ReFi Generation
Ep. 2 ReFi Panel with Traditional Dream Factory, Avano & Hypercerts
Ever dreamt of a world where finance fuels regeneration instead of depletion? That's what our guests TeRex, Sam, and Sophia Dew aim to create and we’re lucky enough to hear about their innovative projects on today's episode. We delve into the intriguing world of the Traditional Dream Factory, a groundbreaking endeavor to build a network of provable regenerative villages powered by blockchain technology. You'll also get a sneak peek to Refi Week @ Traditional Dream Factory.
Bring your curiosity as we venture into the promising potential of ecological benefits Hypercerts for tracking impact claims, providing an additional source of revenue for regenerative stewards of the Earth. We also chat about the upcoming ETH Online Hackathon, pushing the boundaries of regenerative finance space. Join us as we uncover how the future of finance will be a game-changer for our environment.
Ever dreamt of a world where finance fuels regeneration instead of depletion? That's what our guests TeRex, Sam, and Sophia Dew aim to create and we’re lucky enough to hear about their innovative projects on today's episode. We delve into the intriguing world of the Traditional Dream Factory, a groundbreaking endeavor to build a network of provable regenerative villages powered by blockchain technology. You'll also get a sneak peek to Refi Week @ Traditional Dream Factory.
Bring your curiosity as we venture into the promising potential of ecological benefits Hypercerts for tracking impact claims, providing an additional source of revenue for regenerative stewards of the Earth. We also chat about the upcoming ETH Online Hackathon, pushing the boundaries of regenerative finance space. Join us as we uncover how the future of finance will be a game-changer for our environment.
Welcome to Refi Generation, the podcast that talks to experts and leaders in the new frontier of regenerative finance to examine how blockchain technology is creating the next generation of environmental and humanitarian initiatives. I'm your host, cash Upton. In today's episode, we have a Refi Roundtable with T-Rex of Avano and Hardwood Stablecoin, sam, the founder of Traditional Dream Factory, and Sophia Dew, a community manager of Gitcoin and Hyperserts. Good to see you all today. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, fantastic, how about you?
Speaker 1:Can't complain. Sunny California I was really excited when you said that you were staying at the Traditional Dream Factory and that we could all hop on together. So just a few things that I thought would be cool to cover today is tell our listeners about the Traditional Dream Factory. How's ETH online going? I hear you're doing an online hackathon right now, t-rex. Discuss some of the MRV challenges in the space, like we talked about on our last conversation, t-rex, and then just finish up with, while you all are here in the space, and what's inspiring you right now in Refi.
Speaker 2:Sounds great. Please start with a brief overview of what the Traditional Dream Factory is and everything like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so I'm basically building a prototype for Refi villages. So we're using technology to create provable regenerative villages, using production technology to distribute access and governance rights on chain, and so, yeah, in the moment, sitting in the Traditional Dream Factory, we've been just building for the last three years and now we have all the permitting plan and so on to start building it. Also, I guess one of the big aspects of TGF is we're building a work-based conservation network. So they've also built a network of these spaces and it's based on regenerative land scholarship principles. So basically, every land that enters the network has to abide by certain principles. But, yeah, basically, once the land is under conservation, we issue access tokens to come and live on the land, and we're currently developing and co-living and co-housing for the type here in Portugal.
Speaker 2:And I met Sam at East Denver around two years ago and was very convinced by the story of the Traditional Dream Factory and being able to co-create dreams together of what we want to see in this reality. And through that I've been able to continue to connect in our web three space and end up being able to purchase some of the tokens that are affiliated with the traditional dream factory here Next week. Well, on Friday actually, we're starting a read by week here in the traditional dream factory, so we're going to be able to bring all sorts of people from gender to finance together and, yeah, talk further.
Speaker 2:And how do you come about?
