ReFi Generation
Ep. 11 Let's Grow Treegens w/ Jimi Cohen
Let's Grow! This episode is an exploration of purpose, passion, and planting. I sit with Jimi Cohen to discuss the monumental vision of Let's Grow DAO and Treegens, aiming to integrate positive environmental actions with blockchain tools for onboarding.
This conversation explores the encouraging reforestation movement as well as inspires listeners that Jimi's goal of planting more than 560M trees in 24 hrs to beat the current world tree planting record is possible. Jimi shares info about The Regenisance festival happening in Thailand, and how festivals can set the stage for creating monumental change.
The episode also delves into Let's Grow DAO's cutting-edge initiatives – from a dual-token system that rewards community involvement to creating new opportunities for environmental stewardship and using digital assets for gamifying tree planting.
We peer into the democratization of ecological efforts through blockchain's transformative of MRV processes, highlighting how this technology has the potential to empower communities, especially in the global south. Jimi is an advocate for connecting with nature and gives us a reminder of the importance of the connection between our wellbeing and the natural world we're striving to protect. Join us to discover how you can be a part of this regenerative renaissance.
Let's Grow! This episode is an exploration of purpose, passion, and planting. I sit with Jimi Cohen to discuss the monumental vision of Let's Grow DAO and Treegens, aiming to integrate positive environmental actions with blockchain tools for onboarding.
This conversation explores the encouraging reforestation movement as well as inspires listeners that Jimi's goal of planting more than 560M trees in 24 hrs to beat the current world tree planting record is possible. Jimi shares info about The Regenisance festival happening in Thailand, and how festivals can set the stage for creating monumental change.
The episode also delves into Let's Grow DAO's cutting-edge initiatives – from a dual-token system that rewards community involvement to creating new opportunities for environmental stewardship and using digital assets for gamifying tree planting.
We peer into the democratization of ecological efforts through blockchain's transformative of MRV processes, highlighting how this technology has the potential to empower communities, especially in the global south. Jimi is an advocate for connecting with nature and gives us a reminder of the importance of the connection between our wellbeing and the natural world we're striving to protect. Join us to discover how you can be a part of this regenerative renaissance.
As a walkie says. It's not a direct quote and paraphrasing here, but the best way to onboard people is for their first experience of crypto to be a reward for positive impact.
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 Uptin, today we grow. I'm thrilled to have Jimmy Cohen of let's Grow Dow and Trejans on the podcast. Jimmy has profound energy and his mission of inspiring people to become change makers is contagious. Jimmy surpassed the tree planting world record of 23,000 trees within 24 hours by planting 25,244 mangroves in 21 and a half hours in Tanzania. They are now growing the movement of trejans to beat the current world record together set by Ethiopia, of 560 million trees in 24 hours. Jimmy is a leader in the space and believes we should be bringing people into the crypto space by rewarding positive impact. Jimmy is helping to turn D gens into trejans and I truly loved our conversation. I hope you do too. Hey, jimmy, so good to talk to you today. How you doing.
Speaker 1:Hey, let's grow Great and grateful. I unfortunately got into a bit of a motorbike accident, but it will be healed within five days and then I will be back to training like a crazy person to break again, as we're working tree planting. But I'm in the lovely land of Thailand so I'm feeling great. How you doing.
Speaker 2:All right, Gratitude man. I couldn't be more thankful as well. Love talking to folks like you. I mean you've been a busy guy and super inspiring. I love all the momentum you've been bringing to the space, so it's really exciting to get to have you on the pod.
Speaker 2:Thank you, brother, it means a lot Thought about you the other day when I planted some trees, so we're going to dive into your tree planting goals, which are very ambitious and freaking awesome. Talk about what you've been doing in the quarter spaces and trejans let's grow. Just kind of give our listeners a little history and impact about that, and then talk about the Regenussance.
