It's all about regeneration and building for a better tomorrow
When Gregory Landua talks about the world’s future and the state that we will leave it in for future generations, he transforms. And he’s still buzzing after attending last week’s Cosmoverse in Lisbon. Gregory is the co-founder and co-Chief Regeneration Officer of Regen Network, and he reflects that the community-driven event in Lisbon was fantastic. The Cosmos community produced the event and was supported by community-governed DAO’s and treasuries that sponsored it and made it come to life.
At the end of Gregory’s presentation at Cosmoverse, he concluded by talking about his belief that we have the potential and capabilities to build an infrastructure for future generations. For Gregory, to truly change the world, we must bring about fundamental economic change. Regen Network is focused on integrating economics with ecology. Wagging our fingers at everybody, or adapting our consumerism habits on a small scale, or even regulatory and legislative action - are not going to significantly change anything.
It’s like shouting into a hurricane and expecting the hurricane to change direction. - Gregory
As a culture, we need to change the incentives attached to expressing value within the ecological, ethical, philosophical and aesthetic spheres. It’s about cooperation, coordination and having open tools that everybody can use to shift paradigms. Fundamentally, this is about regeneration. We have to be prepared to take calculated risks, innovating and using what we have at our fingertips in the Web 3.0 and blockchain realm - using these technologies to implement new economic systems that will become the foundation for our future.
We need to deeply rethink how we build consensus about what’s valuable and how we want the world to transform, in ways that people around the globe can exercise their basic human rights to express a social construction of value in an ecologically harmonious way. Not only thinking about today but about all the tomorrows that will suffer if we don’t take action.
All of us in the crypto space, at this moment, are in a position to be investing for the future and trying to address systemic issues so that other people can be in a similar place that we are where we are not actually struggling for survival.
Time preference in economics refers to either instant value extraction to address an immediate issue (such as hunger or starvation), or reaping benefits sometime in the future from long-term investments of time and energy; choosing which route you as a person or organisation will take. For Gregory, the former is very driven by scarcity, but the long-term advantages of the latter are the potential for abundance.
On an ecological level, this thinking can equally be applied to trees and soil. A tree standing and living in the Amazon rainforests needs to hold more value than when it’s chopped and turned into lumber. The soil needs to retain more worth being healthy and rich than mined, tilled up and extracted. For actual change to occur, we need “to have economic incentives that align with the stewardship and custodianship of those resources so that those of us in the economy who are close to the edge actually win the day-to-day game by participating in the longer time preference.”
Regen Network focuses on ecological state-change by putting living carbon assets under the microscope, and innovating new ways to better understand and extrapolate value linked to healthy natural ecosystems.
Both Regen and ixo are innovating, experimenting and taking risks to change the state of the world. Gregory believes the partnership between Regen Network and ixo offers essential complementarity and thr opportunity to amplify the potential to build a regenerative economy in which the ixo Internet if Impact provides the digital infrastructure and sustainable financing mechanisms for social regeneration, and the Regen Network provides the digital infrastructure for ecological regeneration –"We intersect to create eco-socio-economic regeneration."
Greogory reflects on his deep conversations at the recent Earth Mission Unconference held on Nov 11th, about the partnership between ixo and Regen. The Regen Network chain is being upgraded to include an Eco Credits module that will enable automated carbon offsetting in the cosmos ecosystem. Regen Network and ixo have agreed to work together over coming weeks to accelerate offsetting by sovereign Cosmos blockchain networks, starting with the Impact Hub, Osmosis and Juno. The ixo AlphaBond module is an important innovation for decentralised financing, starting with Social Impact Bonds, Green Bonds and Nature Bonds, with huge potential to drive regenerative finance innovations. Implementers of these bonds can produce Ecological Credits that are sold through the Regen Network marketplace. This is only the beginning of a what ixo and Regen Network believe can be done together, and in collaboration with other projects that join the Interchain Earth Mission.
This is an exciting time. It’s a critical time. For Gregory, moving from Degen (“get your money now while you can!”) to Regen is invigorating; it’s fun. There are endless possibilities within the mimetic power, the storytelling power and the mythopoetic power of the profound transformation that is taking place.
If we’re focused on what’s the healthiest expression of this ecosystem for [people], it really unifies people and they can see themselves being part of something bigger than them in a much easier way, so that’s part of why I feel like the focus on ecological health and living carbon is important.