Speaker 4:I thought about traditional dream factory because of my contributions within Cabin Dow and so a lot of what they hope to do and what they eventually do is very similar things, and so that was my original interest inside of the entire web three ecosystem as a whole and I was super excited about the idea of regenerative co-living and on all those principles and it was solidified this past month when I stayed at funding the Commons Berlin residency, and I think there's a lot of impact that could happen when you have a bunch of people within the web three ecosystem who are all interested in seeing a similar world and using this tooling in a specific way to achieve the missions they want to see, and bringing them together to collaborate and discuss synergies and figure out how to actually move the needle forward on a lot of these very big ideas. How do we actually make this tangible and practical and move the needle forward? So that's what I see TDF doing is actually like putting their mouth or their foot is getting these things implemented, and I wanted to be part of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that really is so cool. My last guest was the white buffalo land trust, which is a regenerative farm in Santa Barbara County, and so they launched an NFT campaign to kind of help raise funds, build community. And this is kind of like the other side of the coin, which is like you guys are using maybe like the broader web three refi fundamental tools to really implement this. And I love what you said about, you know, provable regeneration. So I'd love to dive in a little bit. I always like to kind of ask, like, what are the actual like web three refi blockchain mechanisms at play that are helping traditional dream factory, you know, make its mission come true?
Speaker 3:I guess primarily like we've been in partnership with open forest protocols, for example. That means that we can actually track, like, how many tons of biomass we are stocking in in our land, so that's like a trace of how much carbon was sequestered in. But we also want to track things like biodiversity, and so we're talking with projects like simplex DNA, as I'm looking to use EDNA to be able to see and quantifies amount of biodiversity that comes through your land, just by doing water samples. And then we also want to do tracking of, like, all the retention down the road, being able to show, like, what is our impact on the water table by example, because that's really like a larger scale regeneration play for Portugal, where it's like drying out quickly, and you have a chance of this application in the heavier peninsula. So first, yeah, that's kind of the priority and what we're working on.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I'm very excited for with Refi week is we have 1000 trees. Is it that will be planting on the ground as this Refi collaborative, and just being able to get our hands in the ground and dirty and that happens for a lot of people here day to day just being able to be with the land and regenerate it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and then a project I'm working on to is creating hyper starts for this tree planting initiative and how that can also lead into tracking these impact planes and creating these impact certificates and potentially another source of revenue for TTF and keep as people make it an impact. There's also another source of funding that gets retroactively allocated.
Speaker 1:So, fia, I want to learn a little bit more about that. That was really cool. I was looking at how hyper-serts are, a new protocol for funding and rewarding impacts. So what you're saying, if people are doing certain regenerative actions, is the hyper-sert kind of like the on-chain proof of that, and then it can be monetized through carbon credits or something like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly. So hyper-sert doesn't specify the specific funding mechanism that is used, so different funding mechanisms can be used and that's still a bit open. But essentially what it does is it's that impact certificate, so it has that proof of impact and you can put that within the metadata on the actual hyper-sert and you can point evaluators to the hyper-sert to certify if whether these things are actually moving along. The funding mechanism isn't fully fleshed out yet and that is intentional because a lot of people have different ways that they want to fund, based off of different impacts, like a carbon market is a good example. So ultimately, what hyper-sert has is this giant data ledger, right with all this different data that can be indexed in different ways depending on the funding systems that are in there Gotcha.
Speaker 1:So a carbon credit is one funding mechanism. There could also be biodiversity credits, eco-credits, all those things Exactly. Yeah, that's really great, you guys familiar with Timo of Basin Dow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, cool, because this is exactly what his whole thing is about is doing good regenerative actions shouldn't just be throwing money at a philanthropy. There should be a way to incentivize a sustainable economic model too. Right, because it doesn't just have to be an economic capitalism system. It could be something that is a little bit more like pole living, where everyone is contributing to the regeneration of this land and then seeing the benefits of it.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, one of those benefits is that we get to cook together every day and we get to eat some of the food that comes directly from the land. Yeah and yeah. Being a digital nomad, it's really nice to have that sort of homegrown feel.
Speaker 4:I mean, I think it's obvious that our food is grown right, like that's something, that we understand that process, but having that really close connection of seeing the food, touching it, harvesting the food, cooking it and then putting it in your body, I think that connection with the land is incredibly important and for anyone who passes through and gets to do that, I will have these ripple effects, I think, throughout.
