Ep. 18 Sovereign Nature Initiative: Funding Conservation & Biodiversity

In today’s episode we talk with Alessandro Mazzi from Sovereign Nature Initiative. Ale was a joy to talk with and is a wealth of knowledge. He is getting his PHD researching the influence of law on the capacity of human and wildlife to coexist.

Sovereign Nature Initiative works in biodiversity conservation and is sitting in the middle between philanthropic giving & conservation projects. Sovereign Nature Initiative helps to raise funds and do impact reporting. By looking at nature positive solutions, aka conservation and restoration of natural ecosystems, they are creating other ways to value nature rather than the traditional extractive model.

Ale discusses the benefits of using blockchain as a transparent accounting mechanism, thus helping to prove an environmental claim actually happens, and reduces green washing because it ensures accountability.

Ale provides a fantastic look on how dMRV (digital or decentralized measure report & verification) allows for significantly reducing MRV costs - further democratizing the access to MRV tools and monetization mechanisms for regenerative land practices. By working with locals and the stewards themselves, emerging dMRV technology can further reduce the barrier to entry and allow smaller scale projects to participate.

I especially loved Ale’s perspective on biodiversity credits, and how certain species can “activate the carbon cycle” by providing important ecosystem services. We discuss an exciting European Union development for a treaty on biodiversity mandates for corporations.

Ale shares an inspiring project surrounding bison restoration in Romania, where children are leading the monitoring efforts of biodiversity. These youth then educate farmers about the importance of biodiversity. I was left inspired and enthused after talking to Ale, I hope you enjoy this episode.

Sovereign Nature Initiative Linktr.ee
Sovereign Nature Initiative Twitter
Sovereign Nature Initiative Website
WWF European Bison Restoration

Transcript

Ale: 0:03

I love to talk about this project to show you that conservation is not just building fences around to protect animals or collecting data or putting colors around you know, collecting data with fancy satellites and so on, or putting colors on animals but it is also about trying to understand. What does social change mean in places where humans and wildlife coexist?

Cash: 0:36

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 talk with Alessandro Mazzi from Sovereign Nature Initiative. Ale was a joy to talk with and is a wealth of knowledge. He is getting his PhD researching the influence of law on the capacity of human and wildlife to coexist.

Cash: 1:20

Sovereign Nature Initiative works in biodiversity conservation and is sitting in the middle between philanthropic giving and conservation projects. Sovereign Nature Initiative helps to raise funds and do impact reporting by looking at nature-positive solutions, aka conservation and restoration of natural ecosystems. They are creating other ways to value nature rather than the traditional extractive model. Alley discusses the benefits of using blockchain technology as a transparent accounting mechanism, thus helping to prove an environmental claim actually happens and reducing greenwashing and ensuring accountability. Ale provides a fantastic look on how DMRV Digital or Decentralized Measure, report and Verification allows for significantly reducing MRVV. Technology can further reduce the barrier to entry and allow smaller scale projects to participate.

Cash: 2:31

I especially loved Ale's perspective on biodiversity credits and how certain species can quote activate the carbon cycle by providing important ecosystem services. We discuss an exciting European Union development for a treaty on biodiversity mandates for corporations. We finish with Ali sharing an inspiring project surrounding bison restoration in Romania, where children are actually leading the monitoring efforts of biodiversity. These youth then educate local farmers about the importance of biodiversity. I was left inspired and enthused after talking with Ali. I hope you enjoy this episode, hey, ali how are you doing today, Hi Kash?

Ale: 3:20

I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me.

Cash: 3:23

Yeah, great to have you on. Why don't we start with just a little background on where you're calling in from and how you got into the refi space? I know you're in a PhD program too, so maybe set a little background for our listeners.

