Regen Foundation
= "the non-profit arm of Regen Network"
URL = https://regen.foundation/
Description
- "We build the Regen Commons. A global network of grassroots DAOs to ensure climate finance ultimately supports sovereign regenerative bioregional economies.
- Our flagship program is the EnDAOment Protocol
- As the non-profit arm of Regen Network. We pilot implementation level research in community ownership and governance in regenerative finance."
Interview
"Q&A with Shaila Agha: How did the Regen Foundation begin? What is the framework that you all work out of?
Regen Network was founded by a handful of permaculture practitioners back in 2017. The project was catalyzed when a cofounder of Ethereum asked us the question: “How could you leverage distributed ledger technology and remote-sensing science to further planetary regeneration?” We adopted the name “Regen Network” due to the influence of our teacher, Carol Sanford, and her lifetime of work developing a school around living systems through a regenerative-paradigm lens. Regen Ledger is seen as a global public utility for ecological data and claims.
Regen Foundation began as the nonprofit, commons-oriented arm of Regen Network, created around the launch of Regen Ledger to ensure that regenerative economic infrastructure is governed by the communities it serves.
It works from a framework that centers community-owned regenerative economics, local definitions of life and well‑being, and ecological institutions, operationalized through governance, education, science, and regenerative economic tools built as digital public infrastructure.
* Who are some of the stakeholders Regen Foundation is trying to engage?
We place a strong emphasis on empowering grassroots institutions to own and govern the transition to a regenerative economic paradigm. With that in mind, our stakeholders are diverse, each playing a critical role in this ecosystem.
At the heart of this work are the people who already live inside these ecological institutions: chamas, mutual aid groups, elders, women’s networks, youth custodians, and land and water stewards whose daily lives are inseparable from the health of their ecosystems. They are not beneficiaries, but co-authors. Alongside them, we engage anthropologists, ecologists, and Indigenous knowledge scholars who help translate lived protocols into legible institutional forms without stripping them of meaning. We also work with local governments, customary land bodies, and legal thinkers where recognition and protection of commons governance becomes necessary. On the enabling side, we collaborate with regenerative technology builders and civic governance practitioners who are willing to let culture guide tooling, not the other way around. Finally, we engage storytellers, educators, and movement builders who ensure these ideas travel with integrity, because ecological institutions only endure when knowledge, care, and accountability can be inherited across generations."
(https://www.newamerica.org/insights/the-cycles-of-regenerative-governance-in-kenya/)
More at Shaila Agha on the Intersection of Traditional Chama Governance and Web3
Characteristics
New Commons and Networked Governance
"Regen Foundation has a mandate to distribute 30% of the total pool of $REGEN tokens, earmarked for non-commercial stakeholders. This gives a voice to people (both human and non-human) who otherwise would not be heard.
Through a process of enDAOment, we donate tokens to groups of farmers, indigenous nations and other non-profit partners. They can use these tokens to vote in Regen Network governance, and help shape the future of the Regen toolkit. They will then receive more tokens as reward for their role in keeping the blockchain running. These tokens can be exchanged for money, which they can use to fund their operations.
Decentralized Scientific Research
We facilitate an open and collaborative process to produce scientifically robust, context specific protocols for the verification of ecological outcomes worldwide. We are committed to open source development and believe that open and shared protocols are a key driver for the acceleration of planetary regeneration and a re-establishment of a healthy commons.
Education and Public Capacity Building
Regen Foundation brings together a co-creative educational network focused on the scientifically proven practices and processes that lead to robust environmental resilience. Technological advances and emerging markets for ecosystem services can be challenging to navigate. Regen Foundation aims to demystify tools and concepts in a playful way, by creating learning spaces for a diverse range of users, including land stewards, community conservation groups, scientists and developers.
We dream of alternate institutions, built on an ethos of co-learning and mutualism.
Emerging Economics
Recoupling planetary wellbeing with economic wellbeing blurs the lines of social and ecological justice. Enfranchise an economy for all the planet’s people and species means understanding the climate crisis is an “intersectional” challenge. We work to develop programs through the Regen Commons which test the viability of alternative economic mechanisms.
In order to have scaled impact, we must ask how to replace corrupted systems of extraction with viable regenerative alternatives that bring a sound livelihood to communities of regeneration."
Status
1. Regen Network:
"As the largest token holder in the Regen Network ecosystem, the Regen Foundation has established various projects. One of the first initiatives was the delegation program, which involves staking tens of millions of $REGEN across a validator set consisting of 75 members. Delegations are recalculated on a monthly basis, taking into account factors such as validator-set prominence, governance participation, community participation, uptime, and carbon-neutral status. This approach aims to optimize decentralization and dynamism.
In early 2022, Regen Foundation granted its first locked token grants, known as “Community Staking DAOs.” Through this process, they realized the importance of creating an educational community around the “enDAOment” process. Consequently, Cohort 1 was launched in the fall of 2022, comprising seven organizations on a pathway to receive $REGEN tokens and participate in governance. Additionally, in 2023, Cohort 2 will be introduced specifically for groups interested in establishing methodologies and listing on Regen Ledger.
Regen Foundation is also a co-founding Limited Partner in the Regen/Cosmos Ecosystem Fund, managed by Cerulean Ventures. The foundation has received donations from Ripple and Biome Trust to further its mission to ensure climate finance ultimately supports sovereign regenerative bioregional economies."
(https://medium.com/regen-network/the-evolution-of-regen-network-ae74febe1edf)
2. Austin Wade Smith, 2026:
"I think the conceptual core of Regen will age really well. Full stop. That is in large part because it foregrounds how systems of living value must implicate community ownership / stake, commoning, consent, and data sovereignty at the level of protocol design. Beneath the language of “climate finance” lies the question of how digital / societal infrastructure might express an ethic of reciprocity with the living world, and how regeneration might be expressed as a protocol across different mediums."
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