Speaker 1:So let's start with Max Impact. I've done 419 episodes to date, and the reason why I'm doing that and it's also why I ask what's your why? As my first question, literally every single episode. I believe it's because this mission of empowering change makers to maximize their positive impact is one that's very near and dear to my heart, because I lived a life of practically no fulfillment and no real purpose. This was in university, so I was very aware of the problems of the world, but was on a path to basically run my dad's company. I was only taking economics. Because he took economics, I basically had my whole future decided for me and I felt like I had no control in my life. Dude, if you have some destiny or some purpose inside of you, stuff that you're meant to work on and you're not doing that, I feel like our bodies have a pretty significant way of letting us know. I felt horrible. I literally spiraled into a depression. Different things are going on in my life, but this lack of purpose was definitely a big thing in my life and I felt so down. I literally had no energy to do anything, to go out and go about my life, until everything changed when I was invited to a student club meeting and they were talking about how they're fundraising for a clean water project. And I was through an event and something inside of me just clicked and I was like I raised my hand and no one knew me in there, but except my roommate who invited me. But because it was my sheer enthusiasm, they let me actually run that event and take the leadership role in it. And, believe it or not, dude, before that day I was super introverted. I would see someone coming, even if I knew them. Sometimes I'd look the other way because I just wanted less interaction. Super different person. Right, it's very hard for you to believe right now. I don't know that. If they give me the time they will confirm. But I knew to make that first event a success, I had to speak with as many people as humanly possible. So that's what I did. I set up a booth in the most high foot traffic location my university, at UBC. I pitched every single person who walked by, anyone that would listen, and eventually they weren't just like all right, I'll come to your party. They're like how can I help you, dude, this just grow into a nonprofit organization which paved the way for some of the stuff I'm doing today and now.
Speaker 1:You've seen me do multiple tree planting wall records. I've done this 24 hour tree planting thing twice. I'm doing it a third time soon. I've done a 60 hour live stream interviewing a new person almost every single hour, like a freaking crazy person. I have this energy, right. And what is it? Where does it come from? It's passion, it's purpose, it's tapping into something that sets my soul on fire. Right, I'm pumped to not just break my wall record for most trees planted today, but the world record for most trees planted by any number of people 560 million in a day. And why does that get me excited? Because, dude, we pull that off. Sky's the freaking limit. We've made history and the regenisant's movement will be in full effect. I mean, we will be crushing it after that, and so that really gets me growing. That gets me, you're really excited. So why do I do max impact? It's to empower change makers, to maximize their positive impact, to tap into something that can also have a similar effect. Because, dude, it's like night and day, dude so it's contagious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's been really inspiring. I mean, like you said, I went to school for political economics and it was boring as hell, didn't do much with it, wasn't inspired, thought that there wasn't a lot that we could do, and then, coming into the regenit of finance space and the mix of culture and community and tech coming together in a way feels very inspiring. Now it feels like there is actually a path to get us to the regenisant's and culture, community and tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, all right. So we're talking about regenisant's. You want to be hit with all four, so so, so, let's, let's get into that one next baby, all right, so different people could define their regenisant's differently. There's actually a whole book on their regenisant's that you can check. And no man, by the way, is joining our team for the for the festival. I've interviewed him about this as well, but this is the way I look at it.
Speaker 1:All right, already, you can go to a GPT or one of their competitors and you can prompt code and build technology and you can prompt a marketing campaign. Right now, I need to know a little bit about code launching everything, but very soon, there will be no barrier to idea reality. You could speak something into existence, a technology, perhaps even an innovation. Someday, once we reach AGI and this might seem crazy out there this is our lifetime, dude, this is in our lifetime We'll be able to speak an idea into existence and so, yeah, it's going to replace a bunch of jobs, but there's also going to be a creative revolution, right? If you have every idea you come up with, you could actually make it just by speaking it. Dude, we're going to have so many businesses that's not even crazy, just pumping out and will those businesses how is entrepreneurial?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Will those businesses be just like the ones that we've gotten up to this point? Because look around you, man, pretty much everything makes a negative impact in the world Plastic, metals, wood. It's like dude. They had to destroy the world to make everything.
Speaker 1:Most of our economy is based on destruction and degeneration of nature, and that's the reason why we live in the world that we do so as we go to this next creative renaissance, is it just going to be like that, or will this passionate group of regions shift where the future is headed towards a world that is regenerative, towards a world where we're actually making the world a better place, we're actually regenerating nature and all kinds of ecosystems are thriving? I really hope for that second future. It's literally dystopian versus utopian, and it's the regions that are going to make the difference. And so festivals have a really impactful place in the world. Actually, you might just think, you know it might think festival, oh, tomorrowland, whatever. People's going crazy, getting high, whatever. No, I mean, I'm sure that stuff happens, but did you know that the revolution in France was actually instigated by a festival?
