The Interchain Sustainability Mission
By: Dr Shaun Conway
Tags: Sustainability, Sdgs, Cosmos Network, Blockchain, Digital Transformation

We are embarking on a bold mission for Cosmos to become the leading blockchain ecosystem for sustainable and regenerative digital finance.

The Mission

Cosmos will become the leading sustainable and regenerative digital finance ecosystem

The future of humanity is being decided by the actions we are taking today and by our impacts on the ecological state of the planet.

The Interchain Foundation believes that open-source, cryptographic, consensus-driven economic networks hold the key to an anti-fragile global economic system and to creating equal opportunities for all.

Cosmos is arguably the best-positioned blockchain ecosystem to build the trusted technologies, sovereign networks and financial innovations which are needed to create a prosperous and sustainable future for humanity. We must now consciously and intentionally use the Internet of Blockchains to achieve this ultimate purpose.

The ixo Internet of Impact and Regen Network have been pioneering this path for Cosmos to become an ecosystem which is consciously purposed towards sustainability and ecological regeneraton. Now it is time for all Cosmos stakeholders to join forces in leading and growing the gravitas of this mission, by creating meaningful exchanges with other ecosystems, and by building bridges between networks of people, as well as blockchains.

To achieve this bold Interchain Sustainability mission, the Interchain Foundation has signed an MoU with ixo — The Internet of Impact to implement a multi-year program of R&D, advocacy and strategic collaborations, together with partners Informal Systems, Regen Network, BlockScience , Grassroots Economics, and The Commons Stack. We are now extending an open invitation to all Cosmos stakeholders and leaders from across the interchain universe, to align with this mission and join as collaborators in this program.

The Call to Action

Digital disruption provides the historic opportunity for us to fundamentally reshape the purpose of finance in ways that will have transformative impacts on people and the planet. We can empower ordinary people as consumers, savers, lenders, borrowers, investors, and taxpayers, to be at the centre of this economic regeneration.

Digitalization can create citizen-centric financial systems that support people’s real priorities, which are collectively represented by the Global Goals to create a better world by 2030, by ending all forms of poverty, fighting inequalities and urgently responding to the climate crisis.

In August 2020, the UN Digital Financing Taskforce published its report People’s Money: Harnessing digitalisation to finance a sustainable future, which concludes that:

“Historic opportunity, combined with unprecedented crisis, provides a unique moment and imperative to act in harnessing digitalization to accelerate financing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Failure to act would be a wasted opportunity and risks finance diverging from the needs of citizens for inclusive sustainable development”.

People’s Money defines the moral imperative for building citizen-centric financial systems and demonstrates a broad political mandate for this change. It also makes specific calls to action and identifies catalytic opportunities to immediately start making progress.

Most relevant to the Interchain Foundation is the action agenda on building sustainable digital financing ecosystems. The People’s Money principles provide a lens through which we can better understand the real-world user requirements for Interchain standards and Cosmos technologies to be accessible, inclusive, useful and sustainable for all people, in all contexts.

Cosmos as a Sustainable Digital Finance Ecosystem

We have the opportunity to align all Cosmos projects and stakeholders with the Interchain Sustainability mission, to collectively build and grow Cosmos to become the leading sustainable and regenerative digital finance ecosystem. Every team working in this ecosystem is already doing something which can be oriented towards this mission. We have the potential to amplify and connect our work and core capabilities, in ways that will accelerate the positive impacts of our ecosystem, by making the following explicit commitments:

We will research and develop catalytic technology protocols and systems through which significant flows of people’s money can be mobilised towards sustainability and ecological regeneration, in ways that trigger broader, systemic changes: Incentivising people to use their domestic savings for sustainable and regenerative economic activities; Enhancing the accountability of public financing; Making sustainability and ecological regeneration count in global financial markets; Financing small and medium enterprises which create meaningful employment and produce sustainable, regenerative goods and services; and Enabling consumer spending which promotes sustainability and ecological regeneration.

We will build the technology foundations of a sustainable digital finance ecosystem which enables: Community currencies and local exchange trading systems; Financing, tokenisation and decentralised exchange of verified outcome states; Zero-emission blockchain network infrastructure; Self-sovereign digital identity; Privacy-enhancing data markets; Effective governance systems; and safe scaling of crypto-economic systems.

We will strengthen the ecosystem governance and advocacy to become more inclusive and participatory in the ways that proposals and decisions relating to sustainability and ecological regeneration are made. We will also ensure that our initiatives are informed by the regulations and standards governing digital financing and will advocate for public policies which enable blockchain technologies and tokenisation to be used for sustainability and ecological regeneration purposes.

….liftoff!

We recently held a truly inspiring inaugural call for the Community Currencies workstream of the program.

I’m so excited to finally see a group like this coming together and to be able to put this blockchain tech to its real ultimate intended use case, which I think is local currencies –Ethan Buchman (Co-founder, Cosmos)

The Program

We will be launching with a process of consensus-building, to articulate a bold shared vision for how the Interchain Foundation and Cosmos ecosystem will contribute towards a sustainable future for humanity.

We invite all stakeholders to participate in the consultations and conversations which will inform this vision, to identify how we can collectively build on what is already being done, create new opportunities, and hyperdrive to imagine where we want to be by the watershed year 2030.

The program team will be reaching out to Cosmos projects and strategic partners, over the coming weeks. We are looking for flagship projects which can demonstrate how Cosmos technologies can be used in real-world sustainable digital finance applications.

An open, decentralised governance mechanism will be put in place for soliciting community proposals (RFC’s) and to build consensus on Sustainability Decision Records (like the Cosmos SDK ADR process). Through this, we intend building the frameworks, protocols, and engineering requirements for a Sustainable and Regenerative Digital Finance Stack.

Development of this technology stack will progress the R&D work which is already underway to develop protocols and open-source software implementations for non-fungible impact tokens, digital identity, governance, sustainable and regenerative DeFi mechanisms, zero-emission validator infrastructure, data verification protocols, and regulatory compliance.

We are recruiting an engineering lead for the Program

If you are an experienced Cosmos SDK developer who wants to take a lead in architecting and engineering the sustainable and regenerative digital finance stack, please get in touch to express your interest. This is a joint appointment between ixo and the Interchain Foundation.

Join the mission

We will be reaching out to all Cosmos project leads over the coming weeks and we welcome you to let us know what interests you about the Interchain Sustainability mission and how you would like to get involved.