ReFi Generation
Ep. 4 Funding the Commons with Beth McCarthy
In today's episode we explore the future of public goods funding with Beth McCarthy, my old UC Berkeley comrade and a big player in the regenerative finance space. Our dive into Funding the Commons illuminates creative infrastructure being built that is helping secure funding and reward impact in nontraditional ways.
We discuss how the merging of on-ground MRV data with on-chain data is a pivotal innovation in the climate space. Beth emphasizes the importance of attestation and impact evaluation, the backbone of projects at Funding the Commons, and how these efforts are crucial in defining precise metrics for success. Our discussion extends to the awe-inspiring bison rewilding project in Romania, showcasing how the Sovereign Nature Initiative is not just restoring ecosystems, but also reconceptualizing environmental contributions of species.
With the Funding the Commons conference on the horizon, we share our excitement for the upcoming gathering and the further allignment of ReFi with traditional sectors, enjoy!
In today's episode we explore the future of public goods funding with Beth McCarthy, my old UC Berkeley comrade and a big player in the regenerative finance space. Our dive into Funding the Commons illuminates creative infrastructure being built that is helping secure funding and reward impact in nontraditional ways.
We discuss how the merging of on-ground MRV data with on-chain data is a pivotal innovation in the climate space. Beth emphasizes the importance of attestation and impact evaluation, the backbone of projects at Funding the Commons, and how these efforts are crucial in defining precise metrics for success. Our discussion extends to the awe-inspiring bison rewilding project in Romania, showcasing how the Sovereign Nature Initiative is not just restoring ecosystems, but also reconceptualizing environmental contributions of species.
With the Funding the Commons conference on the horizon, we share our excitement for the upcoming gathering and the further allignment of ReFi with traditional sectors, enjoy!
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, I talk with Beth McCarthy on Funding the Commons, which was the birthplace of protocol labs, hyper-serts and Filecoin. Green Funding the Commons has organized a real-world asset track and what I especially resonated with was their focus on high-quality programming and providing opportunities for rigorous discourse, which we can never have too much of. We discussed how to integrate ecological impacts and I especially was excited to hear about Sovereign Nature Initiative, which is tying ecological data streams to bison restoration. We discussed upcoming Funding the Commons events and focused on the April conference in San Francisco. They enjoyed talking with Beth. She was one of my first friends at UC Berkeley and really excited to be in the Refi space and get to hear what she's up to, so I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi Beth, how you doing today?
Speaker 2:Hi, very good, Glad to see you and yeah, reporting from Berlin here.
Speaker 1:I love it. Thanks for the internet allowing us to talk on the other sides of the world. Well, being old college friends, it was really exciting when we met again at East Denver two years ago and to both be in the Refi space. So go, bears. I had a great conversation with Sophia Dew earlier this week and we had a lot of good things to talk about with the public goods funding, ecosystem as a whole and hyper-serts and it got me really excited for what you and I are going to talk about today. Yeah, we'll keep it kind of organic, but want to learn how you got into the Refi space, go over what funding the commons is doing and some of the biggest focus right now, how hyper-serts are being used with funding the commons and then what sort of upcoming events people should be looking into and just kind of like a broader ecosystem review of the space. So sound good, perfect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, to talk a little bit about how I got in the Refi space, which I think is also kind of overview of that space emerging is, you know, basically, when I joined crypto, then I was involved with Starfish Hacker Space in San Francisco, which doesn't exist after COVID, but was a really awesome kind of grounds for thinking about what I was really obsessed with at the time and have continued to be interested in, which is how to fund common resources or fund places with common resources, and also, you know, including more than financial contributions, but giving creating art for the space, like doing the work of keeping a space going in a physical sense, like contributing to the kind of collective branding that emerges and brings more opportunities for everyone, and just finding different ways to represent those type of contributions and incentivize people to make them and be really deeply involved.