Speaker 3:And the best thing for us is that, with this playground where any refi protocol can come and plant some seeds and try out whatever they want to, and we're super open for that. And we're like an education center also, like we have a learning hub on the website and so we come to this place where you can actually learn about refi and can try out the different techniques. And we would love to start having like little QR codes that are on the place so you can actually see how do we do carbon sequestration, how do we measure it, how do you do these different things? And just pointing towards the projects, because we also get a lot of requests from village builders like I've come from that space like also organizing for rebuild, and so we bring together a bunch of people building reshotted villages and all of these folks are also looking for how to actually make this viable and like what are the technologies of the demand? So seeing being that bridge between technology and communities within the context of regeneration is yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that was an incredible way to capture one of my like pain points within the Web3 ecosystem is it's a lot of really big ideas and really cool theories, but having safe playgrounds to actually experiment and test out these ideas in practice is really difficult, and so I see TDF as that place to actually test out some of these theories, see how they're implemented in the small container and when they work, figure out how can they scale and create impact at a mass, at a greater scale.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we're going to likely to be doing with this tree planting is an idea that Monty from REF, by Dow, shared like two days ago, and there's this framework called the ecological benefits framework, and the ecological benefits framework is developed by an organization called lexicon and it's going to be adopted by, and is already getting adopted by, large scale organizations internationally, and what we're looking to be able to do during the tree planting event is potentially create an ecological benefits framework, hyper-cert, so combine some of the leading frameworks for environmental and ecological monitoring with the Hypersert, so we can actually start to create this value system with these localized actions of the tree planting too.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay cool, because that was something that when we were talking last time to you, actually it was like the actual on the ground MRV, actual collection of data, but that's still something that was a little bit being worked out. So how is that developed over the last year? What is the DMRV space like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the DMRV space is a very hot subject right now, especially with the need for transparency that has been demonstrated from the larger carbon credit certifiers and how the data is going to be able to make sure that the trees are in the ground or whatever regenerative action is happening.
Speaker 2:And this has led to several large-scale organizations popping up, and two of those that I would mention is the MRV collective and then Demeter.
Speaker 2:And what the MRV collective is doing is it is going to be doing an accelerator with corporations so that they can better understand why they need to be monitoring ESG-related activities and then bringing in corporate individuals so that they can better support the development of ESG.
Speaker 2:And then, at the same time, what Demeter is doing is Demeter is developing a decentralized monitoring, reporting and verification stack, and it has got support from Filecoin Green, so it's been able to build out a data claim resolution NFT system from Filecoin Green. And recently, with the Ethonline hackathon, we completed a project called Code Connect, which is around how do you incentivize open source code contributors, such as the people that have developed methodologies from Stanford around ecosystem service valuation, to be stakeholders in this environment and really push forward the regenerative finance movement. So we're going to be combining this data claim resolution NFT with Code Connect and creating this DMRV system into the future. So that's where we are with the DMRV space from two of the larger organizations that I can see out there, and it's definitely still something that is going to benefit the regenerative finance space immensely once those technologies are out there. More so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll have to do a follow-up on those. Come together a little bit more, sam. Do you have extra thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:And ForestBird call is also a great one, and they're starting to do carbon credits through their methodologies, so they're unique ones.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we kind of yeah, we really enjoyed OpenPorest protocol because they were really quick at coming to market, was like a product that was actually usable and so, like we were looking at being pragmatic and what can we actually use today?
Speaker 3:And so with OpenPorest we can. Already we have a field even that goes out and takes samples, and so we just take those measurements and then that gets combined with validators, just checking that the data is correct. So that was, yeah, nice and scalable approach and, yeah, playing with that. But I'm really curious about like simplex DNA and like basically being able to add more these data streams and then seeing how that can combine into something. We're also going to be adding some more than monitoring sensors now in November with SmartHoods, who is one of the partners here on site doing some engineering, and so that would enable us to track, like gray water production and usage of the different waters and so on, so we can actually track that we are, if we're inputting more water into the land and what we're taking out. It should be a yeah the goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool. And then Sophia, I guess where HyperCerts comes in is that's like the publishing of data to have it beyond chain.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 4:That's the whole point.
Speaker 4:It's like we have all these other evaluators that all come in and create these, and the more evaluators the better, right, and so a hyper sort to have a claim of, like we took out this much CO2 from the planet and you have open forest protocol, you have maybe another evaluator, all of these pointing to this hyper sort, and that just makes that that value, that impact claim that much more so.
Speaker 4:It's this greater data layer that I can. Another side project that I'm working on is hyper boards where you could take all these different hyper certs and actually this is not public yet, but display it on a hyper board. So you take all these hyper certs and now we have a TDF hyper board that shows all these different projects that are working on and the hope is you can donate straight to that hyper board and and it trickles through and as these impacts become even more significant and the evaluators grow, the physical display of the hyper cert grows on the board and there's some cool little rendering happening with that and the excitement behind there is get this cool on chain data and display it in a place that really resonates with donors and people. You want to stakeholders and get them involved.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, yeah, so people aren't like digging through ether scan to like verify it, making a dashboard for people to cool. Cool yeah, we all love that rendering.