Speaker 1:I did not yeah it was possible, and that's when people come. When enough people come together and share ideas, change happens. One of the biggest halts to the Vietnam War was because of Woodstock, and you know how people like them is like a massive protest, and people you know wanted to stand for something, and so, in a similar way, I mean, this isn't just going to be festival, this is actually mostly conference three day conference, two day festival. It's going to be the biggest region event in the world. Why am I so confident? Well, it's not just IRL, it's also digital. Okay, so in 2020, we did a hybrid sorry, we did, yeah, technically hybrid event, but pretty much digital because of COVID. We could only have like 50 people in the room and so we broadcasted. We had massive channel partners with millions of followers, and so all the content that we put out during that festival got 3.5 million views, and so we reached the masses. And we had only two months to do that, Right, Okay, With 10 months and the right channel, distribution partners and a movement and that was just me trying to get everyone involved, Like dude. Now we got the movement.
Speaker 1:Just like how Burning man is put on by the attendees the regenisance is created by the refine movement. It's many startups coming together. I just spoke with Phil Fogle. He's pumped from FlowCon and, yeah, a bunch of people right, and it's mostly like startups. But we're trying to get those big refine players as well to really like co-build this thing. Right To green people, right To onboard them into refi, but also for people already in refi to level up, to realize everything that's available to them and form the right alliances to really push the movement forward. Right, and then we take a movement. Then, Like, it's not tree jans, it's going to plant 560 million trees in a day, to be clear, right, it's the movement that's going to do that. Right, and we need everyone to solve climate change. It's not one startup, it's not a person, it's not even a group, it's a movement. That is the only way, and so that's why it's about uniting and growing the movement. That's the regenisance festival and that is happening towards the end of this year.
Speaker 2:That's right in Thailand, and hybrid.
Speaker 1:Exactly Cool. Respecting about a thousand people IRL Could be a bunch more. Could be a bunch more. I think that's actually a little bit conservative because we're trying to get some you know, some big names to come through Musicians and, more importantly, transformational workshop facilitators, keynote speakers. All we are, to a huge extent, as humans, is a accumulation of experiences that is shaped. We are today right, just like how I told you, that experience in my university completely transformed who.
Speaker 1:Jimmy Cohen is right, and that is the potential of an event like this. It is a transformative experience for people who come out of that having clarity on their next approach nine moves and how to get there and they know that they got this movement of people behind them backing them up and they don't see each other as competitors Because we're all working towards a massive goal. It is very much positive sub-games. So that's Regenisons and that is actually the second project of let's Grow DOW. So let's Grow DOW was the first initiative was let's Grow Live.
Speaker 1:So we were live 24-7 for two weeks. Get this Cash Upton On a brand new page, just created it. In two weeks we got 52% more listeners on spaces than Gitcoin did the entire year and they have 200,000 followers. How Community baby, the movement coming together. It was not only decentralized streaming Every hour we rotated hosts, most hours we had multiple co-hosts and, like I said, and it's not just input is decentralized streaming for output. So we were on 17 different social media platforms live at the same time, reaching all of their audiences, inputting the spaces audio into the video feed, redirecting people back to the spaces.
Speaker 1:So, that's a thank you man. So let's Grow is on chain on optimism. Right now. Everyone listening can join. It is free and you get an NFT when you sign a manifesto. I mean real free mint I'm not talking about. Yeah, just pay $20 gas fees. No, we pay your gas.
Speaker 1:All right, it's included in this platform that we have Shout out to Wasabi, who made this whole shebang, and the people behind the tech platforms that did it. But yeah, it's one person, one vote. It's a Moloch Dow. Ok, we have two tokens. It's LGD, lgd, let's grow Dow. That's your one person, one vote. And then we have Grow Token. Grow tokens are given out to the community when they do work and it's non-financialized, right, because it's Moloch Dow. But you can't even rage quit to a treasury because the treasury is empty for this intentionally. But we use it not only for utility, like exposure at the festival, the live streams, but also, as we do, our own retroactive public goods funding, as when we get grant funding, we can then distribute to the grow holders in proportion to the work that they put in. So that's let's Grow Dow and really, emissions to uniting or the movement similar to the festival.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes, and I haven't joined yet myself, so I will do that today.
Speaker 1:Do the thing? Yeah, awesome, I'll send you the link in there, that is really cool.
Speaker 2:I love the retro aspect. That is one of the beauties or refies that you can reward people for doing impact and not just having it be philanthropy, which God bless philanthropy, but climate emergency. We all need to be just actually working, getting our hands dirty right. So I'd love to just kind of pull on that a little bit more. What is some mechanisms and refi that you see as being able to reward impact?