Ale: 3:37

Yeah, sure, I'm calling you from Lisbon, where I live a little close by on the coast, where I live a little close by on the coast and, wow, the refi space. I've worked for the Sovereign Age Initiative now for three and a half years and when I just started the first year was also the year when the regenerative finance movement started. So I remember a very early call with John and John Ellison and, yeah, so the idea of the sovereign nature initiative specifically was always revolved around. You know, how can we value nature more for being alive than dead? Basically because the economic system that is still running very hard and is still exponentially growing tends to value nature from what we can get out of it.

Ale: 4:38

So, yeah, a tree on a market is more valuable than a tree healthy in a forest valuable than a tree healthy in a forest. So we've been, and we've seen that through our research and the founders have seen that all the attempts that we were trying to value nature, um, through carbon credits or through, uh, other titles like market-based mechanisms, was actually failing. So this is where I mean this is how the Sovereign Nature Initiative started to kind of like answer that question specifically on how do we value, how do we attract funds and redistribute, allocate the funds to projects that are working on what you now call nature positive solutions, but basically conservation and restoration of natural ecosystems?

Cash: 5:27

I especially love that you're like flipping the extractive model on its head, and so that's a good lead in to. Maybe it's a little too soon, but why blockchain? Like, how is the technology that you're using able to better assign value to natural resources that were maybe traditionally just seen as a commodity to be put down or mined?

Ale: 5:54

I think blockchain doesn't necessarily answer the question of value. That's more of a question of economic design, question of, like you know, economic design. But, um, blockchain blockchain offers um, the an account is an accounting system, at least to to me and many, many others um, where we can see not only funds distributed are located to a certain organization, person, but also the outcomes. So, on the blockchain, we can store data, for instance, that can prove that a certain action has happened and the effects of the of that certain action, and that can be connected to the funds, to the energy that we've been put to make that action happen and that outcome happen. Um, this is how we still see, as a sovereign initiative, the advantage of using distributed ledger technologies and also what is informing the development of uh yeah, of nfts, but all the products basically of the sovereign nature initiative is that is, the transparency, traceability of funds and actions that those funds are supporting.

Cash: 7:05

I love it. Yeah, that's a really good explainer as to why is blockchain important. It's that transparency, and then it goes back to humans and local societies to assign values differently based on what is meaningful to them.

Ale: 7:21

Yeah, because it's. I mean, what you're're seeing with a lot in the refi world is that, at the end of the day, using blockchain for carbon trading doesn't solve the issue. It's just using another technology to do it. But though refi, I think, has done a lot of work on the data and the transparency side of things, with this idea of decentralized MRV, for instance. This is the type of applications that, although I mean, you can also do it without blockchain, but it's the type of, let's say, experiments and solutions that I'm really excited to see emerging from the ReFi space.

Cash: 8:08

Absolutely yeah. Dmrv Decentralized MRV Measure Report, verify has been a theme that I hear a lot of people talking about as one of the roadblocks but also one of the solutions for more democratizing access to data. And on a recent let's Grow Live, that was like one of the biggest kind of topics is you know who's the validator? How do you trust it? Like, where are some of the solutions? And I wonder what you found in your work with current DMRV initiatives?

Ale: 8:44

Yeah. So what I'm really let's say what I was really excited about is when, for instance, we worked with Shamba in Kenya, whereby they basically told me, like you know, to access the carbon credits, like this is the amount of money that you need to spend to only be able to do an environmental assessment that you need. Basically, what they've calculated is that, through a normal MRV process, like 70% to 80% of the money that you will then be receiving from the carbon credits goes into the costs that you need to be able to do the MRV. They were trying to flip that around by giving access to farmers and to local communities to be able to do that assessment themselves, because the transparency layer, which is the, you know, all the consultants and the auditors that you need throughout the whole MRV process, are basically cut because you can bring that transparency through technology. So the fact that these people will go out, take the data, run applications that they can track that data was collected at that specific time because of the GPS location, and so bringing extra transparency through technology and the fact that the records of these actions it's on an immutable ledger, could help cut all of the costs that are needed to trust a certain claim or to trust a certain project, and this is a thing.

