regenerative
/rɪˈdʒɛn(ə)rətɪv/
adjective
- tending to or characterized by regeneration.
Regen is a blockchain based company which is creating a global economy based around incentivising people to create, invest in and promote ecologically regenerative practices that restore and enhance the natural environment over a broad measure of parameters including biodiversity, soil organic carbon, water quality, amongst others. Because it is blockchain based, it has its own monetary and legal agreements system with a publicly verifiable ledger of transactions. Regen is currently in test network status, but with a deal already signed with Microsoft, the implications and potentials of this platform should not be ignored. Mainnet release will be due next. This post aims to explain the Regen network, decipher some of the more esoteric blockchain concepts and provide a rationale as to why Regen is truly revolutionary in its ability to facilitate new, innovative ways of organising society around positive earth stewardship.
ECONOMY VS ECOLOGY
The economy should really be viewed as a subset of the ecology, yet the economy has always been given precedence resulting in ecological capital being liquidated with blatant disregard for the long term. We are now at a point in our resource cycle where the ecology is diminished. Examples include loss of rainforest and other wildlife rich habitats, denouement of the soils and peak oil to name a few. A transformation of our society towards being simply sustainable is not sufficient to reverse these losses.
Rather than degenerative or even sustainable living, we must start to rejuvenate the ecology and become regenerative. Regenerative practices use methods which sequester carbon, improve soils, protect the environment and enhance biodiversity, overall ecosystem quality, resilience and ecological processing. For example, land practices that are correlated with positive carbon sequestration and an increase in biodiversity are no-till agriculture, intercropping with perennials and trees, managed rotational grazing, and compost application.
REGEN
Often, in practice, funds are required to invest in or subsidise the new practices as they develop to allow them to compete with the current market. At its most basic level, Regen offers a platform for interested parties looking to invest in regenerative practices to team up with suitable land stewards, thereby providing access to money to make change.
The regenerative path is obviously difficult. Our current political systems are cumbersome, slow, regularly deadlocked and often resistant to the rate of change in policy we need. There is also the issue as to how projects are financed and how the flow of funds are audited and tracked with time. Fraud is difficult to police when global distances and banking jurisdictions separate payee and recipient. However, since Regen has its own currency, payments are brought into one network which is fully verifiable and publicly available via the blockchain ledger, which is very satisfactory for tracking money especially if public funds are being spent.
Regen has also delivered on a method to enable contractual agreements on regenerative practices to be digitally signed with little bureaucratic friction and on a global scale. The Regen blockchain uses its underlying functionality to perform ‘smart contracts’. Smart contracts are simply code based agreements. This is as opposed to forming an agreement with a lawyer in a classical sense. This does not suggest that Regen will be entirely automated since certified organisations will be required to produce industry standard agreements and resolve disputes as the Regen network develops.
There is also the major issue as to how we will measure and monitor our regenerative practices on a global scale, ensure this information is trustworthy and auditable and also use it to stimulate scientific rigour and improve regenerative practices.
We have to look at our actions on a global scale. As our role as stewards of the Earth develops, high quality ecological data becomes imperative to quantify regenerative outcomes. Technology is providing significant advances in monitoring various parameters about Earth including above ground biomass, surface water quality, land conversion and net primary productivity amongst many others. The automated methods employed include remote sensing, in-situ drones/ devices and satellites.
Regen has created a network which can assimilate this data into its computing system and use it to automate payments for agreements made on regenerative practices and their subsequent outcomes. However, many parameters such as biodiversity still require input from humans (e.g. performing habitat and species surveillance) in order to verify the claims; that is to say that, largely this process is becoming increasingly automated but will still require certified organisations to act as oracles for a segment of the data going forwards. Eventually though, it may be possible to create an image of the globe created by sensing devices and enhanced by human surveillance which are being updated constantly, in light spectrums we cannot see as humans and scales that we cannot imagine as earth dwelling citizens.
If we as a society are to implement a transition towards regenerative ecological practices, Regen is the platform where we could assimilate data from the Earth’s ecological vital signs and coordinate action. The platform is due to be open for business 24/7, globally accessible, antifragile, permissionless, operating at internet speed and modifiable. Most crucially, it also draws on sensory data to determine if agreement outcomes have been met and processes the payments.
Another particular function of Regen worthy of attention- and possibly the most controversial — is in its ability to mint new additional tokens which run on Regen that can be used to represent parts of the real world ecology or even abstract ecological processes with measurable outputs. In this sense, the Regen network could mint a token that represented a regional snapshot of measured ecological health and enable it to be traded against other tokens from other regions in a global exchange. This would transform the current value and pricing system of the ecology into a global index and place the Earth on a global stage within the economic market.
For more information on the network you can check out Regen’s website or interact with the varied community here. The whitepapers can be found here, here and here. I am Valid8r, a UK based validator which is currently active on the incentivised test network for Regen and I hope I’ve got you thinking about Regen.
