ReFi Generation
Ep. 10 Alternun: Earth is the Original Bank
This episode just might blow your mind and cause a massive paradigm shift in your concept of gold mining. Jose Santiago & Noach Kettler join us from Alternun, and share with us the potential of "digital exploirtation" for gold mining.
Alternun is a Columbia based ReFi project that is leveraging blockchain technology to collatoralize unmined gold, thus negating the need to mine it. This is possible because upwards of 90% of mined gold is put back into banks, so Alternun is creating a protocol that uses the ground as a vault.
Alternun hopes to stop the environmental & social degradation that gold mining causes, and isntead allow for other regenerative uses of the land. One thing to note, there are times when the audio is not 100%, so please excuse that for this episode. I hope you enjoy.
Alternun Website
Alternun Twitter
Green Digital Guardians (Alternun's suggested ReFi project to follow)
This episode just might blow your mind and cause a massive paradigm shift in your concept of gold mining. Jose Santiago & Noach Kettler join us from Alternun, and share with us the potential of "digital exploirtation" for gold mining.
Alternun is a Columbia based ReFi project that is leveraging blockchain technology to collatoralize unmined gold, thus negating the need to mine it. This is possible because upwards of 90% of mined gold is put back into banks, so Alternun is creating a protocol that uses the ground as a vault.
Alternun hopes to stop the environmental & social degradation that gold mining causes, and isntead allow for other regenerative uses of the land. One thing to note, there are times when the audio is not 100%, so please excuse that for this episode. I hope you enjoy.
Alternun Website
Alternun Twitter
Green Digital Guardians (Alternun's suggested ReFi project to follow)
90% of the gold is used as a store value, so clearly we're not using it for any kind of interesting purposes. So we're basically destroying our nature just to take out the gold from its natural bowl, just melt it and keep it safe in a bowl in Switzerland.
Speaker 2: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 dig into digital exploitation with Jose Santiago and Nook Kettler from Alternunn. This project blew my mind when I first heard of it because, through blockchain technology, alternunn is incentivizing gold miners to not mine gold, instead keeping it in the ground. This works because 90% of gold is not used for technological purposes and instead is mined to be put back into the reserves of banks. So there's a real case for leaving gold untouched in the ground and instead collateralizing against it. This stops the environmental and social degradation and allows for other regenerative uses of the land. One thing to note there are times in today's episode when the audio is not 100%, so please excuse that for this episode, my mind is still blown. I hope you enjoy. Hey, gents, how are you doing today? Very good, cash.
Speaker 1:We're here to talk a little bit about Alternunn, which is a ReFi project that we're developing, probably 18 or 20 months already All right, any of you guys, both in Colombia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Cool, we love such a remote interview happening, so thanks for coming on today. A few things I wanted to cover is your guys' background, how you got into the regenerative finance space, how the Alternunn protocol works and what are the mechanisms behind it and why you guys created it. What are some of the problems currently facing gold mining that are so horrific that this addresses, and then what are some of the monetization mechanisms and some of the reporting and verification in the field. So why don't we start with how you guys got into ReFi and a little bit of your background?
Speaker 1:Sure, let me start Well. I'm a project design engineer and I studied a little bit of economics and finance in Germany, I made a blockchain master's in Spain and now I'm finishing a course from Frankfurt School Blockchain Center that is called ReFi Talents. I've been working on ReFi projects so not ReFi, but environmental projects since my early days as an engineer, and that's why I moved so interested in these kind of ideas.
Speaker 3:So I am Noah Kettler, from Colombia. I was working in precious metals trade like 10 years ago. I was working before with emeralds and diamonds in Israel and New York. Several years, like seven years ago, I was working here in Colombia with gold mining and wool trade here in Colombia and yeah, I was always worried about the environment problems. But the concept of ReFi is pretty new for me. It's like one year ago that I was here about the ReFi concept and I love it and with Alternum we tried to put it all work in this concept and set up with a big part of the company.
Speaker 2:That's cool that you have the background in precious metals and maybe that's a good place to start too. It's just like what did you see as some of the problems in traditional gold mining and environmental problems that face the industry that you guys are helping address.
Speaker 3:First in the in the diamond industry there was the first industry that was that was involved with and Obviously, the. The impact of the damage in the vitamin is is so clear. The extraction needs to remove a lot of Natural material that is seen, that is in the in in our feeds. So the impact, the obvious impact, is so big that you can see. But there is another Like a silence. Impact in the environment is a thing that we don't see.
Speaker 3:When, when we remove some, some months of error Just for make extraction a little piece, whatever it is, we are removing also a natural capes of Er that is making or is there just with a real purpose. That is connected with many, many, many things. It's not just if there and is, is that, I mean, it's a life and it's given life. Everything when, when, when the mining process start to do this, we have started to get a lot of different damage in different areas that we cannot see immediately, like in the water and the water pollutions, error pollution and many problems in the air, with the, with the seat, with the carbon. So there's a many different problems that we have Problems with air, with a water, with them, with air. So yeah, and we and we have something in in that we are talking about many times and is the, the, how we use the precious metals like a humanity.