Speaker 2:And when you're able to play that front end, it enables your organization to like be even more that even more reputable. Like this is a fantastic mechanism to back the credibility of any organization that's claiming they're doing regenerate work is, yeah, this board that's going to be developed and that interlinking that, the hyper certs and verifiable data claims and everything like that.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, you're participating in eth online, right, T-rex. What's going on with that right now is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're in the final phases with eth online and we are about to be the judging round, right after this call for our project around code connect, and what we developed with code connect is a code base that you can connect into a GitHub repository and once you connect to the GitHub repository it connects to a safe. Then the contributors of that repository can vote on how valuable any contribution was to that code base and, based upon the value of the contribution, the contributors get rewarded accordingly. And this was built on top of Merge Stern, which was a previous code base, but we added things to it and we deployed it on base, and base is one of the newer blockchains out there. It was created by or affiliated with point base, and point base has had various regenerative finance support, project support, so they supported yeah 2K in the early days and everything like that.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 2:They're a side chain of optimism. So by being able to push forward our code base with the base chain, we are qualifying for the optimism retroactive public good funding round, which is distributing around $30 million worth of funds to public goods in the coming months. And yeah, we just put our proposal in for Demeter to the Retroactive Public Good funding round, so that's fantastic. And my life actually has been very filled with hackathons recently because I'm also organizing a hackathon for COP28.
Speaker 2:So there's going to be a finance hackathon for COP28 that is open to the general public to participate in from now until November 15 is when the project submission deadline is, and our hope with this is to be able to bring regenerative finance to the international leaders that are present at COP28. And right now we have individuals that will be attending this event, like the Green Sheik, who has been one of the prime environmental activists for the UAE in recent history, so it's a fantastic opportunity for ReFi in general to be able to portray the activity that they're doing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, wanted to add a quick comment about Optimism Superchain, my work at Gitcoin. I'm working on launching a public goods network which is a layer two. Also, it's equimally the base very similar. It's like an Optimism Superchain and the goal for that layer two is all the sequencer fees just go directly back to public goods. And so in a very similar vein, but those public goods will be defined at a much broader scope. So hopefully things that are tangentially related to the things TDF is working on will be defined as a public good.
Speaker 1:Cool. Yeah, we got to get you on to do a full episode on that. That's really cool. And I did want to give a shout out about Gitcoin's next round, November 15 to 29. So we'll definitely link it and make sure folks support that Cool. Well, we'll just about at the end of time today. I'd love to just get each of your perspectives. If someone new to the space says what is ReFi?
Speaker 3:Well, I'd like to ask the question what is regeneration? And to me, regeneration is more life, more quantity of life, more quality of life, more diversity of life. So to me, regenerative finance means creating the means towards doing that. No way. So yeah, it would be much more fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't heard that answer, yet I like that.
Speaker 2:Reimagining our economic system from one of exploitation to one that does just that, and increasing life. And yeah, there's so many different ways and different forms that ReFi is going to take into the future.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and my definition is very technical. I think, if you, if you see typical economic models, their incentive or capitalistic models, there's certain incentives that are aligned, and what we ReFi means is how do you change these incentives and these alignments to be aligned with this form of regeneration or things that help the planet? Is how I a little bit define it and specifically using some of these principles within DeFi, like transparency, like co co governance, how we can collectively make decisions, and that's why blockchain as a tool is really important for ReFi. These are public goods or things that we all co own and should make co decisions about how this money is generated to or allocated to go towards funding regenerate, regenerative projects. So that's a bit of my definition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I love that you brought in the DeFi angle, because that's so true. I mean, defi really did change how economics plays in the world and can make it more equitable and transparent and open to all, so that that really is a cool way to kind of close that loop. I love, I love it, guys, I really appreciate it. Talking to all you and I want to you know, do follow ups and definitely talk more about what each of you all are doing individually. So we'll we'll do a little longer form next time with you, with each of you. Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the ReFi generation production, including the music mixing and editing. As a reminder, none of this is financial advice, and feedback is the breakfast of champions. Please subscribe to our show and send your thoughts, critiques and ideas for future content. Be well, take care of each other and do something good today.