DAO Members Interviewed:
- Gregory Landua, Co-Founder
- Revathi Kollegala, ED Regen Foundation
Interviewer(s): Darren, Deepa
About Regen Network
Regen Network is in the business of regenerating the planet through the creation of high quality carbon credits. Blockchain technology can support planetary regeneration because it enables parties to transact eco credits on a decentralized, transparent, and immutable basis. Regen Network launched in 2017 using the Cosmos SDK (Cosmos) public proof of stake blockchain to build the Regen Ledger, a registry of carbon credits. The Regen Ledger is the backbone of the Regen Marketplace, an online storefront for minting and selling quality eco credits (see: Introduction to Regen Network).
Regen Network’s users are primarily land stewards, scientists, validators, and buyers of eco-credits, who work together to support regeneration by creating an economy around eco-credits.
Founder Gregory Landua has a background in Permaculture and Agroforestry. He has focused his studies in these two areas, as he believes they offer the most pragmatic solution to the so-called ‘meta-crisis’, defined as ‘ the multiple overlapping interconnected global crises that our nascent planetary culture faces’.
Additionally, Gregory has spent considerable time working on the ground, creating pathways for financial sustainability in the area of land regeneration. In 2013, he co-authored a book Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-capital Abundance, and developed the so-called “eight forms of capital”, which have now become a default learning module in permaculture education. The eight forms of capital are also seeing a resurgence of interest in the cryptosphere (e.g. it is referenced in the book GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate the World).
The Regen Network comprises:
- Regen Marketplace powered by the Regen ledger
- Regen Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to the inclusion of a diverse community of stakeholders to build the tools of regeneration
- Regen Network Development, Inc. a US registered C-Corp running the token sale to capitalize the development of Regen Network.
Regen Network does not describe itself as an organization, but uses the terms community, commons, movement, public blockchain-based protocol, and of course network. The community is governed by the holders of the governance token. The community determines how the network should function, e.g. developing standards for eco-credits, peer review processes, and so on.
Their users are not typical app developers, but rather land stewards and scientists creating a wide range of eco-credits, from biodiversity to water quality. The validation of eco-credits takes place off-chain. The ultimate goal is to decentralize the process of high-quality eco-credit creation, and to develop more inclusive and pragmatic processes for users. The buyers of Regen Network eco-credits are traditional institutions, as well as entities operating in the cryptoverse (with increasing demand from the latter).
Regen Network is also exploring new ways to bring eco-credits to market: using smartphones, satellite technology, or by simply recording observations on paper and taking a picture of it. They are always on the lookout for developers, hobbyists, and prosumers to help them build this vision. While many are based in Latin America, contributors to the network span the globe. This diversity of membership adds to the resilience of the ecosystem.
In 2020, Regen Network sold and retired over 120,000 CarbonPlus Grasslands credits to Microsoft on the Regen Network blockchain. Since then, they’ve partnered with fellow Cosmos blockchain protocols such as Osmosis, Stargaze, and Cheqd to become carbon-neutral. The new Regen Marketplace launched in October, 2022 has 20,647 eco-credits tradeable, 4,771 retired, and 25,419 created to date.