Speaker 2:And that grew out of the landscape that we're both familiar with, like co-op environment at Berkeley and just in San Francisco in general at that time, and these different ways of sharing resources and space as a collective, and so looking for infrastructures to build out systems that were self-sustaining and represented those kind of interests. So at that time in 2018, I was like okay, well, there's a lot of housing situations I know that are functioning in this communal way, but what does that look like for a collective that's also sharing physical space, that is mirrored by these digital communities when telegram was first taking off and that sort of thing, and so, while I was looking for that type of tooling, came across the Dow space and I was like this is perfect, like there's already people at Dow stack, for example, building what we are looking into, and so from there it was super deep down this rabbit hole that was just emerging at that time of Dow's, and I think that space has transformed itself to be the ReFi space, which then is in the process of kind of forking and evolving again to become this really specifically focused public goods space. So, yeah, I think has been a really interesting journey where, as tooling becomes more streamlined and accessible, more people understand how to get involved and are able to get involved, and then funding for these type of projects becomes both more robust and accessible. So, yeah, tracking these patterns I think is really interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. I love the Berkeley co-op model was kind of like the seed that got the brain going. That's really cool, sweet. So, yeah, what can you tell us about funding the comments? I've done a bit of a deep dive, but it's really exciting, kind of all the events that you guys are putting on. So what's the focus?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's been super cool with funding the comments, because we started out as part of the network goods arm of protocol labs, and so that included hyper-serts, open source observer, a lot of work together with sustainable blockchain summit although that was part of Filecoin Green at that time and so it has been really interesting since I got involved in July organizing the real world assets track of funding the comments and then came on full time soon after to do experience design with them Basically the ideas to have both high quality programming but also to provide opportunities for kind of rigorous interdisciplinary discourse among like builders, academics and funders.
Speaker 2:And this year we've expanded to also have residency programs.
Speaker 2:So we had a month long residency at the Moose collective space in Berlin, which is an organization and physical space I'm super involved with here, and that was a really awesome opportunity to have 30 different builders come together and work on projects there.
Speaker 2:And then we also now are getting more into doing what we call applied research. So that's the experimentations with building hyper-serts, proof of concepts and funding flows that you probably talked to Sophia about, and also kind of providing meta analyses about, like, what is going on in this rapidly evolving space, with the idea of hopefully closing the gap between the type of contributions that projects and the you know building web through public goods want to receive and some of the challenges that people on Twitter Twitter, I'm sure you often see are complaining about. You know those voting structures broken, this access to funds by you know, small projects that don't have any marketing, people don't have, you know, access to these funds. Or how do you reconcile projects that have VC funding to actually get funds and all of these kinds of questions that are kind of overarching issues for the space that we are looking at and hacking on in our applied research and then using our platform of throwing these different events to continue jamming on solutions there.
Speaker 1:Basically, I love it, yeah, so that's a good umbrella to kind of encompass the broader public goods ecosystem. So let's dig into the hyper-search portion, because that's what I was just talking about with Sophia. So you know, from everything that kind of I've been looking at and just trying to wrap my head around, it's a hyper-search is kind of acting as like a decentralized database for proving different impact and then allowing for either like retroactive funding of a project that's already been in the space, and then, from my understanding, there's also like an evaluation process where an evaluator will look at the impact that that actual project had. So, yeah, let's expand on that a little bit more, because I know you're deeper in the space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So one thing that I think is really exciting about it is, you know I had mentioned briefly this original situation with Hacker space that we had in San Francisco and how my dream at that time was, like, how do we get funding that's directed to different types of contributions that all come together for a whole? But, you know, can be hard to you know, write out Perspectively, or know exactly what is going to happen, or you know. So, if you want to be able to have like this retrospect, retroactive way of being, like okay, we raised you know this amount of money, how did these type of contributions Impact that? And like you know what have to evaluate that. But then also, yeah, to be able to show, like highlight the different types of contributions and who made those.
Speaker 2:So a great example of the first real rollout and Santiation that they did, in my understanding, is it Zuzaloo. So we just had the Kind of Zuzaloo pop-up city and Istanbul, like right before Dev Connect, so about a month ago, and that was very cool because different people did a lot of different functions of organizing it. Like there was the core organizing team that figured out all the logistics of the space that it took place. Like I organized the public goods day with funding the commons and that was super cool and so each of those pieces fit together into making a really Coherent hole. That was super useful. So the hyper search that they issued for that was a way of honoring those contributions.