Speaker 1:That's beautifully segues to the thing that you also included in the four the quadrami there and that's three gents right. This is what I spend most of my time on right. This is what I live and breathe is my baby, is my baby, and it's only one of the things, right. There are other things that I will mention in your answer to your question. Let me start with three gents right, Cause that's what I know in and out.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, tree gents is growing on movements of tree planters around the world through the most rewarding and transparent tree planting technology. Our vision is to create a world where anyone can plant trees and get rewarded. Right, and so we're starting with mangrove trees. Why? Mangroves absorb eight to 10 times more carbon out of the atmosphere compared with all terrestrial forests. They're also incredibly easy to plant. You know if you're using propagules. This is one of the reason why my goal this time is to plant 30,000 mangrove trees in 24 hours. Cause you literally take these stick propagules, put them in the ground. They germinate in the ground. The more you learn about this tree, the more it's going to blow your mind. They desalinate ocean water.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, the barrier is really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it helps with erosion and, by the way, when the coaster roads, the sediment gets down there and kills corals. So it's actually helping corals. It filters the water, it helps with the fisheries, it helps with the crabs, it helps with all kinds of animals to thrive around these biodiverse regions, and so there's many. If you look at the ecological benefits framework, mangroves are crushing all right, bam, so all right. So how are we doing this? We're actually launching three digital assets. Number one called TGN TGN short for tree gen. It's our governance token.
Speaker 1:Right Now we have a green paper. We can look at all the different details of this, but basically the utility of this token is to do something called proof of plant. What proof of plant is is basically you become a verifier, like proof of stake, in a way, where you have something at stake and you're verifying data points. In this case, not to verify every transaction we're an optimism but it's to verify the issuance of MGROW. So MGROW M-G-R-O is our tokenization of mangrove regeneration, and the only way to produce this token is to plant trees, specifically mangroves, and get them verified right. So we have an AI tree counting tool so anyone can plant the mangroves. They take their phone, they film the land before and after, the AI counts, right. But if they film the same land left, right, left right, left, right, it's gonna count multiple times, right.
Speaker 1:So there's additional layers of verification, which is where the DAO members come in. They look at that, they look at the GPS coordinates, they look at landmarks and they say, okay, this person's planted trees, all right, they get 1-6th of an MGROW token per tree for the initial plant and a sequential 1-6th every six months over the course of three years, right? So it actually represents regeneration at the point of three years. And if mangroves grow to three years extremely high, they'll grow to full growth over the course of 25 years. And if you know so, if some don't survive, of course they could replant, but they're not. It's reflected in the sequential issuance. So that's all a part of it.
Speaker 2:Now, Right, they wouldn't get the remaining issuance for the trees that don't survive. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:So it really represents that. Now we're also gamifying tree planting and we're doing that through our third digital asset called a dynamic semi-solbound token. So this DSST is actually dynamic in two ways it has a light on the mind these tree gen characters and there's a light on the heart. And the light on the mind gets brighter when you fund trees. The light on the heart gets brighter when you plant trees. Okay, how do we know you funded trees? Well, when you burn the emgro token, you send it to this burn wallet address on our website. We know that you sent to that address, we can verify that, and that's like kind of like retiring a carbon credit. But it's like you're retiring this ecological credit, right, and that is when you can make a claim. Hey, I planted a million trees, I burnt a million emgro, right, because just by holding the token it doesn't mean you actually can make the claim, just like you can't until you retire a carbon credit, right, and so that's that. And then for the regeneration, of course, we know the emgro token was issued to the wallet. So by tracking these things, it's a visual display of your impact, right, and it's semi-solbound because you can still trade the artworks. But the impact metrics. The lights are nontransferable because we're gamifying. Right, you want someone buying your high score and we have a leaderboard as well. So we're really trying to make this gamified. And, yeah, man, to grow the movement, incentivize anyone and we'll eventually have different methodologies for various types of trees. But we're really bullish on mangroves. And imagine for a moment, man, so this 560 million, that's Ethiopia, right? Imagine if all countries around the world, or a bunch of them, tried to beat that record on the same day and it was competitive. As I think about it, you have competition on individual level. Imagine on the country level, man, ethiopia doesn't even really have mangroves, right. I think Thailand could beat Ethiopia, I think a bunch of countries could. But it's like national holiday everyone goes out and plants trees. So that's kind of what we're working towards, the reason why I see this Guinness thing that I'm doing as a stepping stone towards that.