Ale: 10:31

So, shamba, you can check them. They're also quite active in the refi space. They were working specifically on that in Kenya, trying to build capacity for farmers to enable them to access the carbon market without having to pay crazy amounts of money to do that, which I don't have. Simply so it's it's really scaling this the carbon, uh, carbon market solutions through technology for blockchain specifically. Uh, it's what we're trying to do. They're trying to do soon that's a great example.

Cash: 11:03

Yeah, I'll definitely put a link to shamba in our notes so people can check him out more and to see that they're flipping that 70% to 80% of funds received to have to go into paying for MRV expenses to the inverse, by using local people and a trusted technological system is exciting. Trusted technological system is exciting. I mean, that is the undertone that I've been hearing as the potential for DMRV, but it's good to hear that you're working with folks who are actually implementing that.

Ale: 11:35

I mean in our world, meaning biodiversity conservation. There are opportunities that we've also been exploring of doing data collection of specific, for instance, about specific species or a specific habitat and so on, and connect that to an application through which we can collect this data directly and be able to also process payments for the same applications. I know there have been experiments already working on that, and this is where you go. No technology has its limitations on how much solutions it can offer, but let's say these are examples of solutions that again are blockchain enabled.

Cash: 12:27

Yeah, I think this is a good segue to kind of dive into what the work of Sovereign Nature Initiative is up to. I know you guys kind of sit between philanthropic giving and conservation projects, kind of help with raising funds and impact reporting. So why don't you give some more info to our listeners?

Ale: 12:44

Sure, yeah. So basically, yeah, we sit in between, I would say, corporate, philanthropic giving. Usually, the money that are allocated to these conservation and restoration, biodiversity conservation, restoration projects come from the corporate environmental and social responsibility budget. So we receive these funds from corporations, private organizations, and distribute these funds to projects that are in our portfolio that are directly working on the conservation of either individual population, species, population like lions, or a community or an entire ecosystem. And what we deliver to, let's say what we call our clients, the, is periodic impact reporting and through videos and also through data basically.

Ale: 13:52

So we receive videos and content from the organizations that have been supported and update them about the progress that these organizations are making on a specific project with specific objectives that are time bound, meaning that our client, certain time in the future, is expecting something, some sort of biodiversity outcome, and I can discuss some of biodiversity outcome and I can discuss some of the examples. But basically this is what we do we use blockchain for tracking of both the funds being distributed to the conservation organization and the project, and the data basically is also a component. We basically match funds to the data that tells us something about the additionality of those funds, so what those funds have created additionally for that project and eventually to the ecosystem species population that this organization works with In the carbon or in the credits world. You call project developers, but these are organizations, a group of people scientists, rangers, local communities that are committed to protecting species and their ecosystems.

Cash: 15:26

I love it, so excited when I heard about you guys. When you're talking about funds, I assume you're talking about grant funding, but I also want to ask about eco credits or future funds that could be earned through carbon sequestration or another ecological benefit that is being created through the restoration project.

Ale: 15:56

Yeah, so we went down the biodiversity credits rabbit hole and so far it's very hard to calculate additionality of certain intervention on a complex system how we value. So, to cut my answer short, we we are looking at potentially these projects that have been funded, potentially becoming in the future an asset that could be traded or having some sort of return on the investments for donors, but so far, again, there's no really active market, it's really nascent. There's nothing like a carbon market. There is a way to connect and this actually was in your question. There's a way to connect biodiversity conservation to carbon. So, as you recall, in nature-based solutions whereby you can say, by protecting the species of forest elephants, for instance, that keep the rainforest healthy and alive, because they eat the little trees, they keep the bigger trees healthy and strong and capable of throwing down carbon long and capable of throwing down carbon. You see, so if you make that connection between and what is called activating the carbon cycle, you might be able to enter the carbon market. So, without having to wait for biodiversity credit market to come or offset All this, to say that, yes, we keep it in mind.