Speaker 3:We are just making an extraction because is we can, we can sell the material, that we are we abstract, but we don't need it. This a month of extraction that we are doing for sure. There is some different ways more friendly environment, if you want to say that Ways that we can use the power and we can use the, the, the count set that this kind of material has, because a lot, I mean the 90% of the goal is just using for, for Different purpose. That is not like our technology or use it purpose. So we can use, yeah, we can, we can make a different stuff, and this is what we have tried to do with alternative and this is the some problems that we have. We so in the mining, I would.
Speaker 1:I would like to add a bit of what no one was saying. As he said, 90% of the gold is used as a store value, so clearly we're not using it for any kind of interesting purposes. So we're basically destroying our nature just to take out the gold from its natural bolt is melted and Keep it safe in in a bolt in Switzerland, because after that it was betrayed with what we actually trade it just the certificate, the certifications of the opposite. So nobody sees the goal and we a create a huge Environmental liability. So that's extremely important. But over the environmental damage or liabilities that this creates, there's an important issue that we want to address or result, and that is the, the social liability that is generated. That may be for the global north, which is a concept that it's very clear. In reply, we we don't talk about developed countries and under development, but we say global north and global south.
Speaker 1:The global north probably done it's unable to see what happens and if you come to Columbia you will see that these very rich areas that have is an enormous large Amounts of gold.
Speaker 1:They are extremely poor and the reason of that is in our research it's due to the lack of rooting at the lack of settlement, because you already know that you will have worked maybe for 10 years, 15 years, so every profit you have from this area is taking to another place, so to they go to the large city and they don't invest in these areas.
Speaker 1:So you don't invest in these areas and you obviously don't care a lot about the environment and the damage you are creating. So what you have at the end is a very devastated area and these this, the social development of these areas. It's pretty poor and that's a very clear situation that we can see here in Columbia, but it's the same thing in Peru, maybe in Venezuela and other countries where the gold mining industry develops that way. The other important thing and that I would like to say is that Sometimes we have there are large mining companies that they are probably more responsible, but in Latin America the gold mining industry is in many cases a small or medium sized and they are performing without the knowledge and the technique. So the environmental damage is even higher because they Create a lot of deforestation, water pollution with cyanide, with mercury, and that affects obviously Everything in the change below. So those are the kinds of problems we are looking to address.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, this isn't gold mining where they're digging a huge tunnel and going underground. It's a lot of surface stuff where they're polluting streams and deforestation is happening and then, yeah, mercury to process and, yeah, pretty horrific chemicals being used on Okay. So yeah, let's move on to the digital exploitation, because we I had my mind blown when I was talking to Reza and learned about what you guys were doing, and it's such an incredible concept because, like you said, 90% of gold is not being used for tech, and so how is this other store value created? And now we come to alternates. So what's the take on how you guys making it work?
Speaker 1:Sure, that's pretty interesting, because what we designed is something that they call this. Digital exploitation allows us to create liquidity pools. The security pools are actually a collateralized against Unminded gold reserves. So what we actually do is that we are offering a new opportunity to the environment and this community To use these gold reserves, but in its natural state. Once we do that, what we have is that we stop the mining process, avoiding all the probable damages that could come from these exploitation process, and Then we can actually get the profits on the other product of these days. This and we have designed these liquidity pools in a certain way that we believe that is extremely clever, because what we have done is that 20% of the liquidity pool is actually for gold miner and the Company who perform at the exploration process. That's 13%. So if you see, we are changing the role of the gold miner. He used to be a depredator, a predator of the of the environment, and now he moves into maybe a, a keeper, because his role now is to make sure that nobody is Exploiting the gold and he is actually protecting the area. That's the first thing.
Speaker 1:We also include 2% of this design for the government that have these Gold resources. That is important, and I would like to stop a little bit there, because some of some countries have a Problem behind them because they want to be environmental, but at the end the government takes taxes from the gold extraction. So how, how you, how you can compensate that? So what we design is that we offer to the government 2% of royalties for the digital exploitation. So for the government is fantastic, because they can have a tax, but they don't have the environmental and social liability that could generate the actual exploitation. So it's a lower tax, but at least they can tax and that helps us to create a better Settlement. So for institutional investors, it could be much better, in fact.
Speaker 1:So, and the rest of the liquidity pool 50% is Designing to go to projects. These projects are selected by doubt, so everyone who has a token of the liquidity pool has the right to vote and then select the projects. Our proposal is that these projects should be really five projects. So our regenerative project. So, for instance, if we have 50, 50% of the resources, we can develop solar energy power plants or Hydro power plants. We can make for a regenerative farming, beekeeping, ecotourism.
