Funding the Regeneration – San Francisco 2025

my name is Matthew Monahan co-founder of ma Earth uh ma Earth we aim to share ideas and build tools for planetary health and regeneration I was here uh a year ago at Earth Commons and we were sharing about the launch of our first grants round so it's great to be back thank you funding the commons protocol Labs holim the whole team I think it's really important that we gather like this in community so really appreciating that uh the title of my talk is funding the Regeneration here we are spaceship earth what Carl Sean says is that we were the uh inheritors or the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic Evolution um just in the last couple hundred years we've made a real mess of the place uh this out of pot stem Institute for climate impact research the planetary health check many different indic ators of course flashing red I think one of the key messages here is that this is not just a climate crisis it's not just a carbon dioxide crisis this is really about the tissues and organs of our biosphere and of our planet everything from biodiversity to nitrogen and phosphorus to the pollutants the Plastics our water cycle and so forth if we could only somehow get more money into the environment and regeneration nature conservan estimates it at $700 billion per year nature funding Gap I don't think we're going to close that with meme coins Alone um and I suspect this isn't even the right way to frame the problem because what we're really talking about are the deeper Logics of our economic system the impetus for growth the externalization of costs under nature and really how we view ourselves in relationship to the natural world treating life as just a commodity or resource for our own consumption meanwhile also in this small blip of cosmic time we've been building some incredible exponential advancing tools uh everything from satellites AI web 3 sensors Etc and I think part of what unites Us in this room is an appreciation for the transformative potential of these Technologies um and an orientation of how do we use them for good and there is so much good work to be done because no matter how clever we think we humans are nature still has the best tech around Tech like photosynthesis and bioluminescence and micro risal fungal networks um and so how do we essentially live in harmony and help these natural processes take place um in some ways it's not that complicated we need to shift shift Our Food Systems into regenerative agriculture we need to reforest the landscape protect old growth ecosystems restore the wetlands Steward this the seed cycle and really especially get our young ones out into the land understanding where their food comes from getting their fingernails dirty um and really teaching them about life on this beautiful planet importantly I just want to emphasize that these activities happen in contact with the Earth they happen in place they are by definition local to somewhere there's a quote that many of us know by the Nobel prizewinning chemist Ilia pen when a complex system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence and a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order I think this is a helpful metaphor for our time you may believe that we can essentially tweak capitalism we can balance our budgets get more efficient grow faster decouple GDP from ecological destruction let AI do its thing and maybe that will be the course you may believe that this system is terminal that collapse is inevitable uh you may believe that we are on the verge of witnessing some sort of metamorphic empis and transformation to a higher order regardless of those scenarios my contention would be that these place-based communities nature-based projects in place in local contact with Earth these islands of coherence these are the infrastructures of resilience for our world they are going to Buffet us from the impacts of climate change and extreme weather they're going to create the Havens for healing and education and luckily and hopefully as we connect them up they can help to shift the entire system to a higher set of order I'm very inspired by what's happening in this room in this community in this blockchain ecosystem um I think that the push towards decentralization and the ethos that has underpinned the technology is really hand inand in symbiotic with localization and there are so many ways to deploy these tools that are being constructed in service to place-based communities and that's also why I'm really excited about the momentum that's been gathering for ethereum localism another framework we like to use is three Horizons the idea is quite simple we're kind of on the first horizon here thinking about what is worth conserving right now what needs composted as we move into the second Horizon the transition Pathways to get from point Horizon 1 to Horizon 3 Horizon 3 really being the world that we want to create um and a viable future for all of life so asking ourselves this question of how do we bring more capital and funding into nature-based projects in place-based communities this is a a very loose not comprehensive uh way of thinking about the capital stack and I think it's very important as now we're scaling these blockchain systems for larger scale adoption that we think critically about what are the different buckets of capital that we're going after and how are we catering our offerings how are we cater catering the value proposition and for ma Earth our belief and our strategy is essentially to start on the philanthropic side of things uh we think that Grant capital is the most liberated from a growth imperative or a debt based incentive uh there's roughly a trillion dollars a year that moves in philanthropy uh philanthropy is going through a number of disruptions right now the age of the stewards of a lot of this philanthropic capital is decreasing and the youth care more about climate and environmental issues than the other Generations did and so we're thinking a lot about those types of capital on the left side of the stack as we move down and over into things like carbon markets of course and hopefully maybe Diego and Troy will speak to that Eco credits which is infrastructure that regen network has really been shepherding um and then as we move into things like lending impact investing venture capital and so forth um and then we get into the really fun stuff like nature-based tokens local currencies and so on so to me the question is how do we leverage the tools and the capital that we have to build Network effects and momentum to essentially move up the capital stack and to drive adoption in these types of manners and the one other thing I'll say about traditional philanthropy that I find so interesting is you know 5% of philanthropy goes out to Grants the other 95% lives in endowments and is invested and so essentially uh you have the same core relationships with foundations As you move up the capital stack with the assets that they are stewarding I love quadratic funding um I think it's brilliant I think it's done an amazing job bootstrapping a lot in this ecosystem um I love it because of the way that it looks for signal and coherence amongst communities um I think it's a good tool for helping to en normalize and equalize some of the wealth inequality between the global North and the global South and I think it's great that we have this mechanism for cohort-based marketing campaigns to essentially bring attention in a concerted manner um into the projects that we want to support So ma Earth we ran our first two grants round last year distri distributed roughly $400,000 of Grants into roughly 50 projects we learned a lot from these experiments we learned a lot about the ux and the shortcomings of the ux as it currently exists um we're inspired by what token engineering Commons is calling tunable qf so for our third round we're going to be kind of embracing some of those new ideas and like essentially boosts to the coefficient allocations and we also uh really took to part feedback we got from will Ruck and some comments that he shared as a participant in Grassroots economics around how do we continue to evolve quadratic funding so that it's not just competitive Within These pools of projects and so we're inspired by ideas to essentially create like a collective bonus matching or what my friend David yesterday referred to as super linear matching so that essentially if enough can be raised by the crowd that more of the collective matching pool is released so I think there's still a lot of iteration and experimentation and huge shout out to gitcoin for making this possible we were able to run these experiments um Without Really writing a line of code thanks to the the grant stack so as we move up that Capital stack I know many of us in this room are dealing with the same issues how do we quantify measure get the feedback loops of the impact that's happening for the grantees um and we love hypers certs and we love eoser which are essentially hypers certs for ecological use cases shout out to grain Forest they put up a site eoser and. XYZ check it out first ever use cases of EOS certs out in the wild and for sale um but essentially what draws me to the idea of hypers certs is that it gives us a protocol where we can do Bottoms Up Market formation where we can have an open evaluation system where we can start to have some shared data standards and schemas um around how we append these evaluations and methodologies and so the idea is really quite simple how do we create a platform that brings together these three main actors land projects evaluators and funders create network effects and get the spiral going to essentially move up the capital stack and do Collective funding for place-based projects on the ground uh ma Earth thinks of itself as a a adopter or maybe an early adopter of different protocols so we're looking at things like hypers certs ethereum at testation service our home is ethereum we're looking to the super chain as our you know main deployments um and with a lot of appreciation and respect for all the other chains and protocols that exist and so essentially we want at Ma Earth to be contributing to these protocols and these data structures in a way that can get picked up by all the the other amazing Community projects that are happening whether it's biofi project refi Dow Grassroots economics regen Network one Earth uh the list goes on there's so many great projects happening and I think it's important if we can create shared data schemas so that the projects themselves and the evaluations can benefit regardless of where they're interacting in the ecosystem so this is a bit of our team uh and some of the partners we are uh funded and endowed by biome trust a philanthropic Foundation that I have the privilege of co- stewarding and we are looking actively for front-end developers ux design and a publishing manager someone with great com skills so if you're interested please reach out and uh many of you will know us from our interview series the Regeneration will be funded the idea here and it will continue is to just try to advance the field by profiling amazing experts and inspiring folks like yourselves in this kind of emergent space of regenerative finance and economics and we have uh a new content offering led by my brilliant colleague sofhia Rocklin which will come out in a couple months called learning lab this is going to be focused on the land stewards and land regenerators helping them with capacity building technical skills um funding Readiness this type of learning community space so that's it from me you can find us at the links below and thanks again for everything you do for a regenerative economy and life affirming future [Music]