Ale: 17:48

All the methodologies that we we are developing on impact reporting keep in mind the requirements of biodiversity credits, or, you know, it's inspired or informed by the mistakes that we've been doing with the carbon, with carbon markets. But we're not to our clients yet, we're not, uh, you know, selling the idea that they can make a profit out of this project. Financial profit, right, so it can be in in other ways, or capital returns in other ways, but not through, yeah, let's say uh, interest or anything like that, right, and that's smart.

Cash: 18:26

You don't want to promise things that can't happen, and I appreciate, appreciate that. And you're not saying, oh, this is our roadmap, you're going to get rich, right? You're not doing that. I think that's smart. I guess one of the things that I ask for is because of the never-ending grant cycle that nonprofits find themselves in and having to continually raise money, and so if there is a back end where the work they're doing is earning them passive income, it starts to make the work more sustainable economically in the long run 100%.

Ale: 18:58

I mean, you're putting a very painful point. There is hope that we, we, we can incentivize corporations beyond their um, you know, beyond the return on their investments let's say, incentives only, and that is a regulation. So law, um, I know, I know, in europe I haven't done the study or globally, but there will be from the global biodiversity treaty, the CUMMI, montreal post 2020 Convention on Biological Diversity. Basically there is a non-mandatory obligations, but we can see the EU following. There is pressure on corporate companies to basically give well, not voluntarily anymore, but to basically fund and donate towards biodiversity conservation. So in Europe, we have legislations coming into force literally this summer in the global north asking corporations to give, with no expectations anything in return, to give to biodiversity restoration and conservation. So this is our strategy is to basically bring as much transparency as possible about the projects and bring the most important, the most critical projects to these corporations and offer to them all the transparency that we can offer and offer an education about the project, so that they can share these stories with not only their employees but also the customer base. And um, and this is the incentives that we're trying to tap into before any, you know, market incentives comes.

Ale: 21:06

Yeah, the methodology that that we have been developing, it's very like crystal.

Ale: 21:11

I mean, it's pretty clear, let's say, the logic behind it.

Ale: 21:14

There's no like huge you know calculations and huge use of data to try to make big assumptions on what is nature positive, let's say so.

Ale: 21:27

How we do that is we identify with the ecological stewards, as we call them, conservation organizations. So with the stewards, we, um, we look at like, what are the main threats to the specific species population or the community or the entire ecosystem population or the community or the entire ecosystem? They decide what are the strategies and actions they would take to mitigate those or abate those threats or if there are opportunities for restoration, if you have a degraded ecosystem, for instance, it can also be an action towards restoring habitat and and basically we report back to the donors on how much are these actions contributing to lowering the threats or hiring the restoration of a certain habitat, and there are ways to calculate that. Again, we will never understand nature, let's put it this way, we will never know exactly what happens and and you know. But we can make good guesses and assumptions on what an action will mean for, for an ecosystem, and we want to be fully transparent about that.

Cash: 22:43

We want to engage the public throughout this process of, you know, fighting against the certain threats or working hard towards regenerating and restoring habitats yeah, I think that's really important, that that's cool that you're working with the stewards and identifying those threats and then, yeah, it it seems like the perfect kind of ledger database to to show impact reporting that you guys are creating. You mentioned earlier the importance of policy and, with you getting your PhD looking at the influence of law on human and wildlife capacity, what is your call to action or kind of takeaway as to the importance of policy in this space?

Ale: 23:29

Yeah, I mean I think policy done right can be really transformative both for society and for society and for ecology. So I mean, from my research, I'm looking at how law can be seen as an indirect threat or opportunity to the health of both humans and wildlife, that who share an ecosystem, share resources and share space. Let's say, through my work what I've seen is that organizations that work directly with governments for instance produce data analysis and reports to change policy are the ones that have the biggest returns. Meaning like if you prohibit certain boats from, for instance, navigating in a place that is known as a breeding place for an endangered species of whales, or even if it's not endangered, just you know whales and so on and you can prove that by you know, going by passing through this, you're disturbing their mating, the mating season or the other type of social behaviors that they have. Then you can recuperate the poopserum population. Or if you change the policy on bycatch and so on, that has direct effect on wildlife population, the numbers you see numbers going up, for instance or ecosystem refining balance after something, a threat has been removed and policy and law is the way you do it, then of course it has its own limitations, like you know, enforcement and protection of certain species that also had negative consequences on humans.