Speaker 1:So this is very interesting because, first of all, we stopped the gold mining industry. Now we are avoiding the fossil fuels, we are avoiding the deforestation, the water pollution and the damage to the to the flora and fauna, and now we are Forecasting or creating green energy and also Creating valuable jobs for the community that is around the gold mine. So this is extremely important because now we can close the cycle and the profits of these projects go to the holder of the token. 80% of the profits go directly to the holder of the token, 15% is for Alternum and 5% goes to the liquidity pool. So the liquidity pool will refill in the future and the owners will have new resources to develop new projects.
Speaker 1:So, that's the design. So we are missing a 30% of the liquidity pool. This 30% of the liquidity pool will be used as recovery pool. The recovery pool is to be how we use it. If Something goes wrong in those projects, then we have the collateral. So we have the contracts and the post, the Permissions from the government to take out the gold right, and now we have the economic capacity. So, if necessary, we can go and extract the gold, something that shouldn't happen. Our idea is that that Won't be necessary in the future, but it's the way to to guarantee that we have the collateral in our hands. The important part here is that we can use this 30% as Kind of instruments, so it won't be just Laying down and sleeping, but we can use it as instruments in deep fiber protocols.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that makes sense that you know there is still some mechanism if you have to extract in the future, but that that's a really cool paradigm shift. I mean just the fact that you're able to fund other renewable projects and regenerative projects with this. I'd love to Dig a little deeper no gold pun intended on how Exactly the collateralization of the unmind gold works. And then, how is the liquidity pools time getting funded? And and where is that kind of initial, where's the initial kind of Origin coming from?
Speaker 1:At this moment we are wearing a process that it's still private. I can talk a little bit about that because we are at this moment negotiating with a company of the states. They are willing to invest an important amount of resources in Alternate and that will probably allows us to move faster. But I can tell you a little bit about the gold mine. We are starting with a gold mine that is located in Antioquia and it was already explored.
Speaker 1:This was a process that was performed by a very known company here in Colombia that is called Mineros SSA, and I'm a local, dachan T, which is globally renowned, and they already made a lot of the studies. They took about seven years studying the land, making drillings and in samples, to understand how is the gold vein below the land, below the soil. So we have extremely precise data and what we want to develop is an international report that is called 43101. It's actually a Canadian report and that allows us to have a very clear amount of research that we can actually move into the collateral. So that for the investors is extremely clear, because that's an international report and everyone who knows about gold understands that. 43101 is a proof of guarantee, if I may say. And we have, that gold mine has all the contracts with the government, so it has all the licensing already performed. So it is a clear collateral for investors.
Speaker 2:So it's already been vetted and essentially what is going to happen then is there would be an investment to put into the liquidity pool rather than the investment in mining. It Is that kind of what that looks like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, instead of extracting the gold, they are going to invest in the digital exploitation that will allow us to create this first liquidity pool. Then we will open to any customer so that people could go into our platform and mint the tokens and they will be part of the Dow and they will just not only helping us avoid the damage, but they will have their assets collateralized in the gold.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool, and then funding the other projects that are doing other regenerative. One of my latest guests was Douglas Gaten of the Lexicon, and they are creating the ecological benefits framework, which is in collaboration with Google and a lot of non-governmental organizations, and essentially it's looking at six different environmental factors, not just like carbon, but water quality, air quality, species, biodiversity, social impact and then two more, carbon, and the idea is that it's not just mechanizing or monetizing carbon sequestration, but it's also giving monetization and impact benefits. It's still being developed, but the idea is in the future you could get these impact benefits for having cleaner water, species, biodiversity. So I'm thinking that there's a whole other underlying mechanism where, because you guys did not extract and the land is still sustainably managed, you could be getting these other kind of eco credits for having a good impact on the land.
Speaker 1:That's correct. In fact, we are talking we have talking already with some people that will help us to develop the models that will allow us to create some biodiversity credits. So it will be very. I believe that it will be fantastic in the near future and, in fact, I would like to talk a little bit about that, because our vision and what we have in our roadmap is that maybe for the 2025, we would like to have our platform ready to sell to individuals carbon offsets, but the people is going to be allowed to choose the kind of offset they want to support. Okay, and the 50% of what we collect from this carbon offsets are going also to the liquidity pool, so anyone who is in the liquidity pool will get more resources to develop new projects. So our idea is to continue this cycle and help us, help to develop everything.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. So that's carbon, carbon credits coming in 2025. When is the alternate protocol expecting to launch? When should people be looking, looking out for you guys.
