Regen Network tackles climate finance with blockchain

0:19regen network the climate and climate ecosystem and merging that in with blockchain is something that is fascinating and i think needs to be done right now in this time and your team is working on some really interesting stuff so i would love for you to kick it off with just a high level overview and the focus of regen network and then we can dive

0:38into the details yeah fantastic well at region network we're you know we're a bit bold we like to say you know our mission is nothing short of planetary regeneration and we're also pretty practical so we've worked very hard to understand the unique challenges of climate finance and carbon markets and start to build the tools to unlock

1:08the massive potential of climate finance both to solve the climate challenge right all this excess atmospheric carbon needs to go somewhere but also to unlock the potential of this new financial revolution that's going to take place at the intersection of digital finance and climate finance and in order to do so we've built a public proof of stake

1:36blockchain that's focused on creating transparency accountability and financial innovation in carbon markets and climate climate finance more broadly definitely in great intro gregory and there are so many issues that you can tackle from different directions in climate finance this is a global problem and there's a lot of people working on it and i'm

2:00curious the approach that you took when you started regen network what were some of the problems that you were most specifically worried about and that you narrowed in on and that you were most interested in introducing blockchain and distributed ledgers to solve these problems yeah well there's a couple of big issues climate finance generally carbon markets specifically

2:24are really you know we're talking about a public goods accounting issue we're we're talking about either internalizing costs that have been previously externalized like emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or funding public goods directly where you can't necessarily you know enclose and privatize the good because everybody's going to benefit from a clean healthy planet

2:51and yet we all depend on it at the same time it's a fundamental part of operating a business and it turns out that blockchains are uniquely well suited and as we all know people talk a lot about funding public goods in the blockchain space and you know why is that what are the attributes of blockchain that make it well situated to solving this problem

3:15well the first is a public ledger so having transparency in our case it's enormously important to understand the structure of a claim around a carbon credit currently carbon markets are very opaque and it's extraordinarily expensive to audit a carbon carbon claim you essentially have to have a staff of phd professionals who can dig in to a lot of paperwork

3:45pdfs track data down in order to audit a claim so you know our value proposition is to work to lower the marginal cost of auditing a claim to as close to zero as possible so that any stakeholder in the system can understand if what's taking place is fair if what's taking place if the impact that's being claimed really is the impact that's happening somewhere on

4:11earth so in our case i think i sort of you know i think i alluded to this earlier but didn't i wasn't very specific we're very focused on natural climate solutions we're very focused on soil health forest biodiversity conservation water quality this ecological state how healthy our planet is and how effectively natural ecosystems are sequestering

4:36carbon out of the atmosphere and that's because those are the places that have the most ability to stack what we would refer to as co benefits or multiple public benefits like reducing flood risk goes hand in hand with sequestering more carbon into your soil so those are two different benefits that can accrue from a land steward a farmer in this case

4:59changing their practices and stewarding their land better but how do you account for that and how do you create an asset class that allows us to realign the incentives of the multiple stakeholders that benefit from that public good outcome definitely and those are great initiatives gregory and you're right about the transparency that's super important

5:21especially because it seems often it's cheaper for corporations to cut corners and pay a fine than than to go you know the long and hard way and the right way to do it and i think that's why transparency is going to be so key moving forward that's right it's well it's going to be a transformation i mean i think we are entering into an era of that

5:42competition will be dictated by how effectively you can provide goods and services as well as care for the public good and that's going to be the competitive dynamic of the 21st century and in fact it already start it has already started to be that with esg investing and cs the huge rise in csr corporate social

6:12responsibility what we're seeing is and you know i'll actually do a little loop here what we're seeing is the growth of a multi-trillion dollar industry in climate finance alone the world economic forum the un world bank have all estimated that our specific little niche which is natural climate solutions which is carbon being sequestered into forests oceans