Ale: 25:41

There's been evictions, you know.

Ale: 25:42

People have been taken away from places I mean the US I think the national parks is one of the examples right Like where people are kicked out of wild places where they lived.

Ale: 25:53

You know, indigenous people have been living for hundreds of years simply because we want to keep a very pristine ecosystem, thinking that humans are aliens on this planet, which is really not true, specifically not true of indigenous people, which have no better than anyone else. I mean, again, it's hard to put everything in one basket, but, let's say, most of the ones I've experienced know exactly how to deal with wildlife, know exactly how to deal with their ecosystem and how to steward it and protect it. But this is like I mean, it's a rabbit hole we can go into Just to say that law yes, law has a huge, huge, huge power. And this is why I chose this to be the focus of my research and also why I believe that, of the strategies conservation organizations take, the ones that try through data collection, science and advocacy to change law and policies, are the ones that have the highest chances of really making a long-term change in an ecosystem.

Cash: 27:05

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way to frame it. That intersection is a really important one and it's exciting to see that you're working with that, because I do think you're right In order for capitalism to be conscious, there needs to be some rails, there needs to be some policy to direct it to a more positive, protopian type environment. I love what you said, too, about the indigenous not being aliens on the land, and just like the different management practices.

Cash: 27:37

I was just listening to a podcast about bison management in Montana called Threshold, and the traditional way to get bison to move around by the national parks or by the state of Montana is to like haze them. They're like, you know, making their life uncomfortable. They're doing loud noises, they're like wrangling them up. And then when the um, the steward of the Fort Peck uh, native American tribe, was talking about his management of the bison, they just have these like flags and they kind of try to direct them with flaggers, but it's very gentle and they just encourage them to go places instead of hazing them and that, right, there is a incredibly different, you know, paradigm yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ale: 28:21

There is this like, almost like, also a recognition of like we cannot control them. All we can do is try to nudge them somewhere, and then there's the other way of doing it, which is like just going to fence them forcefully. Yeah, I mean, if you know, in our work, one of the very exciting type of strategies, if done well, is what is called community led conservation, where you try to involve local communities in the in the work of, you know, either, data, data collection, community outreach, education, uh, I mean actually like really scientific work sometimes, so these communities will get education to know how to do data collection. What I'm saying, the done right, is that the ones that are really the most successful ones, where you really start to create a socioecological system that is resilient for long term, is when actually the indigenous communities come up with a solution.

Ale: 29:18

So, because, again, they know, yeah, like I have heard of a biodiversity credit that was trying to be developed recently in the in the amazon and they asked them you know, how do you value if an ecosystem is doing? Well, you know, and the scientists are like the most complex, whatever calculations and so on, and they said well, we know that if the jaguar is here, the ecosystem is good, so they use and which is a? You know, scientifically it's a very good proxy of ecosystem health and that's it, and that's what they're using for the biodiversity credit. And yeah, no census on the population of jaguars and how they're doing, and of course, I mean you can also do a dna testing of genetic diversity to see how healthy the population is, um, but that's basically it and it's just about asking how have you done it for hundreds of thousands of years, and that's probably the best way to go.

Cash: 30:18

Yeah, absolutely no, you're right. I mean, they've been doing it for so long, it's not broken. You're talking about the Jaguar credit through Region Network and the Shara Minsta.

Ale: 30:31

No, actually I'm due to talk to Gregory now. Okay, so probably he's going to tell me about it. It was another project.

Cash: 30:41

Okay, cool. Well, that's awesome that there's multiple down there, and it must be on to something. If they're both looking at the health of the jaguar population as the biomarker um for the health of the rest of the ecosystem, I think we've covered some pretty awesome um digging into the weeds. Why don't we finish with the work that sovereign nation nature initiative is doing and um this projects that you're currently working on and raising funds for, and just kind of give a little bit of info to our guests on that?