Speaker 1:It's a tricky question because don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah, yeah, we started and we have developed it. We have our day app developed to work in polygon, but we have been talking with some networks that want to give us a grant, so we are in the process to understand what we're going to do. It's been a while the finish of the year and also this company that is from the US. They also have their own network, so if we close the deal, probably we will go with them. Otherwise, we will go to some of the networks that are talking with us. Probably that will maybe create some gaps in the time, but we believe that, finishing the semester, we should be already deployed.
Speaker 2:Okay, finishing the summer, we'll have to get you guys back on then to do a launch episode. No, it's anything that comes to mind in the more of the traditional mining industry that we didn't really cover that kind of is being addressed with what you guys are doing.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:One thing that I want to say is that we are playing a different game here and not just in the mining industry.
Speaker 3:Also, we are playing a different game with the bank industry. That we want to do because actually this is similar, like as the banks do with the goal, but we are doing in the opposite way. I mean, the banks makes money, keeping the goal as a resource of value, yeah, and they are investing different projects and they make a lot of money, but so we want to keep them the goal, keep them on the ground, and this profitability that we are doing, we want to make with the projects, this profitability goes to the different stakeholders that we have. So we are making the opposite way in the mining industry because we don't make destruction, and we are making the opposite way, like that banks do, because we keep in goal, but profitability goes for everybody that belongs to this system or this idea of the digital exploitation. So this is our concept that we have and we are making impact in the mining industry. Obviously, we are doing impact in like a change in the different industry as a bank industry or this kind of industry, that there is management, the goal of business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really cool. The vault is the ground now instead of the bank, the original vault of gold. That's really cool. Do you guys have any interaction with MRV the measure report, verification side of things where data collection in the field and putting that data on the blockchain, or decentralized MRV, anything like that? I just try to check in with my guests on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we haven't started yet. We know, and in fact we have been exploring a bit about helium and how can we use the helium technology to probably use and deploy some elements that will help us to do the DMRV. But we haven't started yet with the third because the first thing we have to do is to secure the gold mine. But, yeah, our idea is that it's going to be a huge step towards having trusty carbon credits and that will be fantastic for the industry, I believe Cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I definitely want to dig in on that more because that's something that I hear a lot of feedback on. Is that's kind of the last piece of the puzzle that's still being developed a little, the Internet of Natural Things and how all that gets tracked in the field and trust it. Well, awesome, you guys. If there's nothing else to talk about with Altenon. I think that answered most of my questions. I'm really excited for what you guys are doing, altenon. Are there any other kind of REFI projects that you guys are excited about, or especially in Columbia, that you direct our listeners to go check out?
Speaker 1:Well, in Colombia there are some projects. We know one that is called Green Digital Gardens. They are working on creating forestations and creating natural areas. The idea is not to create just a single, single, single-speed forestations, but to have several ones. And there are also some other projects, maybe worldwide, that are very interesting. Some are kind of refly projects, but they are actually refly that are in Particular. Particular is a project or a company already that is creating a kind of certification for different refly projects. So what they are trying to do is to give another stamp to some projects and help investors to reach them out. So that's very interesting. There's also Senken, which is interesting too. So I believe that this is a very new industry, but I believe it's worth to be developed.
Speaker 1:I believe that maybe 2025, 2026, we're going to be talking more about regenerative capitalism. So this is very cool because probably most of the profits will move to refly work and the consciousness that we have to take care of them. Our environment will become greater and I would like to invite the people and the audience of the podcast that it's necessary to think not just another job to take care of a forest. We need to think more about how we can actually regenerate the environment. That means creating new forests or creating green energy and being able to develop the communities with them, because sometimes, when we talk about refly, most of the people would think let's buy a forest and just keep it. But doing that, is it enough? That will be the question. So what we all have to think is how can we go further and find out the real solutions that will help us to create positive cycles that will help us to regenerate our world?
Speaker 2:I mean, jose, I love it. That's a great way to end it. That's a good call to action. I think we all need to be figuring out how we can regenerate rather than just do no harm but do good in the world. Correct, correct, wonderful. So anything to finish with, or I think we covered it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want to make the same invitation for people. And it's that one year ago we don't know that we are making something that is refly or regenerative itself. We never knew about this council. But we start to touch the council, the council comes to us and we start to make it deeper. We love it now because we discovered that, the new possibilities that we have to make a wealth to the planet. So, yeah, the invitation is the same for the people. Obviously, if they have some projects here in Colombia, they can contact us, because for sure we need some different projects to make the real here in Colombia. We are so happy to hear about it. And second one is, yes, just thinking, the real industry. How do you can change that? What do you can make of this industry that we have right now more?
Speaker 2:regenerative. Really love what you guys are doing and so cool that you're taking something that's happened forever holding gold in a bank, but you're using these new blockchain tools to make it regenerative and not extractive, and really cool to see what you guys are doing. So thanks so much for coming on today and appreciate it talking to you guys.
Speaker 1:It was pretty cool, despac, thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 2: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.