Speaker 2:And then for a future Zuzaloo, what I assume is gonna happen is going from Like retroactive funding, you know, for these different types of contributions, to being able to show, like you know, it made this amount of impact to give that funding. Here's how we can use those metrics to Feed into retro I mean, sorry, to prospective funding, so that people, you know, aren't having to work for free and then get paid after or whatever. So, yeah, very all over the place explanation, but yeah, I'm just really excited about new ways to track contributions and incentivize people to get involved and also to record like a record of what they're doing so that people understand all of these different parts that are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really cool way to look at it, because one use case that I saw was like for a get coin round. They were Projects were able to award a hyper cert for people who contribute it to that, so it sounds like a lot of it is like tracking the the impact of who supported a project as being one of the use cases. Am I correct in thinking that there's also it's gonna be like tracking ecological impact of a project, like could you have a hyper cert for Biodiversity or water quality or carbon sequestration?
Speaker 2:It's so funny that you asked that because I was having an exact topic with project.
Speaker 2:I mean a exact discussion about how to incorporate that with a project that I collaborate with called sovereign nature initiative. So I super recommend looking into them. But a major thing that they do is have our right now is having NFTs that are tied to ecological data streams, for example, about various dolphins or bison or you know these different animals that they support, and tandem with conservation initiatives, and so a specific thing that we are Hopefully gonna start collaborating on with hyper certs on soon is how to actually integrate these ecological data streams so that the type of Impact that's measured is not just you know on-chain impact of like you know these different people contributed or whatever, or self-reported impact of like you know X amount of people came to this conference because of you know Y amount of Marketing effort or whatever, but like to also have actual you know streams of data, which, yeah, I think this is in terms of impact evaluation Directions that we're really excited about, like being able to have that objective External and like self verifying tie in a super important.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome, yeah, so it sounds like, yeah, the space is still progressing that way, and that's what a lot of my guests have talked about is like the Connection between mr V, the measure report, verify on the ground data, and then that integration with on-chain Data is still where the puzzle piece is kind of coming together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I expect to see that as being one of the major innovations that happens this year as we hopefully move into the bull market, because I know that there's these twin themes of a Focus on like attestation and then a focus on impact evaluation and metric definition and how those themes interact with each other, which are definitely our few major areas of research at funding the commons right now. And so figuring out, like the same as the Dow space really matured and exploded once on, chain tools such as snapshot and no, so safe became Safe, as I guess it's called now yeah, you know, became Standard like, I think, figuring out some kind of typical flows that can be composed together for integrating mr V with on-chain data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's gonna be super exciting, so well yeah, I was listening to a refied podcast with Monty and Doug from ecological benefits framework, working at the Lexicon Foundation, and one really cool thing I learned about was the Bluetooth the founding of Bluetooth and how Bluetooth is actually a nonprofit and it's what they call as a digital handshake, and so it was this like a nonprofit protocol that then allowed all these other things to talk to each other. But at the end of the day, bluetooth is just Bluetooth off doing its own thing, not trying to, like you know, make a bunch of money just allowing communication.
Speaker 2:Well, that is, yeah, considering how essential that is, you know, to everything. And I mean, this gets into a topic that I'm super interested in, which is, like, what are these different infrastructure layers that we kind of take for granted and you know also how to fund those and make sure that they are getting, yeah, the kind of kind of support and recognition that they deserve? Which, also, to give a shout out to another project, that's super interesting is fund sharing and streaming model from DRIPS Network that allows projects to always have some, you know, basically like a royalty-ite payment going into infrastructure components and the people that build them. Yeah, I think that this is super cool. So, yeah, number one, like funding infrared tooling, and then number two, like recognizing what the different ways that those pieces can compose together. Yeah, I just think it's a super exciting place that we are at right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, yeah, and I'll check out. You said sovereign nature initiative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm right, Cool.
Speaker 1:Do you know what specifically they're doing with Bison? Because that's like a kind of a really big passion on the side for me helping restore Bison.