Speaker 1:Now, what are all the ways you can get reward? That was kind of the broader scope of your question. There's a lot of ways, and so At Regenison's festival we're going to be really like demoing a bunch of these ways. One of them that comes to mind Evergreencoin is like you could do all kinds of environmental stuff. You could just do your recycling and get rewarded. You could do a bunch of stuff and you could plant trees, compost, whatever you got to get that token, and so that's great. And then there's LitterToken. There's a bunch of them.
Speaker 1:Beach has done stuff for plastic beach cleanups. What do they call it? Aquapurge is doing stuff for plastic beach cleanups. Bye-bye plastic has done something as well. They got a grant from Selo and they're doing $70,000. Blondish, by the way, I'm in contact with Blondish. I think she's actually joining her douch. It would be amazing. Yeah, so these are all the different ways. Man, and look as a walkie says it's not a direct quote and paraphrasing here, but the best way to onboard people is for their first experience of crypto to be a reward for positive impact. What a better way than coming in there to try to make a bag and damn, they rug me.
Speaker 2:You know what I?
Speaker 1:mean this should just be good intentioned people rewarding good people for doing good things, because it is my plan to convert the DGENs into tree GENs. I am planning to do that because I plan to make people bullish on MGROW. We can work with the carbon markets, carbon forwards, where you sell the future value of carbon credits in the short term at a discounted rate. But that discounted rate is still in order of magnitude more than what it costs us to plant trees in the first place, which means we can multiply the trees and we can airdrop the holders. We can also take I'm applying for the right now you can apply for the Optimism Growth Experiment Grant. So this is like a quarter million OP tokens, which is massive. But the thing with that is you have to give it out to the end users. You can't just, as a startup, cash them out. That's perfect for us.
Speaker 1:We want to be rewarding the people doing good things right, so it's a match made in heaven. So that's one of the things. There's a bunch of different things. We're looking at biodiversity credits in the future, the whole ecological benefits framework. How do we sell that when they're issued or as a forward? How do we reward and make people bullish AF on regeneration.
Speaker 1:That's something I spend a lot of time thinking about, and there's many different ways to grow about. That, specifically, might have made of MGROWs, but then you could do this for many sorts of things, and that's what I think a lot of people in ReFire doing is rewarding people for positive impact and even get coin right. Literally like you could have a little farm in Kenya and you get access to Twitter. You somehow find Jimmy Cohen and now all of a sudden you're on get coin, making way more money than you were from your farm and you're able to grow your fund. This is a real story Cowal Gooma Village Project. So what I'm saying is that you could also get rewarded through grant projects, right, I mean, you don't have to go through another Web3 project to get rewarded, because you could literally do a good thing and start something and get rewarded through that. And then this whole retroactive public goods funding right, the top 50 out of 600 on there got more than $100,000 worth. So, oh, sorry, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the impact equals profit meme is incredible. Right, Reward people. There's already people doing regenerative farming practices because they love the earth and but they're not getting paid for that. They're getting some marketing kudos. Right, they're getting a pat on the back from people. They're doing a good job. They're not actually getting rewarded. And carbon has a value, clean water has a value and that's why I love the mangroves. Right, Like you said, the ecological benefits framework, the clean air, clean water, biodiversity it's all there, and so being able to leverage all that is really cool for that Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so with Web 3, right, we can put our values into what we value Boom.
Speaker 2:That's a cool thing Programmable values into what we value. I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, values, do what we value we value this.
Speaker 2:You can't do this in the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's fix it Like that's literally the potential here for insuring.
