Rifai Sicilia's Purchase of the Sharewood Forest Land
= learn about the The Olive Oil Loan
Case Study
Regen Avocado:
"In the spring of 2025, Rifai Sicilia received our largest grant to date, 8 ETH in matching funds from Octant Epoch 7, supported by 90 donors. By the end of summer, ETH's price had risen enough that we had a real opportunity. We used the treasury to purchase a 1-acre forest in Scopello, Sicily, which we named Sharewood Forest, the first property of our bioregional commons land trust.
Rather than sell the ETH outright, we decided to use it as collateral on Aave and borrow against it to pay for the land in installments. It was an elegant plan, until it wasn't. But within every crisis grows an opportunity.
In October, ETH began to fall. By December, we had maxed out our credit line on Aave, and association members chipped in personally to cover the final payments. We were committed, there was no going back. But closing on the land wasn't the end of it. We still needed another €5,000 to cover taxes and the notary required to officially transfer the title.
Then came January 31st. ETH dropped from roughly $3,000 to $2,000, and we were forced to close our Aave position to avoid liquidation. Our credit was maxed. Our savings were gone. How were we going to find the money? What we did have was social capital and trust within the broader ReFi and commons network that we could tap into.
After reaching out to trusted friends, an idea emerged: a personal loan structured as a real-world DeFi primitive. We offered to repay the principal in cash earned from the new land, while paying interest in olive oil. Sharewood Forest has 40 mature producing olive trees, and Butterfly Hill, our flagship agroforestry site that we tentatively tenant farm, has 240 more that will begin producing in 2–3 years and reach full maturity in 5–10.
Three friends lent us €5,000 over a 3-year repayment period. Our lawyer drafted the contracts. Payment arrived in EURC. Sharewood Forest is now legally registered to Rifai Sicilia DAO in Italy, and spring programming is already underway generating more donations and revenue from the community.
This difficult journey forced us to get organized and grow in ways we had been avoiding: we now have a bank account, an IBAN, and a revamped website improving week by week. And that olive oil loan planted the seed for something bigger GrowFi."
(https://paragraph.com/@regen-avocado/growfi-rooting-finance-in-territorial-trust)
Discussion
GrowFi is a cosmo-locally scaled version of Community-Supported Agriculture
Regen Avocado:
"The Community Supported Agriculture model is one of the oldest forms of regenerative finance: buyers purchase shares of the harvest at the start of the season. The farmer gets cash upfront to buy seeds, hire workers, and carry operations through to harvest. When the produce comes in, shareholders redeem their shares for a portion of it. It's simple, proven, and deeply human.
GrowFi takes that model and scales it onchain turning social capital into liquid cash loans.
Juicebox is our low-fidelity MVP, a first step to validate the CSA model for our bioregional portfolio of projects, association operations, and GrowFi protocol development. Supporters deposit ETH and receive RIFAI tokens, which can be redeemed for olive oil, guided tours, educational experiences, and any other product or service we bring to market in 2026 and beyond.
When GrowFi is fully live, supporters will be able to stake their RIFAI tokens to back specific regenerative land sites, earning real yield from the harvest or its cash equivalent from product sales. The diversified harvest of a syntropic farm is tokenized as a campaign: investors buy into the total seasonal yield, stake to earn their share, and redeem when the harvest comes in at the end of the year
GrowFi is the deeper layer: a lending platform and DEX inspired by early yield farming, but backed by real trees verified through the Silvi platform. It enables both micro-lenders and larger capital allocators to participate in bioregional regeneration. And because it's fully open-source, any project using Silvi for tree-planting initiatives can deploy the protocol to finance their own development.
(https://paragraph.com/@regen-avocado/growfi-rooting-finance-in-territorial-trust)