Ale: 31:10

Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. We so far, like we have, we have supported organizations specifically, but not on, let's say, the way we have communicated. Our project was mainly focused on the work in general, and right now we are launching a campaign to try to raise funds for six organizations, but specifically for specific projects that have clear targets, clear objectives, but we know the threats that are working against. Then these are six working with different species. I can, if you want, just like walk you through a few, at least just to give you a bit of a sense of you know what are the projects that we support, as long as you talk about the bison project.

Cash: 32:08

That would be cool.

Ale: 32:10

You want the bison project? Okay, is that one of the six? Yeah, well, okay, let's start there. So, uh, wwf, uh Romania with, um, uh, we were there, which is the community uh led uh project, which is the community-led project there. I've been there and I visited them. I've reintroduced the European bison in 2010.

Ale: 32:36

Around that time I mean it was a process of a few years, but basically they reintroduced the European bison, which was extinct in the wild, I think around the Second World War and so on, because of loss of habitat and also killing of the animals we meet. So only a few were alive in zoos, so they took them and basically repopulated them in a beautiful region in Romania, in the Carpathians, across the Tarcu Mountains. So, yeah, wwf Romania and we Wilder are part of one of the projects they were trying to collect funds for, but it's not related to the European Bison specifically, at least, it's about engaging the younger community, so high school kids, in the collection of biodiversity specific data. This is actually a project I'm really, I'm really passionate about. So, basically, they are teaching kids how to collect data about insects, about mammals, so they will see traces of mammals medium, medium, small mammals around certain areas where unsustainable agriculture is happening. The objective of this monitoring, led by youth, is to basically try to convince farmers in the area about, or make them aware of, the importance of biodiversity for their farming practices. So the goal is to collect a month of data around the region on the biodiversity using kids and basically having the kids present the results of this biodiversity assessment to the farmers, showing, for instance, that more sustainable farming practices attract more biodiversity and hence also increases the quality of your crops or your fruits. And this is their theory of change. They will believe that, if the youth is to teach to the older generation why biodiversity is important, this is when change can happen, and I'd love to talk about this project to show you that conservation is not just building fences around to protect animals or collecting data, or putting colors around, collecting data with fancy satellites and so on, or putting colors on animals, but it is also about trying to understand what does social change mean in places where humans and wildlife coexist. So this is an example of what they call Grow Wild project, meaning both the crop growing wild and the kids growing wild being know, being aware of the importance of biodiversity in the region.

Ale: 36:03

Romania is, I think yeah, I mean Romania is holding the most biodiverse ecosystems in Europe. Now they have in that specific region the highest diversity of mammals, for instance, or large mammals. So another example, just to check well to, to stay on the community community led uh side of things, is a project from the macau recovery network. They work specifically on endangered parrots in Costa Rica and the project that they're trying to attract funds for works with well, basically aims to provide a salary for two women, local women, to. They will be tasked basically to plant trees for to restore the habitats of endangered of the Green Great Macau specifically, which is an endangered parrot in that region. And I found that this is again like a very interesting project where you merge both the social and the ecological Right. So local communities, specifically women in this case, are incentivized through. You know well, they're given a job, they're given ways of livelihood and while doing that, they also they also actually, you know, restoring the habitat of an animal. That, unfortunately, is almost yeah, it was, it was at some point a brink of extinction, uh, because of poaching, um for wildlife trade and so on. Um, I can run you through another one. Another example of like you know how much like you can actually help with relatively small amounts. So this is the amount we're asking for is around 20,000 euros.

Ale: 38:06

Another example is from a project close by here, amn, which works on protecting marine wildlife population, specifically dolphins and whales. This is the resident population. The resident population is bottlenose common dolphins, but you have also minke whales, sometimes orcas, popping by in the southern part of Portugal, so it's Algarve region of portugal, so it's algarve region. And the funds that they're trying to attract is to buy an engine for their boats because they've been running and put around for so much for so long. I've been there with them.