Speaker 2:Right. All the externalities can now have a price, and can be have a reward or have a price.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly, and that's why we're making the markets, because it's very destructive. More than half the mangroves in Thailand are gone and you'd think like super essential ecosystem, so many things drive around them. But, like dude, if you can earn more from chopping it down for some firewood or making a table, that's what's going to happen, and you can make it illegal. But, dude, if you got to put food on your table, it's still going to happen. Yeah, and it does. And the prison in Kenya for cutting mangroves still happens, and so the law isn't going to fix it. The economy as is is broken, and when it comes to what it values and what we value as humans, as regions, as people who genuinely give it to them. And so how do we fix that? Well, economic opportunities, right, it is, you know, our intention to specifically go into the regions where there is mangrove deforestation.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, I talked about carbon forwards before. Of course, people could get rewarded. Hopefully they become tree planters. That's ideal, but there's many actual economies that thrive around the mangrove trees, so, for example, beekeeping. Some of the most delicious honey in the world comes from mangroves and it's dark and has antioxidants in it. Of course, organic it's from mangrove. They're natural right and so that could be massive. It already exists. You could help that grow more. There's crowd farming, there's fishing, there's all sorts of different industries, eco-tourism they're thriving around the mangroves. And so I spoke about carbon forwards before, where we sell the future value of carbon credits in the short term at a discounted rate. Our plan is to take 50% of that and put that towards local regenerative businesses like the ones I just mentioned, so that we can tip the scale If the value of regeneration and conservation is more than the value of degeneration. That's what we're going to see. Just follow the incentives.
Speaker 2:Yes, incentives play a huge role in shaping the world and we can program those incentives now into money, tokens, whatever, right, what we value. I love that. One question I have that came up. I love the AI tree counting concept. But one thing, especially when I was talking to Douglas Gay and the ecological benefits framework, one of the pushbacks he had on just the broader blockchain space was what barriers to entry are there, and he wants to make sure things are democratizing instead of adding barriers and get on board Right. Yeah, and that's the impact one right. From my understanding, a lot of traditional MRV is expensive because you actually have to get a person out there, you have to physically check something. So, from a decentralized MRV perspective, it seems like there could actually be a lot more onboarding of the global south and people in more developing parts of the world that don't traditionally have access to all the technology or the finance. So what's your thoughts on that and especially like the MRV and the access side of stuff with people who maybe don't traditionally have as much resources?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just speaking with someone on Maximeback today who's doing more affordable MRV using Web3 technology. So there's also Shamba network. Shout out to Shamba. They're using satellite. I am intrigued to do this more affordable. Yeah, bear prices out Most people $100,000, $50,000 to $100,000 takes like six months plus just to make an account.
Speaker 1:You kidding me, like, unless you're a massive project, you're not going to pay that. You can't afford it. So now these things are just for the big project developers and that's not the goal here. There's a lot of people on the ground who could really benefit from tapping into these and ultimately do way more good because they're on the ground and they're going to re-spend that money in the economy and that's going to not only affect the regeneration, it's going to affect poverty, and poverty is one of the underlying things that pins all the deforestation we see in. A lot of it is based on poverty and changing the economic landscape, and so, yes, that is a great opportunity. I'm very bullish on the MRV people doing that.
Speaker 1:Our AI tree counter is not to track carbon necessarily. It's to track regeneration. It's to count how many propagules are there, how many are alive, et cetera, and that ties into our proof of plan. So what TreeGen is really doing is we're tokenizing the regeneration side, which has a value, right, even without carbon markets. We planted more than 2.2 million mangroves so far and that's been purely because people want to plant trees. They just funded it. Shout out to Kyoto Protocol. They funded us a million mangroves and like dude and they don't expect carbon credits. But until that was a 100K deal, right, we started 10 cents each. This is a four trees club. By the way, my brother and I co-founded a regular tree planting org and he's more leading that now and I'm more deep into the Web3 TreeGen side. But that already has value. But being able to tap into that as another revenue stroke because these are very different claims, right, ngos that plant trees they can't claim carbon credits. It's a different claim, and so we can leverage that carbon in addition and do more of the tree planting and that's another big thing there.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I really respect everyone who's working on MRV measuring and importing verifications. It's a huge problem and yeah, I'm so glad that that's going to happen. But the problem is with that is demand. 70% of all carbon credits are sold through Vera. That's the reality.
Speaker 1:So they sell themselves in a way, like you put them in the registry and there's demand for them, right, because big companies like, oh, we're gonna get audited or whatever. They need to make sure it's up to a certain standard. And, honestly, vera's had all kinds of problems, but they are just the oldest, so it's like the old grandpa. They're like respects and they're like, yeah, we'll keep inviting them to dinner, but like don't expect to be perfect communication. I don't know, it's like you know, but so you have to do extra work. You have to sell the carbon credits. If you do another MRV, right, that's another cost of sale. But as we grow the movement, as we, as refi goes to make history and plants the most trees in the world, largely because of these different systems, then we're gonna see demand for that increase and I also really hope demand for other forms of ecological assets, like biodiversity, really increases too. But it's up to all of us, man, we all gotta make that sexy somehow.
