Why Regen is truly revolutionary
1. tending to or characterized by regeneration.
Regen is a blockchain-based network creating a global economy around incentivising people to create, invest in and promote ecologically regenerative practices that restore and enhance the natural environment, across a broad range of measures including biodiversity, soil organic carbon and water quality. Because it is blockchain based, it has its own monetary and agreement system with a publicly verifiable ledger of transactions. This post explains the Regen network, deciphers some of the more esoteric blockchain concepts and sets out why Regen is truly revolutionary in its ability to facilitate new ways of organising society around positive earth stewardship.
Often, in practice, funds are required to invest in or subsidise new practices as they develop, so they can compete with the current market. At its most basic level, Regen offers a platform for parties looking to invest in regenerative practices to team up with suitable land stewards, giving them access to money to make change.
The regenerative path is difficult. Our political systems are cumbersome, slow, regularly deadlocked and often resistant to the rate of policy change we need. There is also the question of how projects are financed, and how the flow of funds is audited and tracked over time. Fraud is difficult to police when global distances and banking jurisdictions separate payer and recipient. Because Regen has its own currency, payments are brought into one network that is fully verifiable and publicly available via the blockchain ledger, which is very satisfactory for tracking money, especially when public funds are being spent.
Regen has also delivered a way for contractual agreements on regenerative practices to be digitally signed with little bureaucratic friction, on a global scale. The Regen blockchain uses its underlying functionality to run smart contracts, which are simply code-based agreements, as opposed to an agreement drawn up by a lawyer in the classical sense. This does not mean Regen will be entirely automated: certified organisations will still be needed to produce industry-standard agreements and resolve disputes as the network develops.
There is also the major question of how we measure and monitor regenerative practices on a global scale, make sure that information is trustworthy and auditable, and use it to stimulate scientific rigour and improve those 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 essential to quantify regenerative outcomes. Technology is making significant advances in monitoring parameters such as above-ground biomass, surface water quality, land conversion and net primary productivity. The automated methods include remote sensing, in-situ drones and devices, and satellites.
Regen has created a network that can take in this data and use it to automate payments for agreements on regenerative practices and their outcomes. Many parameters, such as biodiversity, still need human input (for example habitat and species surveys) to verify claims. So while the process is becoming increasingly automated, certified organisations will act as oracles for part of the data going forward. Eventually it may be possible to build a picture of the globe from sensing devices, enhanced by human surveys and updated constantly, in light spectrums we cannot see and at scales we can barely imagine as earth-dwelling citizens.
If we as a society are to transition towards regenerative ecological practices, Regen is a platform where we could bring together data from the Earth's ecological vital signs and coordinate action. It is open 24/7, globally accessible, antifragile, permissionless, operating at internet speed and modifiable. Crucially, it draws on sensory data to determine whether agreement outcomes have been met, and processes the payments.
Another function of Regen worth attention, and possibly the most controversial, is its ability to mint new tokens that represent parts of real-world ecology, or even abstract ecological processes with measurable outputs. Regen could mint a token representing a regional snapshot of measured ecological health and allow it to be traded against tokens from other regions on a global exchange. This would turn the current value and pricing of ecology into a global index and place the Earth on a global stage within the economic market.