Speaker 2:So, oh, okay, that was awesome. So I don't know specifically, I will have to look that back up, but I have been told about it a lot. Basically, there's this area of Romania where Bisons had become extinct, I think, and they're getting rewilded, basically, and so this certain conservation initiative, basically they're getting reintroduced to this area of Romania and the summary of what it says we wilder. A collaboration between WWF Romania and local communities supports this effort of, yeah, basically providing infrastructure to these Bison, and I think this is such a cool use case because it's like, how do you tell that the health of the ecosystem is existing in tandem with these Bison? And just it's measures that are totally different from the kind that we were interested in when I was working at Toucan, for example, about elements that influence carbon credits, versus here, where it's like about biodiversity and health of the ecosystem as a whole. I mean, both are super important for growing out the impact markets that we're dealing with right now. But yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 1:I mean Bison themselves could earn a lot of eco credits because they provide such an incredible tool to the ecosystem in terms of like water and species diversity and grassland restorations. And yeah, the way they graze has a lot of benefit and all that. And when they wallow in the ground, they make these.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God.
Speaker 1:They impact the dirt which then creates like vernal pools in the spring and help birds and all that. So, yeah, they play a really cool role no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Okay, that is so cute and I didn't know about that. So, yeah, I really look forward to talking to you about this more once I understand more about that project, which I like just got announced basically, okay, yeah, this would be so cool, cause I mean, that's also like in terms of these whole kind of area of research that, like TerraZero is working on, for example, about, like you know, chorus, like self-funding, like self-determining forests and stuff like that. Or also, you know, kind of a tagline that we had at Touquian that I think is familiar to people in the Refi space, of, like incorporating the earth as a stakeholder. The idea of, you know, supporting the Bisons but also recognizing, like, the impact, like these kind of fractals of impact that each of the yeah, each of the contributors has, is really interesting.
Speaker 2:Or yeah, thinking about them as being a type of contributor, not just a supported thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, yeah, flipping, kind of flipping it over, like no, that's like support the Bison cause. They're supporting us and yeah.
Speaker 2:That makes me interested in thinking of. You know, a project of like bees or something like that. Like, yeah, what are the different types of conceptions that you can have for playing with all of this? So, yeah, I just I think that it will be so interesting to see more, more conservation initiatives being brought in, and especially, you know, to this idea of like where is Refi evolving these days? Like for like the general conception of that to move beyond speculative markets about carbon, and also, you know, more ways of rewarding biodiversity and stuff like I'm sure you're familiar with Gain Forest as well, like some very awesome folks who are actually in our builder residency in September and, you know, basically having MRV data streams from citizen scientists and yeah, anyway, some very cool projects.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love it. Yeah, definitely gotta have you back on to keep talking about all these cool projects in the future. You touched on it briefly, like where the Refi space is evolving and how funding the commons is doing a lot of you know public good, specific focus, which you know is regenerative in nature typically and because there's funding mechanisms tied to it, like it's part of Refi but there's like a niche or it's broader. So like just having you, you having been in the space for the last you know two to three years, like how do you see it evolving? Like, where do we still need to improve? Like and we talked about, maybe like the MRV, the data attestation side of things. Like where do you see some other areas like improvement and progression in the Refi space?
Speaker 2:So I think it's interesting with within the Refi space, I feel like there was this kind of identity crisis that happened at some point last year where it was like maybe because of you know, getting greenwashing criticism or like running into the you know challenges that are like definitely not unique to Refi, but I feel like happens a lot when Web3 like comes to a point of like needing to take its next step by interacting with, like the traditional outside world or whatever, and so kind of losing the way in terms of like you know, what is the shared goal, or is there ever a shared goal?
Speaker 2:I mean, it kind of reminds me of yeah, I was reading something about like the surrealist movement like a hundred years ago, and how they had tried to get, you know, these different cells of people that were doing this like surrealist art and whatnot, to have to unite around a political manifesto.
Speaker 2:And they were all like you know, we're just United by having these kind of shared interests, but like we're not a I mean not even homogenous, but you know, we're not like a coherent group and I, and then it was fine, like they were just like okay, we're all surrealist, but yeah. So I think that's maybe the point where Refine movement is at like. I think it's interesting how, like some of the big funders, for example, as, like you know, financial pressures would be bearing down on the industry then for some reason it emerged that there was kind of a equivalency between being too associated with like a refi banner and Having that somehow seem Correlated with not finding product market fit or something. And so I think but you know, I yeah, I don't really understand how that came about, I just observe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like to your surrealism Example, like they're trying to force homogenity and it doesn't have to be like that. Like it can be fractioned, it can be different. You know, ecosystems are kind of coming together with that shared purpose and, yes, and bank and free didn't help the perception of its blockchain technology on one side. And then there's, you know, crypto, token BS on the other side, but the, the underlying blockchain tech is Really what's what's fueling a lot of this innovation and that's what we're trying to dive into here, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So I think you know, I think it's really interesting to observe this stuff. But I really am excited about this impact evaluation direction. I know at funding the commons, you know we will soon be focusing again on bringing like more of a climate of nature specific focus to events to continue what sustainable blockchain summit started, which you know was one of my favorite conferences various times when that was happening, and but I think also, you know, our upcoming conference in San Francisco will be two tracks.
Speaker 2:That's like one that's AI and one that's about open source infrastructure, and so I think there's this kind of question of like. You know, those things, like, if there's a Venn diagram of like, do those things fall in like public goods or what does that mean? Like, do people who are not in web 3 think that that's an accurate way of talking about public goods? Is Everything that's kind of impact focused considered to be regenerative, which I personally think that it is, like you know, and it's also like ideological in terms of like.
Speaker 2:When I was first Involved in the refied movement, then I was speaking a lot at conferences about like cultural aspects, like how do we build regenerative culture inside projects that then reflects across the ecosystem and I think you know that's an example of something that, as you know, the bull market became the bear market. Then there was, like you know, not able to be as much of a focus on, like regenerative culture on an individual level for people within projects. So I think, yeah, these different measures of sustainability and how to talk about them, yeah, I just continues to be super interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Yeah, not just carbon tunnel vision. There's that whole broader conversation to have about the system as a whole. Yeah, super cool, yeah. So what are some of the upcoming events? I know what's the. Is the date been set for the? San Francisco April, or when is it?
Speaker 2:so we're still figuring that out. It's either gonna be the 13th through 15th or the 20, whatever the next weekend is. That's the 23rd, I think, and yeah, and so we're still figuring out where exactly that's gonna be in the Bay Area, but looking forward to announcing that as soon as we finish talking to venues. And yeah, we definitely love to have you come speak there.
Speaker 1:Hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll put it on my calendar. So yeah, and then we're also gonna be at Dweb, and which is like a small conference, and outside of San Francisco in August and around Japan blockchain week, for I know there's some events in Tokyo and they invited us to get involved and then, yeah, main large plan is gonna be at DovCon.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's gonna be we guys have a presence at East Denver.
Speaker 2:No, so we're not gonna make it there. Okay, it's there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I cannot go back over to the US yet that early, so I love it. Yeah, I've got to be Focusing everything for April, I think.
Speaker 1:but yeah, I'm gonna see you there this time.
Speaker 2:It's like a tradition now.
Speaker 1:I know, yeah, that was the shelling point from two years ago was just such a cool kind of launch point it's. It feels like that's when a lot of momentum started to really build and that was.
Speaker 2:That was super fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was really cool seeing you on stage. So how can our listeners support the work that you are doing and stay involved and support Funding the comments?
Speaker 2:Well, definitely a major one would be coming to our conferences and joining our telegram group. Look for funding the comments on telegram and also, yeah, linked on our Twitter. And yeah, we will be sharing a lot of stuff soon about ways to get involved and some hyper search proof of concepts, and I guess an early one you can do now is if you have attended funding the comments type a, then we're issuing our first hyper search for that. But, yeah, so really looking forward to bringing some awesome content to people this year and continuing these conversations.
Speaker 1:So absolutely, and we'll put some links on the show notes so people can help get involved and really excited for the April event. So, beth, we will be in touch and see you in April. Thanks for coming on. Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the refied 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.