6:38wetlands farmlands is going to be upwards of two trillion dollars per annum by 2050. so that's that's the same size as the oil and gas industry right so this is a big this is a big emergent industry and the infrastructure that's required for that is accountability and transparency about claims right how do you know that soil carbon is deeper and

7:04healthier this year than it was last right how do you know that forest is intact or is being reforested or regenerated this all comes down to having a data integrity layer but also the ability to assess data quality and assemble all of that into claims credits and new financial instruments and that's really where region network is innovating and

7:26providing services amazing gregory and i know your team is well on your way to providing these solutions and you're so early in this market as you mentioned it's going to be as big as oil and gas and right now it is just nowhere near that but it is going to be when people start waking up and i know that your team's been working hard you recently closed a 10.5 million

7:47dollar fundraising sale so congratulations on that's a huge step forward thank you yeah it's really fantastic to be supported by the community we have quite a healthy distribution in our initial private round we're about to shift into a public distribution of these governance tokens as well coming soon so stay tuned and yeah it's just you know it was

8:15it was a long ride i mean we've been at this since 2017 really and we decided not to do an ico in 2017 mainly because we felt like we needed we needed to have a public blockchain on one hand but we also needed to do so in a way that was mitigating regulatory uncertainty because we need to be able to stretch between we need to create a peer-to-peer network

8:42that allows for data integrity transparency and financial inclusion in this new asset class that includes institutions governments and smallholder farmers indigenous people i mean really everyone is a stakeholder in this so we took it pretty slow and it's you know it's a testament to what we've built that we managed to raise in from a large community a

9:11healthy amount over the time while deploying real you know products and services along the way so it's been quite a ride definitely quite the ride and yeah all of those parties are super important and i think large corporations as well have a big role to play and i know that your team recently had a credit sale that involved microsoft i would love it for you to elaborate on

9:32that and how they're working with this and how you're working with that yeah so we were very excited to sell all of our pilot carbon credits that had been innovated over the last couple of years to microsoft that microsoft made a pretty amazing commitment to go carbon negative which a lot of companies are starting to do and microsoft is one of the

9:58leaders of this movement and just a brief note people may say why are these big companies wanting to be carbon negative and buying credits well it's because they've recently realized that carbon emissions are a real risk and therefore they're including it as a liability on their balance sheet and therefore these big corporates basically have a fiduciary

10:23responsibility to mitigate that liability and their therefore they're purchasing carbon credits so in microsoft's case they alone along with a couple of the other leaders if they were to mitigate all of their carbon sequestration through carbon removal and i'll get into the different types of carbon credit classes in a moment but they have a very specific

10:47strategy which involves actually pulling carbon out of the atmosphere not just you know having more energy efficiency in some place around the planet but actually removing carbon out of the atmosphere is what they're purchasing and there are not enough credits in the marketplace to serve them and so they did a request for proposals we won that bid essentially we were one of the

11:10winning teams and they purchased all of the carbon credits that we had been able to issue up through this year and we're very excited to actually see that continue and to see the interest from other corporates so i alluded to sort of walking viewers through a you know quick 101 of different types of carbon credits so you could sort of think of this in three

11:33main ways there's avoided emissions which are things like avoided deforestation that's accounted for by saying how much would be emitted if we chop this forest and cut it down and that's actually what you account for which is kind of crazy or avoided emissions like you got your coal power plant more efficient and so the delta the change between what you

11:58were polluting and what you're polluting now is what's accounted for in the carbon credit so that's one type another type is actual carbon removal or carbon drawdown where you're able to account for carbon being sequestered and stored into for instance a living system like soil and you're able to account for the permanence of that how long it's going to be stored

12:20and you know the final way is carbon removal into long-term systems where they're pumping you know liquid carbon back down into the earth's crust and these sorts of things and so there's sort of three different types of carbon markets we're focused on the natural solutions that give as i was noting earlier the most co-benefits that's amazing gregory and to have