Ale: 38:49

It's hard work.

Ale: 38:50

It's basically to go out every day monitoring the dolphin population and the threats that they're facing, especially through, well, from boats and tourism.

Ale: 39:05

So we're watching, but other type of boats as well that run very fast and so on and disturb the social life of these animals. The founder, joanna, is an expert in mother-calf relationship and she, you know, could prove that certain anthropogenic stressors on mothers basically made it so that she would leave the calf or she had to, you know, abandon the calf because she couldn't take care of it, because of the stress that she would get from the sounds of the boats, from whale watching boats chasing the population of animals, and they've been able to prove that and through that you can change policy. And again, this is the story of an engine. Is what we're buying with this, with these funds for the boat. But then what does that enable is, uh, is again the protection and the monitoring of the threats to to this very important population of dolphins and whales. I'll finish here. I'll probably leave the rest of the three for the audience to go and check it out. They're're as exciting.

Cash: 40:17

Yeah, I want to do a call to action you know, director, listeners to your website because I do think it is really cool that you guys are adding a utility layer to an NFT, right. You're not just doing some speculative profile pick, pump and dump like people have a bad taste in their mouth and why people don't like NFTs in the broader mainstream media, taste in their mouth and why people don't like nfts in the broader mainstream media, right, but instead you guys are using nfts as the utility to fund these projects yeah, and I mean in this, in this case, you know, uh, it's not a crowdfunding uh campaign, uh, so we're actually trying to attract uh corporates to come fund these projects and then what happened so far is that the companies see the advantage of distributing all these nfts and, depending on the community they wanted to distribute it to.

Ale: 41:04

You know, when we did the project with wallets connect, we distributed uh 100 000 nft, so the number doesn't matter, but whoever receives that has access to uh the project, the progress of the project, so they can be connected, basically forever to those organizations and the animal population that this contribution that came from the company was allocated towards.

Cash: 41:31

Yeah, no, I think that's really cool. On the website you specify that the NFT is linked to humpback and sperm whales that are in the Caribbean and stewarded by the AquaSearch team. So really cool to see that they have a direct link to a real life whale and helping that actively restore their populations. It was really cool for me to see.

Ale: 41:54

Yeah, and there, for instance, so in every NFT, we, every NFT or Gives you access to a page where all the reporting and the data and the details of the project is. We, our interface is called real and there you can check, you know, the data, for instance, of a whale. So what type of data? It depends on what the organization finds relevant. But in that case of the humpback whale, there is a bioacoustic, so these are like recordings of the communication. So these are like recordings of the communication, either whistles or songs For Humbert Whale they call them literally songs or clicks. So you have access to that raw data of the whale and then why it's important for the organization and and for the project specifically, so you can understand a bit more of the work that is this. Um, yeah, these stewards are doing in the field. That's cool.

Cash: 43:07

And then you know the blockchain the nft is is the link, it's the bridge to that data and that validation mechanism to to show, show the work as being authentic and giving that link to people.

Ale: 43:19

Yeah, so it's like it's your key to NFT is the key to your contribution and the impact it's having on the ground. And again, regardless of if you paid for that NFT or nfp or not, you know. So so far those entities were gifted. Basically, apart from a lion um project our first project all the rest was uh was. Uh was a gift from the voluntary contribution from a company to its customers and employees.

Cash: 43:55

Oh cool okay, yeah, well, uh, really love the work you're doing, ali and at sovereign nature initiative. So um again, like exciting to see that you're kind of showing the in real life utility of what you nfts and blockchain can do with the underlying um goal of conservation and restoration. So really good having you on, sir, and thanks so much.

Ale: 44:16

Yeah, and thanks, thanks, so much Cash and I'm happy to come back anytime with maybe more updates. Then I'll be happy to come on.

Cash: 44:25

Yes, sir, love to have you back on 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.