Regenerating the Planet with Blockchain
By: Clare Politano
Tags: Regeneration, Blockchain, Cosmos Network, Ecology, Agriculture

Our current rate of extraction of the Earth’s resources is not sustainable.

In order to survive and thrive on this planet, as responsible stewards of the Earth and our more-than-human community, we must evolve from sustainability to regeneration.

Regeneration means collaborating to build systems that create more value than they extract. In the words of Daniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, “A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.”

To advance regenerative culture, Regen Network is building a blockchain for ecological contracts to track, verify, and reward ecological performance using the Cosmos framework.

Why Blockchain?

Blockchain technology plays a unique role in creating this regenerative future, and Regen Network is on the forefront of implementing it in this way.

There are several features of blockchain that are useful to regeneration, such as the opportunity to reevaluate the meaning of “value.” A currency is anything we agree has value as a medium of exchange. Blockchain frees us from the limitations of fiat currencies and allows us to redefine value however we want, plus the infrastructure to exchange that value. To regenerate the planet, we need to assign economic value to natural capital — the sun, trees, mangroves, soils, and more, that produce energy, clean air, water, and food. The inherent value of our environment is obvious if you’re paying attention, but for too long we called environmental impact an “externalized cost” of doing business and excluded its profound value from our balance sheets.

Decentralization is also key, because climate change and environmental degradation are international opportunities that haven’t been solved by the international community. Blockchain allows people to make ecological agreements human-to-human and bypass politics and bureaucracy. Farmers, ranchers, distributers, brands, and organizations that care about regeneration should be able to collaborate directly and blockchain lets us do this.

Finally, immutability. The power of blockchain as an immutable ledger enhances data quality and trust, compared to relying on ecological data collected by for-profit companies and certifications and stored in private databases with no publicly accountable governance. For the first time, we’ll have access to worldwide, transparent, verified ecological data.

But wait! Isn’t bitcoin is bad for the environment because of all the energy spent on mining? Well, it’s not the best.

A tremendous amount of energy is spent to mine blocks for bitcoin, 47 Terra Watt Hours per year at the current hash rate, equal to 23,000 kilo tons carbon dioxide, which is enough to power a small country. Bitcoin mining is energy intensive due to the Proof-of-Work system, on which Ethereum also relies.

The higher the value of bitcoin, the more energy is spent to mine blocks. Yes, some of this energy is renewable. Geothermal and hydroelectric-powered mining is a positive step. There are even claims that the majority of energy spent to mine bitcoin is renewable. Even if that’s true, does it really make sense to build a better future on a currency backed by energy expenditure?

The Ethereum community recognizes the drawbacks of Proof-of-Work and is deeply enmeshed in the transition to Proof-of-Stake. Meanwhile, several Proof-of-Stake platform blockchains have emerged to compete with the incumbents. Cosmos, running on the Tendermint consensus engine, is one of them. We’re using it to launch XRN, Regen Network’s native token, backed by the living health of planet Earth.

How It Works

Governments, nonprofits, and companies want to promote regenerative agriculture and already pay farmers for ecosystem services such as cover cropping, planting trees and building healthy soil.

Regen Network tracks ecological improvements and rewards land stewards for achieving agreed-upon results.

But verifying ecological outcomes is currently a slow, bureaucratic, and expensive process, and it often takes years for farmers to receive rewards.

Regen Network overturns this paradigm, combining the power of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain to track and verify ecological improvements at scale, and deploy rewards to farmers through smart contracts.

Satellites and drones image the entire surface of the Earth every day. We use these images to train machine learning models to recognize ecological indicators and make predictions about ecosystem health. These models can predict with high certainty improvements in soil health, plant cover, tree growth, and more. Verified improvements trigger rewards through the blockchain.

Combining these technologies gives us an unprecedented ability to understand the state of the planet’s ecological health. Supported by this high-quality ecological knowledge, funders and farmers can make mutually-beneficial agreements with each other to promote regenerative agriculture.

Through Regen Network, farmers can make verifiable claims about ecological improvements to their land, both to care for the environment and achieve business objectives. Farmers provide data, which Regen Network and our partners evaluate based on methodologies we call Ecological State Protocols. If results from our machine learning models are inconclusive, we send a field scientist to the farm to conduct an inspection. Results are time-stamped and saved to Regen Ledger, a transparent and immutable blockchain record.

Regen Ledger

Our blockchain is built on the Cosmos SDK, which is targeting a mainnet launch late February 2019. We like that Cosmos is scalable, modular, and interoperable with leading blockchains like Ethereum. It also allows us to run a hybrid Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-Authority system, which lets us choose our bonded validators from among respected institutions and collaborators dedicated to regeneration.

These validators are the members of Regen Consortium, a network of purpose-aligned organizations that govern Regen Ledger and steward Regen Network as a whole. Each included organization has shown competency and focus in agriculture, environment, data, or economics. Using a public, permissioned blockchain means we only need about 100 validator nodes. These nodes will run on renewable energy. Our carbon footprint is negative and our network will steward a net sequestration of carbon.

Here’s where we are today: The Regen Ledger testnet is up and running. We are collaborating with Cosmos and contributing to their developer community as we continue to build our technology.

We are starting pilot projects with farmers and funders in the USA, Peru, Ecuador, and Barbados, with several others in development.

Towards an Ecological Knowledge Commons

The problem with accounting based on externalities is that eventually those externalities run out. The planet is losing 75 billion tons of topsoil per year due to degenerative agriculture, and at this rate the UN estimates we have only 56 harvests remaining.

Farmers that choose degenerative practices aren’t lazy or shortsighted — they are simply trying to get by in a system heavily stacked against them. Regen Network’s goal in accounting for ecological impact alongside financial impact is to incentivize farmers to become land stewards by aligning short-term profit with long-term ecological health.

Our ability to track, verify, and reward ecological performance through blockchain unlocks true-cost accounting that communities, brands, and governments are increasingly calling for. But that’s not all.

Data is the missing link in ecological verification, and marrying blockchain, AI, and remote sensing allows us to create an ecological knowledge commons from high-quality, trusted data on ecosystems around the world. Stakeholders everywhere can access this pool of ecological knowledge and leverage it to create contracts around ecological performance.

Let’s use this infrastructure to regenerate the planet.