12:44such great partners early on and to have all of these different ways to work together with all these different parties it seems like the options are endless and you're really gonna have to narrow your focus down and have your team you know working hard on getting out the functionality that you need to get out in the right order could you allude

13:04to where your platform is at right now and sort of what are the next steps within throughout the summer of 2021 that you're that you're planning on working in terms of the product yeah so we just launched our mainnet so we have a live public network which i believe is the world's first public blockchain dedicated to ecological data claims and assets so we have a global

13:28ecological ledger now that's live and over the course of the next six months or so we're going to be progressively upgrading that layer one solution for ecological accounting to bring online sort of what we would consider the minimum viable functionality which includes the credit functionality some very advanced data on and off chain data functionality

13:52governance so that people can curate credit classes so that stakeholders like corporations can govern credit classes as well as associations of monitors and verifiers so you have this sort of nested governance to ensure quality of the assets themselves so all of that is going to be coming online over the next two months or so and then proceeding for

14:17there our focus is really on empowering the community so we have our carbon plus credit class that we developed to using all open source technology and open source approaches to show people what's possible to be able to bring a new credit class to market and serve sort of a high-end buyer like microsoft with their corporate goals and really what we're

14:43wanting to do is invite a huge amount of creative participation so that people can use this public network to launch their own ecological applications new credit classes and really invigorate innovation in the space which has been quite constricted wow i'm looking forward to seeing that play out and especially i think the community is very important to

15:06have them involved early on and for them to help develop that ecosystem as well to be able to have them participate and i know you have the r d token i'm guessing that has a governance aspect to it in the ecosystem if you could like just elaborate on the regen token how it's involved throughout the product and the ecosystem and does it create a

15:28sustainable ecosystem for the participants that would be great yeah so the regen token is the public proof of stake governance token for the network and so that allows a holder to govern the blockchain itself so participate in governance but what are the modules that we're going to have on chain what's the what's the functionality what's the direction that we're moving as a

15:55community it also allows people to you know as i was noting sort of there's nested sort of curatorial or governance to be able to also participate in governance of credit classes and engage in the type of you know curation and quality assurance that's really going to make region network i think unique as a public approach to generating ecological assets

16:24and regent tokens give holders access to block rewards so the annual inflation of the token supply accrues to token holders who are staking their token and have their tokens at stake in order to secure the network it also accrues fees and each new credit class each new credit that's issued is a token that is secured on the

16:52layer one on the blockchain so every time a new credit class is issued exchanged retired or these new classes of ecosystem service currencies and supply chain transparency which are all applications that are currently starting to innovate and build on this public blockchain you know the more activity there is the more value accrues to the token holders and the more the

17:19token holders engage with governing the system in a way that's complementary to attract activity and to ensure quality so there's really a virtuous cycle between application developers stakeholders and token holders to really build this powerful new approach to ecological accounting definitely that is a powerful cycle gregory and i'm looking forward to

17:43seeing that grow because this is just an initiative that is so important to the whole world right now and you know we are running short on time but for those viewers that are more passionate about the climate and they want to learn more or they want to get involved in the product and the ecosystem what's the best way for them to get involved well

18:00there's definitely a few different ways the biggest way right now is probably to come come drop in our discord channel there's a lot you'll get to see quite an active community there's a lot of chatter people doing different things so you're you're more than welcome to hop in over there i'm sure we can throw a link and if you're a land steward or you're interested in

18:22purchasing credits there's sign up there's places to sign up on the website and if you're interested in participating in the public sale at some point in the future you can sign up on the website there's a spot there to just sign up and we'll let you know when that you know when we're out on exchanges and when you're even when it's able to sort of jump in

18:43and help co-create this regenerative future that we're working towards definitely and i will leave those community links in the description box below as well for the viewers thank you so much for taking the time gregory to talk about regen network and this very important initiative right now all the best with the whole products in the platform moving forward and let's follow up in

19:02the near future fantastic thanks ashton this has been fantastic you