Speaker 2:Well, and I like what you're saying with, like the AI portion, like that is a new technology that will help with cracking, I think, liquidity, like you're saying, like, if you don't have a place to sell it, a marketplace that you can't use what you're generating, so the blockchain can give liquidity. I wonder, like, is there a resounding feeling about blockchain tech where you are in Thailand?
Speaker 1:I don't think businesses can legally accept cryptocurrency here. It's just as a form of payment, because the government can't. They claim they can't really track everything right, so like, if it's on a credit card, they know, of course they can't track cash either and can technically try to blockchain and there's totally a solution to that problem, but they just haven't really figured it out. And so there's like no, that's not to say not everyone accepts the bot currency looks just like Bitcoin. I don't even know that, but I'm like, oh, this place is Bitcoin. It's like, no, dude, that's bot. It's like, oh, it looks like the same. It looks exactly the same. I get so excited every time I see bot and I'm like, ah, but yeah. But that said, man, like there's huge communities for it. You go to Chiang Mai.
Speaker 2:There's massive web, three villages where people are like co-working together and building stuff, and you know like the blockchain tech is received there, but not necessarily like daily usage of it, Like how in Buenos Aires people are like buying coffee with. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely not very yet.
Speaker 2:And they also have a hyperinflation problem, and maybe Thailand is a little bit more insulated from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's one of the one of the great use cases for crypto. For sure, it's like that's when people like for OK, let's check out all our options here. And yeah, us dollar, too, like long term, not that bullish. So you know, we need these other forms of value and, yeah, to try to have more. It's difficult to use the word stable value because, of course, they're more fluctuating, but if you just zoom out a little bit, right, no one's ever bought Bitcoin, held for three years and lost money. It's people who sell before that. Right, if you can zoom out and that's my entire strategy, and I'm just like you know, buy some over three years. I'm not going to look at it, just pretend I don't have it right, try to forget about it and then, hopefully, to discover one day. I think that you know there's so many different. Yeah, we don't have to go down that rabbit hole. There's so many different investing advice, not financial advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not financial advice guys, Like do your own research. But like honestly, I think that's yeah, that's just personally what I do. I'm not a trader. Let's say Right, yeah you're an impactor. Yeah, impactor all a few things. That's the way.
Speaker 2:Well, dude, I think we've hit most everything I wanted to talk to you about today. I'm very excited. I love your energy man. Thank you Anything. We didn't cover any like favorite projects in the space. People should look to.
Speaker 1:If I say something now, then you're like what did you say me?
Speaker 2:Why did?
Speaker 1:you say me OK.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I think you're going to be 19 so far.
Speaker 1:There's so many good ones out there. Let me just say, all right, I'm just going to biasly say the ones that I know very well and work with. Ok, yeah, it's not all the good ones. There are many good ones out there. Ok, but let me just chill my let's grow comrades, because I know these people very well. I know that they're very passionate, I know that they're willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and that makes me bullish. That makes me really bullish. So, from the top, all right.
Speaker 1:So Coconut Network these guys are doing coconut plantations and they're leveraging all different forms of coconuts for the value of them and, of course, it's helping with carbon in the future. They actually have various forms of crops and things like this, and so this is really like the exemplary Dow. If you look at how to Dow, how to not get wrecked in a Dow like this, is it, I think, molloc Dow, one person, one vote. Actually, I don't think they're one person, one vote. I think they have voting, but it's Molloc, so you can only rage quit. Anyway, it's a great Dow the way that he's designed. If you look into this Coconut Network, coco Dow they're doing conservation in Colombia and Anna's great stuff and they're also collaborating with Open Forest Protocol to map things out. And SolarPunk Dow is launching Earthcoin. This is pretty cool. It's backed by a real ecological impact, so it's like an impact investment and that it has yields and all those things have yields which go back to the token holders. Super cool model. Shout out to Earthcoin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had a discussion for episode seven actually.
Speaker 1:Epic. Yeah, of course she's my man. You know, when I went to India he hosted me in his house, gave me food, free accommodation. What a guy, like just great guy For many reasons, but that was like this guy's cool and yeah, so, oh, jerry, jerry, nft, ok, so we've got to say this guy. So, jerry, he takes, so you can take a bunch of photos. Right, talk about rewards for impact. So you take a bunch of photos of your impact. He makes them into like a mosaic with characters, but it's like a mosaic, so the color slightly changes, makes another image, and that he actually helps you sell as an NFT and then rewards the people. I think that's really cool as well.
