties about ecological state. Agreements about ecological state are the foundation for the inclusion of ecological health into our financial system—an important aim of Regen Network.
Currently, ecological health is not held on the balance sheet of any entity, private or governmental. This means that financial decisions are blind to their ecological impacts. This is starting to change in small ways; there is a global payments for ecological services market. A conservative estimate puts the global market size in 2016 at $36 billion annually [SBC+18]. One example of this would be the Natural Resource Conservation Service (a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture) paying farmers to plant riparian buffers around streams that pass through their farms to improve the health of their waters. We would like to build on these shifts in societal perception of farmers and others interacting with natural systems. Rather than viewing farmers simply as food producers, we would like to elevate their societal status to that of land stewards. Agricultural use is the primary way (by land area) that humans interact with land, representing 37% of land globally [wor19]. Currently, the vast majority of this activity is degenerative, but it doesn‘t need to be this way.
We do this through two fundamental instruments: Ecological State Protocols (ESPs) and Ecological Agreements. ESPs are algorithms that, primarily utilizing remote-sensing data, determine the change in state of a specific facet of ecological health. An example of this would be a soil carbon ESP, which would track the change in soil carbon in a given piece of land over a given period of time. Ecological Agreements are smart contracts tied to the outcomes of Ecological State Protocols. For example, a rancher has demonstrated via a soil carbon ESP that they‘ve sequestered one hundred tons of CO2 over the past year in their ranch land. A carbon market, utilizing an Ecological Agreement, could pay them automatically when this carbon sequestration is verified." (https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf)
Examples
Eco-Cacao
K. Birchard et al. :
"Eco-Cacao is a cacao-producing farmer-cooperative in Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador. These farmers steward agroforestry farms that border the last remaining fragment of the Chocoan Rainforest of Ecuador. The Chocoan Rainforest is of high ecological importance for a number of reasons, including its role as a part of the hydrological pump that keeps the continent of South America and the rest of the planet hydrated, and its phenomenal biodiversity.
Regen Network is working with a group of cacao buyers and Eco-Cacao to verify regenerative land stewardship as a part of a price premium paid to farmers who are successfully managing farms that mimic the native forest, generate high carbon sequestration yields, and increase biodiversity on the farm.
In this case, the land health is being recorded on Regen Ledger to create an open, transparent and public view of the ecological state of the larger region and the relationship between that state and the management outcomes of land stewards. The payment for ecological stewardship and land health of the plot being stewarded are also recorded on the ledger. Eventually, direct payment will be possible to land stewards. Layers beyond product premium such as carbon payments and biodiversity payments will be added to the agreement matrix." (https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf)
Rainforest Foundation
W. Szal et al. :
"The Rainforest Foundation is an organization that supports indigenous land stewards to protect their ancestral forests. Regen Network is supporting Rainforest Foundation in leveraging the Global Forest Watch system of satellite monitoring to give information to on-the-ground land stewards about potential threats. Regen Network will serve as the public ledger for data and contracts to streamline this operation and eventually payments will also flow through Regen Network." (https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf)
Source
- Economics whitepaper: Regen Network Economics Technical Paper. An Ecological Market-Commons, Secured by Proof-of-Stake. By G. Landua, K. Birchard, W. Szal. Version 0.2, November 14, 2019
URL = https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf