Ep. 8 Taking the Green Pill with Kevin Owocki

In this episode we showcase the potential of regenerative finance with none other than Kevin Owaki, the trailblazing founder of Gitcoin and host of the Green Pill podcast. We dive into how blockchain can redefine our economic landscape and impact environmental and humanitarian efforts. Gitcoin's implementation of quadratic funding has directed over $55 million towards public goods!

As we navigate the intricacies of Web3, we confront the real-world challenges of melding traditional nonprofit strategies with the often misunderstood realm of blockchain.  The episode explores how projects like Downtown Stimulus in Boulder, CO have successfully harnessed the power of blockchain for tangible impact, without getting bogged down by crypto currency complexities.

We delve into the future of impact and funding within social media and Kevin shares how decentralized social media platforms could revolutionize the way we value online ecosystems, shifting focus from ad revenue and influencers to genuine societal contributions.

I especially loved exploring the concept of mycelium finance, drawing parallels between web3 networks and the natural world's "wood-wide web." Join us and be part of a dialogue that's reimagining the nexus of technology, finance, and social good.

Links:
Kevin's Twitter
Green Pill Podcast
Gitcoin

Transcript

Kevin: 0:02

You know it's interesting. I was talking to someone two months ago and they said, to a sentence that I thought was extremely profound and I'll just repeat it here they had just been at COP28 and they said carbon is the new monocrop.

Cash: 0:27

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 talked to an OG in the ReFi space, kevin Owaki. As the founder of Gitcoin, kevin has helped to deliver over $55 million of funding for public goods through quadratic funding. Kevin hosts the Green Pill podcast discussing pro-social, pro-topian and pro-environmental visions. Kevin shares his vision of the future, where impact equals profit, and we discussed the nuances of public goods, such as non-rival risk network goods which become anti-rival risk, thus turning economic principles upside down. I'd love Kevin's take on carbon tunnel vision and the need for a holistic approach to solve the climate crisis. We get a little teaser about Shelling Point 2024 and end our conversation on mycelium finance and how Web3 networks can benefit from mimicking mycelium networks in the wood-wide web. I hope you enjoy. Hi, kevin. Thanks for coming on today.

Kevin: 1:55

Hey Cash, How's it going?

Cash: 1:56

Great to be here Doing well, We'll keep today's conversation organic, just to cover a few things for our audience to have on mind. We'll start with your background and how you got into regenerative finance. Love to hear a little bit about what's being planned for Shelling Point this year at ETH Denver. Dive into Gitcoin and retroactive public good funding and the mechanisms of quadratic voting, and then talk about some nuances of public goods and where the refi space is and where you see it evolving Sounds good. Yeah, what's a little bit of your background for folks who maybe haven't taken the green pill or haven't listened to your podcast. How did you get into the space?

Kevin: 2:33

So I have a computer science degree from University of Delaware in 2006. I've been doing civic hacking, slash web entrepreneurship pretty much since college, and in 2017, I founded Gitcoin, which has grown around one of our primary products. Gitcoin Grants, basically a crowdfunding platform and protocol for funding public goods and helping communities fund what matters. That has delivered $55 million worth of funding to different builders in the space. It's not uncommon for me to go to an Ethereum conference and have someone say, hey, gitcoin changed my life, because we got some amount of funding at some time or some validation and an idea by putting it on Gitcoin. So that feels great.

Kevin: 3:20

And in 2021, I wrote a book, a self-published book, called Green Build how Crypto Could Regenerate the World, and that was basically just to get a vision out there of. I feel like there was a very strong libertarian culture in crypto and very strong financial culture in crypto, and I wanted to build more pro-social, pro-topian type of culture. And I think I was uniquely positioned to do that because I founded Gitcoin, co-founded Gitcoin, and so, yeah, I'll put that vision out there. And it's been great since then to meet hundreds, if not thousands, of people who believe in building pro-topian, pro-social, pro-environmental economies using crypto, and I think we've also benefited from Ethereum's merge to proof of stake, which consumes 99.95% less energy. So that's a broad stroke overview of my career and how we got here.

Cash: 4:14

Yeah, really cool. I love the Green Pill meme. As a Matrix fan, it was great to have that kind of come out of the messaging around it and I do love that positive some angle and I think that is really important because there is so much hype and shilling and people are not in it for the right space and to see what blockchain tech can do with the right intention. I think has been really rewarding. For me it was pretty doom and gloom with the environmental crisis until I found some of the tools that blockchain and refi are unlocking, so I think it has been a really cool environment to be in. Just to kind of remind our listeners, with Gitcoin was that one of the first retroactive public goods funding mechanisms that really was able to have a lot of impact.

Kevin: 5:02

So Gitcoin grants is a crowdfunding application and now a protocol that has grown around the mechanism called quadratic funding, which is basically a very democratic way of allocating capital. We are starting to do some retroactive public goods funding but credit words to optimism has been the primary pioneers of retroactive public goods funding and, if you're interested, I can give into the differences between these mechanisms, but at a high level. Your listeners can kind of think of these mechanisms as ways to supercharge or make more effective impact giving.

Cash: 5:40

Yeah, and I'll direct people to your newest season of Green Pill where you're really focusing on impact and you're co-hosting with Carl, because, yeah, that had some good info on the optimism RPGF that's happening. Yeah, we'll direct folks to that. I'm wondering where your take is a little bit of the nuance of what is a public good, especially like a digital public good, versus a physical public good, and just how that's kind of evolved in your thinking.

Kevin: 6:07

Yeah, so the word public goods is a term that economists will recognize. Basically, the idea is that a public good is non-excludable, which means that I can't stop you from consuming it, and non-rival risk, which means that if you or your listeners consume it, then it doesn't stop me from consuming it. A really great example of a public good is something like clean air I can't stop you from consuming it and your consuming it doesn't in any practical sense stop me from consuming it. An example of a digital public good would be something like open source software, that because the source code is available for free, then anyone can download it and again, it's non-excludable and non-rival risk. There's actually some people who in my network are excited about a thing called network goods, which are anti-rivalists. So basically, the idea with open source software is that it actually gets better the more people use it. Because if you use the pizza software, you submit a bug report, the developer fixes it, then I pull that downstream. That's an anti-rival risk good. And so just by things being digital, you can now have these things called network goods, which are anti-rival risk, and it turns some of the economic things upside down with I'm not being articulate it turns some of the economics upside down to have anti-rival risk goods.

Kevin: 7:31

I think most of consumer society and capitalism is based off of scarcity, and that's what you learn about supply and demand in high school. I actually Gitcoin's mission has always been about open source software, public goods, but recently we found ourselves articulating it as funding what matters, and the reason for that is that everyone viscerally knows their own truth of what matters to them, whereas if I was to tell you what public goods are like, say, we're at a cocktail party I have to corner you for like two minutes and give you an economics lecture, whereas if you say fund what matters, that's much more visceral to people. And I do believe that if public goods are the least funded stuff and they matter the most, then they'll be what rises to the top when you're funding what matters. So yeah, to answer your question, that's what public goods are, but we're actually sort of pivoting our messaging more towards funding what matters, because it's more relatable to people to think about that as opposed to like getting deep into economics.

Cash: 8:28

Yeah, people don't want to give that bandwidth away right now, all the time. Just to finish up the Gitcoin thought last round, gitcoin 19,. There was the implementation of the ALO protocol. Right, isn't that becoming more of like a self-running mechanism?

Kevin: 8:43

So ALO protocol is short for capital allocation protocol. Basically, the idea here is that there's a lot of capital that if we could figure out a great way to allocate it, then could be unlocked for doing good in the world, and so basically what ALO protocol allows you to do is to take coin grants and build it into your application. So basically, if you want to do quadratic funding or retroactive public goods funding, you can take ALO protocol, the capital allocation protocol, and, as a developer, really quickly spin up a crowdfunding site or crowdfunding application by taking the heart of Gitcoin grants and putting it into your application. So Gitcoin grants started off as a centralized platform and we've since rewritten the entire thing to be a decentralized suite of modular protocols, and part of the benefits of it being a protocol was that people could take that module and put it into their own application. Number one.

Kevin: 9:43

But we were also after this attribute that Vitalik talks about a lot called credible neutrality, where, basically, because it's a protocol, anyone can see how it's working and they know that there's not someone in the back that's speaking the parameters towards their favorite projects. It's credibly neutral and I think that's something that's really important in public goods funding. Is that you want to be able to allocate capital not only effectively, but you want to know that it's being done in a credibly neutral way. So yeah, alo protocol is the new protocol at the beating heart of Gitcoin.

Cash: 10:18

Yeah, that's really cool and the credible neutrality I think is really important, because there is so much opaqueness in a lot of traditional funding mechanisms and how capital is actually being allocated can be very confusing to find. So that's cool that it's kind of being transparent like that. You also just announced the easy retro Pgfxyz tool, and so is that similar but different than what ALO offers?

Kevin: 10:45

So basically, gitcoin is basically on a mission to democratize the ability to allocate capital in your community and easy retro Pgfxyz is a way of allowing anyone in the Web3 ecosystem to run an optimism style retro Pgf round.

Kevin: 11:04

So the idea here is that quadratic funding is a power tool that allows you to do quadratic funding, democratic capital allocation in your community. Retroactive public goods funding has kind of caught fire over the last six to nine months. Easy retro Pgfxyz is a way of doing retroactive public goods funding in your community and the idea is more, better tools for people to fund what matters in their community. And I think that quadratic funding and retro Pgf are totally complimentary and our tentative plan with easy retro Pgfxyz is to continue updating it as optimism does. Another retroactive public goods funding round next summer I have no inside information, but it'll probably be next summer if they do it on a every six month cadence and so basically taking the insights from the frontier of people doing deep mechanism nerd research on capital allocation and democratizing it so that anyone who has a Dow can can run in their ecosystem. So yeah, that's what easy retro Pgfxyz is meant to do.

Cash: 12:09

That's really cool. I definitely want to play around with that a little bit. I'm on the board of the Central Coast Green Building Council here and I think there's some really good tools there that haven't been explored yet for nonprofits, and that's what's kind of getting me excited to really kind of play around with them on the ground in real life.

Kevin: 12:28

Yeah, I mean I will say that I think a lot of these tools need to be more effective in allocating capital and Web 3 before we can take them too far out of the Web 3 ecosystem. Every day, people are afraid of tokens. Crypto just sounds scammy to them, and I mean not without reason. There are scams in crypto, but my whole argument is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are good things in crypto also. But yeah, I mean I am excited for one day for these things to go a little bit more mainstream and serve everyday public goods instead of just digital public goods that nerds like open source software.

Cash: 13:04

Yeah, no, that's a really good take. How to bring in the more traditional Web 2 or existing NGOs who are maybe more skeptical because they've only heard of crypto as the scammy pump and dumps of the tokens. I benefited Refide Generation was on GetCoinGrants19 and got some Kodak funding, so that was really cool and super humble for the support that we got on that. So, yeah, do you see any ways to help bridge that gap between traditional Web 3 and existing nonprofits?

Kevin: 13:39

I don't, but it's also not been a focal area. I interviewed Griff Green. I know that he's been thinking a lot about how do we take these tools and put them in the hands of everyday nonprofits and there's a bunch of stuff around. Basically, how do you make it so that they don't get scammed, they don't have to worry about custody of their private keys? It feels more like a Web 2 style user experience. I think Griff has thought a lot more about that than I have, so I'll just defer to him.

Cash: 14:05

Okay, cool. Yeah, I've been talking with Dave Fortson a lot too. We live near each other and we want to host a local Santa Barbara refi event specifically tailored towards nonprofits, just because Santa Barbara has one of the highest per capita saturations of nonprofits, so we thought that could be a good space to welcome them in and do some onboarding.

Kevin: 14:28

We did do one campaign in 2020 called Downtown Stimulus, which basically took quadratic funding. We basically took get coin grants and we took out all of the Web 3 and we just put in strike payments into it. In 2020, if you remember, was the start of the COVID pandemic all of these foot businesses in Downtown Boulder had just seen their foot traffic foot businesses, retail businesses had just seen their foot traffic drop by 99%, and so we ran a quadratic funding round in order to fund these businesses on Main Street and was able to raise like 50K, which is a couple of months rent for a lot of these businesses. It was a comic book shop, a yoga studio, a bookstore, a coffee shop and I forget what the other business was. But that round was a success and the cool thing was we took a mechanism that was prototyped and validated in crypto and sort of backported it to the real world. Now, in doing so, we totally cut all the blockchain stuff out of it because we didn't want that to trip people up. But you know, I was really excited to see that that worked well.

Kevin: 15:35

But B I think that this sort of speaks to if this stuff ever does go mainstream.

Kevin: 15:40

I kind of think of it as it's going to have to be a blockchain mullet, where it's, like you know, it's Web 2 in the front and it's Web 3 in the back, and that's kind of what we did with the Downtown Stimulus campaign. I don't have a ton of conviction that everyday people are going to learn to custody their own private keys and learn about gas and the layer 2s and all of those things you know. In Web 1, it took maybe like a decade or like a generational change for people to learn about the URL bar and the home button and the refresh button and the back and forward button and web browsers and those are like lower stakes things than like, oh, your entire net worth or your bank account is, if you remember these 24 seed phrases or 24 seed phrases. So yeah, I think it's going to. If it does go mainstream, it'll be more of like a blockchain mullet kind of setup Web 2 in the front, web 3 in the back.

Cash: 16:30

Absolutely, and yeah, that was. You know that's one of the most frustrating things about the FTX crumbling is that you know they were really onboarding a lot of people but you know they had custody of everyone's stuff and he ended up being a scammer. So it wasn't real decentralized crypto and people don't get that, but you know that was a big onboarding avenue and then people you know left. Yeah for sure. You guys did a lot with the Gitcoin passport and civil resistance type stuff. So any kind of just takeaways from that work that you know maybe is a help in the onboarding Because you know for the Gitcoin passport, you know you connect LinkedIn and Facebook and you know all these in real life sort of tools to prove that you're a human.

Kevin: 17:11

So, basically, quadratic funding, which is the mechanism upon which Gitcoin was built, is basically a capital allocation mechanism that is very democratic, basically cash. If you have a grant that raises $100 from 100 contributors, and I have a grant that raises $100 from one contributor, you'll get like 99% of the matching funds because you've got such a democratically supported grant. You've got more supporters than me, and that's great because we're now funding the public goods that the everyday citizen wants to fund and not what the whales want. You know, imagine if the everyday citizen had more sway than like the Koch brothers or something like that, and I feel like this is the Refi generation podcast that gives the Koch brothers as the boogeyman but don't hang me out to dry if you're a Koch fan Basically. So there's a really important primitive here in being able to tell who the individual accounts are, because then you can allocate capital according to the wishes of the masses, as opposed to just the people who have capital, and so I think that this is what's called civil resistance sock puppet resistance in Web 3.

Kevin: 18:15

Getcoin Passport is a tool for allowing us to do sock puppet resistance and therefore allocating capital a more democratic way, and I think that's really important because I want the capital to flow with. The everyday citizens want, not just what the rich people want. And to answer your question, is GetCoin Passport a way that we can onboard more people into the space? I think that not yet, but it's getting there. Basically, we want to be able to like. My dream is that next cycle we onboard hundreds of thousands of people by giving them rewards for having impact in their local community, as opposed to like buying a monkey jpeg, and you know it'd be great if everyone got a GetCoin Passport and $100 for cleaning up a pothole in their local community.

Kevin: 19:03

You're helping a little old lady cross the street or volunteering at a community night, or you know whatever local impact there is and, you know, I think digital identity can be really important in making sure that that capital is well allocated, as opposed to just giving it to what's called like civil farmers, like people who are just making up identities in order to farm the things. So, anyway, that's where GetCoin Passport sort of fits in the evolution of Web 3 towards more democratic capital allocation but also more impact oriented capital allocation.

Cash: 19:34

I think hey man, yeah no, I love that onboarding through impact. That's a really great way to get people to go through a few of the hurdles because they did something. There's something waiting for them, really like that. You know, one thing that I hear a lot of is the bottleneck around MRV, measure report verification, or DMRV. I'm wondering if you have any kind of takes on how that's been evolving to be a little bit easier for people to implement.

Kevin: 20:01

MRV, as I understand it, stands for measurement and reward verification.

Cash: 20:06

Take it that right Reporting and then verification. Yeah, okay.

Kevin: 20:09

So I think that this is one of those spaces that's totally wide open. And you know, I'm reminded of Gregory Landua, who you know is a friend, and he talks about the eight different forms of capital. So, basically, financial capital is only one type. There's also spiritual capital and material capital and intellectual capital, and I'm not remembering the other four, but basically there's all these different types of capital and I think that MRV for intellectual capital is going to be totally different from MRV for material capital. So, basically, you know, I'm very I'm kind of like a nerd's nerd. You know I'm funding the open source software developers, which is a form of intellectual capital. You can look at GitHub stars, you can look at quadratic funding votes in order to verify impact and reward it in my domain. But someone like Gregory Landua and someone who's doing like true carbon capture or biodiversity work, the verification of that is just going to be totally different than the work that I'm doing.

Kevin: 21:08

So the first thing, I'll say that I'm mindful of what I don't know when it comes to MRV, for you know, traditional environmental type of projects. But one of the things I'm really excited about is how we could build more impact out test stations into MRV for all different types of grants. So, basically using things like the Ethereum attestation service to encourage everyday citizens to attest to where impact is being happening. It being happening is happening and you know, you can even imagine having these IoT sensors, whether they're satellites or they're actual embedded devices, in areas that are attesting to different impact, and I think that at scale, this becomes kind of a web of trust of people attesting to impact. And then you have people who are attesting to other attestations to say, oh, this one's a spam one and this one's legit. And then it's in the the web of trust that's built on top of that, that I think we might be able to start doing really interesting new, novel types of impact attestation.

Kevin: 22:11

So I don't really have like a profound or insightful take other than to say that I think that there's a lot of primitives and data that could be constructed in new, interesting ways to realize the meme of impact equals profit, but I don't know exactly how it's going to unfurl over the next five or 10 years. Hopefully we'll start to see. What you want is mechanisms that are simple enough to use but they're powerful enough to reward the people who are actually doing the impact while deterring the people who would be falsifying the impact, and and with cryptography and distributed networks. I think that we're on the precipice of something important there, and I'll be curious to see how it evolves.

Cash: 22:51

Yeah, absolutely. I love your impact equals profit that you push on. It's way better than the influence equals profit, right, the traditional kind of social media influencer gig, whereas building a more impact-driven social media too Because aren't you working on some of that for a decentralized social media and for that sort of impact equals profit meme.

Kevin: 23:15

Yeah, so one of the things we've been experimenting with is taking quadratic funding and using it to fund creators on social media.

Kevin: 23:23

So basically the idea here is that what if social media is very much focused on the attention economy and there, instead of impact equals profit? It's kind of like attention equals profit, right, attention equals add, dollars equals profit. And so what if we could change the incentive mechanism of social media such that, basically, creators are being funded off of micro tips instead of advertising? And so one of the things that we did was we did this experiment with Lens protocol, which is you can kind of think of as like a decentralized Twitter, and at ECC, stani, who's the founder of Lens protocol and the founder of Ave and one of my heroes, and I got up on stage and we announced this integration of Allo protocol with Lens. And basically what we did was we replaced the micro tip or the like button on their social network with a micro tip button and then we had like quadratic funding matches on top of those micro tips. And so one of the reasons I think micro tips hasn't really taken off as a payment mechanism is that I send you a dollar and I'm like on crypto, and I'm sending you a taxable event, right, it's more of a pain in the ass than the amount of money that you got. But if I'm sending you a dollar with a $25 match because of the quadratic funding subsidy, then I think that that becomes really powerful.

Kevin: 24:46

And so we just were kind of experimenting with doing public goods funding straight away in our social media, and one of the things I think is really powerful about this is how it changes the incentives of creators.

Kevin: 24:56

But also what's powerful for me as the Gekkoing guy here is that people spend 15 minutes per quarter filling up their Gekkoing grants cart, but we all spend like two hours a day on social media. So what if we were just funding public goods in our digital town squares and we're funding, you know, like? I think that's a very exciting idea, and so I'm hoping to do more experiments like that, in which we're combining things that have a lot of, I don't know, traction and gather a lot of attention with things like public goods funding and just seeing if we can change the incentives of the internet and we would move it away from ad dollars. I think is the big idea there. But a lot of these things are just kind of weird experiments that are not within Gekkoing's core business, but it's kind of me poking around in the frontier and seeing what could be the next big thing.

Cash: 25:49

Yeah, that's really cool. And the Allo integration that was through Lens or was that like one of this, the Twitter, like things that are built on Lens?

Kevin: 25:58

Lensster is the name of the front end that we built it on and okay, so here's the rub. If anyone's deeply technical you'll care about this. But Lens v1, basically we built it into the front end to prototype, to prove that people would care about it, and I think we did prove. We got like 600 donations when we built it into the front end of Lenssterxyz. The next step is to build it actually into the Lens protocol through what's called I think it's called the collect module on Lens protocol. So we'll be in no promises, but I'm hoping to build it into the Lens v2 protocol in 2024.

Cash: 26:31

Okay, cool, yeah, then it could be utilized by any app that's using Lens.

Kevin: 26:37

That's the idea and you know we got 600 quadratic funding tips in our prototype that we dropped at UCC off of a forked interface called quadratic Lenssterxyz and I think if we got upstream into the protocol and into all the other apps that Lens consumes then we'll have 10 or 100x that. So I'm really excited to get more distribution.

Cash: 26:57

Cool. Yeah, I need to actually play around with that. Full disclosure. I'm a bad Lensster. I have a Lens profile and I haven't done much with it, so any any advice for jumping into the Lens ecosystem?

Kevin: 27:08

I think that it's just, you know, important to start with what's wrong with web two social media, and then that's your motivation for playing with web three social media, and that's that's why I try to remember to check Lens as often as I check Twitter. But you know, the habit is strong. It's been like 10 years of like hard Twitter use for me, so I have to go back and still.

Cash: 27:32

Yeah, I know. Especially the refi movement has got a lot of momentum on Twitter. It's hard to yeah, I won't ever call it X though.

Kevin: 27:40

It's hard. It's hard when you get that drip of attention. But you know, I'm hopeful that web three social networks will take off in the next couple years.

Cash: 27:48

Yeah, I think with a lot of the data coming out on you know just how terrible Facebook and all the algorithms are for you know developing brains and kids. I think people will probably take it more seriously when you can look under the hood and see what the algorithm is is showing you and stuff.

Kevin: 28:06

So that's really powerful yeah reminds me a little bit of like you ever hear the stories about how it was in the fifties or the sixties. People would just smoke and they had no idea of the health, the health effects. And now, 50 years later, we're like why were people just smoking and didn't expect to get one? Like 30 years after that, when they started putting all these sugars and preservatives into into food, and we're like, yeah well, there's sugar in it. Of course, it's going to be really bad for you. With the benefit of hindsight, you realize what these things are doing to you and I think we're just gonna. We're starting to have that moment with social media now, starting with the Tristan Harris stuff and the social dilemma and everything like that. But I'll be curious to see what we think of 2010 style social media in 2040 or 2050,. We might look at it in the same way we look at cigarettes today.

Cash: 28:54

Absolutely yeah, definitely addictive and doing weird stuff to the brain. One of my past guests was Sophia Dew and she was doing a lot of building in the hyper-cert space and just wanted to see if you had any involvement in kind of what is going on with that type of attestation, because I envision that's going to have something involved with in the DMRV space.

Kevin: 29:18

So I was involved with Carl and Hoka and Matt when they were sort of conceiving hyper-certs, I guess 18 months ago, and I think it's a really powerful primitive for tracking impact, basically to catch people up. If you go to hyper-certsorg you can see their website, but the idea is to have an NFT that tracks impact. So basically you walk 10 little ladies across the street, you can get a hyper-cert for that. And another way I think of hyper-certs is like they're like a generalization of a carbon credit. So you get 10 tons of carbon taken out of the atmosphere, you can get a carbon credit for that. Hyper-certs are like that, but for any other type of impact. So 10 little ladies across the street, you get a hyper-cert. I teach 10 people to code, I get a hyper-cert. I save some species of wild animal, I get a hyper-cert for that.

Kevin: 30:11

And then the idea is to bootstrap a demand side of that where people are purchasing hyper-certs. And all of a sudden what you've done if you're able to do that is you've created a financial incentive for people to create impact, If you're tracking impact and you're able to have people purchasing that impact and we'll wave away the fact that there's no demand for this stuff now by saying, hey, maybe we'll hook up Retractive Public Goods Funding or get coin grants to these things, and maybe you'll be purchasing hyper-certs whenever you receive capital from those things. And so this is a double-sided market between people who are producing impact and then the people who are funding impact. And then I think there's a role I'm just channeling Carl and Hulk in my head but there's a role for impact evaluators in the middle that are basically building their reputation and saying, hey, this hyper-cert is a total scam and it's just someone who's making it up in order to try to make a buck, and this one's really legit. And so you bootstrap this role of impact evaluators in the middle, and so I think it's a really powerful primitive for tracking impact, and I'm curious to see where it goes in the future.

Kevin: 31:28

I know that Holka has been focused on what is the next phase of hyper-certs. It seems like they're in a place where you can go and mint a hyper-certsorg, but they haven't really figured out how to bootstrap that demand side yet, and so I'll just be curious to see how it evolves in 2024. And I have the same take as I had before when it comes to MRV. The hyper-certs for open-source software contributions are going to be totally different than the ones that are for carbon sequestration. It's just totally different chain of custody, chain of verification when it comes to impact evaluation of those two things. So yeah, I'll be curious to see where it goes.

Cash: 32:08

Yeah, it's interesting, the work of the impact evaluators and kind of that being a slightly thrust mechanism, whereas I also envisioned a lot of the IoTs Internet of Natural things. Having ability to be more trustless and be able to capture data and then put it on the attestation of the blockchain and then create a hyper-cert from theirs is one thing that I see too, but that's an interesting spot for impact evaluators in the middle.

Kevin: 32:41

Yeah, for sure. I think it's going to be sort of a market by market bootstrapping of these things, and we should probably start at the place where the impact evaluations a little bit easier and prototype them there. But yeah, I'll be curious to see what comes out of that with Carl and Hoka and RetroPGF in this year.

Cash: 33:03

Yeah, me too. Before we jump to Shelling Point, just want to kind of wrap up some of our kind of bigger picture, kind of refi space thoughts. Do you see, like, where do you see some of the biggest improvements still being needed to be made in refi and some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions maybe?

Kevin: 33:24

Yeah, well, I guess the first one I'll start with is that it feels like people here refi and they think, oh, carbon credits on chain. And my definition of refi is a little bit more exhaustive than that. It's regenerative finance and so it's anything that's regenerating over time across all the different eight forms of capital, so you can be regenerating spirits, regenerating intellectual capital, regenerating social capital and regenerating carbon sorry, material capital and my definition has sort of a wider aperture, and so I guess you know my volley back to you would be like how do you draw the boundaries around the refi space? Before we get into answering that question, yeah, that's a great pushback.

Cash: 34:05

I definitely agree with that. Carbon tunnel vision need to be taken down. And looking at all the other forms of capital, I went to school for environmental sustainability as my focus, but I was a political economy major and so one of my guests the other week was telling me they were kind of in the similar major and they were like that was refi a decade ago. It just didn't have blockchain behind it. But looking at the sustainability and restoration while through the lens of economics is kind of where my brain is at. So regenerative finance I see as obviously leveraging the tools of decentralized finance and having a more kind of trustless, decentralized way to interact with the world. You know economics the Greek word is you know how do you take care of your household? Right, like so. So how are we interacting and living in the world while also regenerating and not doing harm? Yeah, got it.

Kevin: 35:09

So you know it's interesting. I was talking to someone two months ago and they said, to a sentence that I thought was extremely profound, and I'll just repeat it here they, they had just been at COP28 and they said carbon is the new monocrop.

Kevin: 35:22

And I thought that was so profound because I was like, oh, you know, everyone's so focused on carbon and but there's all these other different issues and everything from rising authoritarianism to biodiversity collapse, to you know, it's just like there's so many different issues and impacts.

Kevin: 35:45

That's value in the world.

Kevin: 35:46

That's valuable in the world, but we have this tunnel vision towards carbon as the monocrop and, and I thought that it was really profound that they had put it that way, and so it's to me it's a yes, and on top of the carbon stuff, and we should be doing all of these things in bootstrapping one substrate, in a financial system that that recognizes that impact equals profit will help the carbon stuff, but it will also help the the other dozens of important, impactful things that we need to work on as well. So, yeah, I'll be curious to see what takes off and in what order it feels like in web three. There's a lot of focus on using web through tools to bootstrap web three ecosystems, and so I think open source funding is going to be a a thing that is a high order bit in the web three ecosystem, but on the backs of creating more open source software tools that are hopefully helpful for the world. We can. We can be funding non-digital public goods and non non-digital impact and and I'm here for it, I'm excited for it.

Cash: 36:50

Yeah, yeah, I love that broader sweep of it not just carbon and definitely the authoritarian angle and democratic principles is one that I think has has a profound potential to decouple politics and economics in a way where we can be interacting and living and creating financial inclusion without necessarily needing it to be coupled with who's who's in office. Yep, Well, I think you know a good way to wrap it up is kind of talk about the shelling of the green pill meme and at shelling point at East Denver and just kind of what, what people should expect, and then also there was a shelling point in Istanbul just a few months ago, right, yeah, so, um, a shelling point is this idea in game theory it's a point at which people will arrive without having to coordinate.

Kevin: 37:46

So I think the example the example in New York City is Grand Central Station, at the clock tower in Grand Central Station is like if you know it's pre-cell phones and you have to meet someone and you're not sure where you, that's where people will. You know stable, rational, like equilibrium will arrive. I live in Colorado and so my example of a shelling point is a Campfire. So basically I'm out, you know, at night, and I don't even have to say it to the people I'm camping with will hang out by the campfire that night. So, um, yeah, so People always talk about shelling points in web 3 and I thought it was a fun Thing for us to name our regen conference shelling point, because it's kind of like a shelling point for the hopeful, it's a shelling point for regeneration and but it's also there's like a little bit of an inception there when you have to learn what a shelling point is in order to want to go to the conference.

Kevin: 38:38

So Meaning it into existence is is was kind of a strategy there, so we've run maybe half a dozen shelling points over the years.

Kevin: 38:46

It's Denver, ecc, dev connect, I'm trying to remember where else, but but yeah, basically just creating a place for the the people who are working on regen to come together and to To work together. There's so much to be gained by capital and talent, finding each other, people who work on data analysis, working with the software engineers, working with the game designers and that's what shelling point is meant to do. Is is to kind of build this regen culture and build the relationships in the network. And you know I actually read this book called impact networks by David Erlichman, who's you know I'm a big fan of him. He's now the founder of hats protocol, but before, before that, he was researching impact networks and one of the things that he talked about was the stronger the relationships of the people in your impact Network, the more likely your impact network is to be successful, right? So you know this is a fun device for us to create a meme about shelling.

Kevin: 39:41

About a shelling point, but it's also about building the impact network around get coin and in region web 3. Anyway, shelling point is happening at Denver 2023 and I Do not know what's on the schedule yet because the get coin marketing folks have not made that public yet. So Go to shelling point get coin dot co by the time this episode is out and hopefully those details will be announced for Denver 2020. I have made.

Cash: 40:08

I said 2023, but I meant 2024 and the directions for the time machine will be announced as well. Totally, yeah, cool. Now I love that the stronger relationships within networks create, you know, stronger impact. I think that's something that I've seen in the Green Building Council community is, you know, there's so much educational content out there and webinars and and people are getting stuff you know, you know put in front of them every day about how to build a, you know, less carbon intensive building. But the actual Relationships of people knowing each other, getting to laugh and just be humans next to each other Create so much better work environments and and better outcomes in the future if people can just kind of have some community building and social interaction.

Kevin: 40:51

Yeah, totally.

Kevin: 40:52

And you know, I think this is like a principle that I sort of learned and relearned over the years is don't forget to have fun.

Kevin: 40:58

And you know, community building and learning through social relationships and just enjoying each other's company is Not only a means to an end of building the impact network, but it's an end in itself. I think the you'll keep your batteries going if you're, if you're having fun throughout the years, and not my seventh, seventh year working in web three I'm practically a dinosaur, you know, by web three standards, and I think it's something that has sustained me throughout the years is to be building meaningful friendships that serve no purpose from a business perspective first, and then and then, you know, only later do they become useful professionally. So, but on the other hand, it's kind of become hard. Harder now that I've become more known, is that I can't build a relationship without anyone in like. I've been trying to figure out, figure out the line, the, the line forward. So if you see me eat, never just remember that I'm a nerd and an introvert first, and so you're welcome to come say what's up, but I, you know, I'm new to being in the, the niche public eye.

Cash: 42:00

Oh man. Well, for all all that you've done in the space, we love having you a part of it. So I'll buy a beer next time I see you and we'll. We'll have some fun Just shooting the shit.

Kevin: 42:12

Sounds great yeah.

Cash: 42:14

All right, man. Well, anything we didn't cover that we should wrap up with, or just direct people to come to East Denver and keep doing good in the world.

Kevin: 42:21

Yeah, maybe I'll drop a little teaser of two projects that I'm working on that will drop at East Denver. The first is a book on mycelium finance. Mycelium is the network of underground biological networks that are beneath mushrooms in forests. If you've heard of the term wood wide web, it's because there's this idea that trees and other organisms are exchanging nutrients through mycelium networks underground. Basically, the idea behind mycelium finance, the MycoFi book, is what do web three networks have to learn from mushrooms? They've got the highest lindy effect of any organism on earth.

Kevin: 43:03

I'm working with Jeff Emmett from Block Science and LH, who is a freelance designer, on basically what do web three networks have to learn from mycelium networks? What can we learn from their mutual reciprocity and dynamic flow and edge based wisdom and pluralism and polycentricity their fractal nature. I'm really just excited to drop it because I think it's like a like Green Pill was like a deep niche nerd book, this Mycelium finance is like 10 times the niche nerdery of Green Pill. So come find me at at ETH Denver. That's something that we're going to be dropping. Eddie Thinver will also be dropping some like actual get coin stuff at ETH Denver. But, yeah, keep an eye out for those releases.

Cash: 43:50

That's really cool. Yeah, paul Stamets is a hero of mine, so anything Mycelium I am going for.

Kevin: 43:56

So yeah, and I'm just so thankful to you know it's not just like we're going to. It's an art book, but it's going to be dropped dropped by Jeff Emmett, who's at Block Science. If you're not familiar with his work, he's one of the strongest mechanism designers and game theorists in the space and he's a huge mushroom nerd, and so I feel like I've got this like PhD level content about mushrooms next to beautiful art, and also adding a pinch of Web 3 in there, so it's going to be a really fun drop. Anyway, keep an eye on my Twitter feed or find me at ETH Denver if you're interested in that.

Cash: 44:27

All right, I'm excited. Well, thanks for coming on, kevin. This has been a really fun conversation. All right, thanks for having me. Cheers. 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.