Speaker 2:Regent Bill's new art art mixing with impact. I love it. That's really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, art. You know my mother's an artist and environmentalist and she didn't get paid that well, like kind of struggled a bit and unfortunately that's like a really sad part of it's not like I cliche at this point. Right, the struggling artists. Why do artists struggle? They make us like happy. This is like the cross language boundary that everyone can actually appreciate and get something from.
Speaker 2:I love the web three is also helping you out Free writers maybe what Like people appreciating art without saying thank you, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, once it's digitized there's no variable cost. Everyone get is peruzability of them, and you know that's the problem. But boom, nfts solves that. So ownership for the win. Regent Bill makes construction more sustainable. They track that. They reward people. If you're doing it. I was blown away by just how much emissions happens from construction. I think that's actually insane. Prana was in the climate program which, by the way, is no longer a core Gitcoin. It's its own thing. So I'm bullish on the climate program and John is working on that too.
Speaker 1:I'm going past the let's go down members of this point. Sorry, dude, you asked me a question. You probably be like one and like dude, I got to. If I don't mention these guys. I mean I love these people so much I wish I could just show here. For, like dude, I actually did that one time. You know, we had like 50 hosts for let's go down. I chilled every single one on the main Gitcoin space. Dude, I got up there. I freaking chill them all Even brought people who like didn't show up. I was like, well, I got a list. So let me just chill in every single person. And I, you know, after like two weeks of hanging out with people like almost every waking hour. Like you get to know their project pretty well, you can show them.
Speaker 2:I love it, man. No, you bring people into the space, man, like. You introduced me to one of my first Twitter spaces, like over a year ago, and it really helped me to just kind of, yeah, keep coming into the space and being present. So, dude, keep doing what you're doing, man. How can our listeners support you? When is the max impacts? How can they get involved? I'll put some links at the end of the show, but Monday's or Tuesday's usually, it is every single day's except Sunday.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what I'm introducing let's grow Sunday. So it's every day. So I do, okay, unless something happens if I'm traveling blah, blah, blah, sometimes issues, but pretty much every, at least every weekday, sometimes Saturday, sunday depending. I'm live on at Jimmy Cohen. Actually, mondays is Regenison's day. I actually do that from max, from let's grow Dow. Kind of confusing, but, by the way, if you click on my profile at 10 am EST just 10 pm in Thailand, I think that's six UTC you will see the max impact episodes there. You can ring a bell to get notified when we go live, because sometimes things might change. Blah, blah, blah. And how can they support me? Well, it's not during a good coin round, so I don't think they really can. But actually, you know what, if you want guys one of the people who are listening right now I want to plant two trees. If you follow Jimmy Cohen, I plant one tree per follower. I also plant one tree per follower on tree gens. So that's two trees. Click, click, boom in the ground. And oh, how can I help you guys? It might be mutually beneficial.
Speaker 1:We're growing our community. I'm focusing on Telegram over Discord. So if you go to tme, slash tregenfam. That's T-R-E-E-G-E-N-F-A-M. That's the link to our official Dow community for tree gens. We have many channels in there. One of the channels is called Impact Alpha. I believe there's more than 20,000 investor contacts, phone numbers, emails, details on what they invest in, more than 300 grant opportunities. There is a culture of giving without expectation in this community. There's phenomenal people in there. Love to see you in, introduce yourselves and we'll see how we can support you and one another. Because that's what it's all about, baby. We're all so much more capable of changing the world when we're united and on one cohesive front, and that's really what the ReFi movement is really coming to fruition to achieve, and I can't wait to be here for it. Let's grow. Let's grow, love it.
Speaker 2:You have me, my man. Thanks so much for coming on. This was such an exciting time to talk and just again I'm gonna go plant a few trees later today. You inspired me.
Speaker 1:Let's grow. Hey, make sure you touch tree. Use the hashtag, guys. That's the only way to get green listed. Actually, there's seven ways, but you have to do that. Put your hand on a tree, take a selfie. Hashtag, touch tree on X. That's how you get green listed. Hey, we've done giveaways for people who touch trees. Might do it again. You never know. You never know you might get a airdrops, boom, impact, alpha just for cash up then. All right, do the thing. Touch trees in your best interest. It's also good for mental health. All right, it's good for you.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, horse bathing. All right, sir, thanks for doing this. Much love Cheers. All right, yeah.
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.