Can Crypto Keep Us Cool? | Panel

excellent okay so now uh we have our guests up for the next panel uh I take issue with the title can crypto keep us cool some of us need crypto to help us get cool in the first place but um I'd love to introduce our moderator John Ruth from the climate coordination Network and solar foundation and he will introduce our speakers so round of applause all right yes can crypto keep us cool as carbon level levels soar and biodiversity plummets We Gather at the intersection of planetary crisis and digital Innovation our soils deplete our air thickens our water rises and our ecosystem unravels yet in this perfect storm of environmental collapse ethereum's borderless architecture offers an unexpected Ray of Hope for for our overheated Planet we've built networks sophisticated enough to send dog memes across continents in milliseconds yet somehow can't coordinate to keep our shared home from becoming the world's least comfortable sauna but what if the blockchain that's been heating up gpus could actually cool down our communities ethereum localism where Global code meets local soil and the world computer might compute solutions for worlds where we actually want to live guiding us through these new possibilities are three Pioneers in the space Sarah John Stone who helped plant the seeds of regen network from its Genesis block showing us how regeneration isn't just a buzzword but a buildable protocol Marcus aelius the philosopher builder of cadow whose data driven Vision Maps the comp who who data driven Vision Maps the complex systems where carbon code in the community intersect and penguin who is building Asos crafting the defi tools that might finally bridge the gap between crypto prosperity and ecological necessity welcome to the conversation that flows between the tokens and the top soil where we answer the burning question can crypto keep us cool and or are we just adding more hot air to the conversation so I would love for the uh guests on the panel to tell us anything more you'd like to share about yourselves and then tell us what you're excited about that was beautiful John um I think one of the things I'm most excited about is that I got to spend time with you and Marcus this week um I've really enjoyed getting to know you both and I'm also really excited this panel is happening it is the year of the regenerates and I think that's something to celebrate um so you know thank you spor Dow for making it the year of the regenerates and spicy take the regen the regen movement is still very under represented and it's underfunded and I believe that in order for ethereum to manifest and catalyze its Envision its vision of an invisible Garden we need to see some progress and get some more Capital flow to the regenerative Movement we are in a meta crisis and now is the time to accelerate Capital to the projects and people working in the regenerative movement so I just want to take a quick second and talk about what it means to be a Regen for those of you that maybe are less familiar with our lit our little niche subculture and movement so when we identify as Regens we are trying to move beyond the traditional traditional crypto Narrative of Perpetual growth and token go up and embrace a new paradigm so that aligns ecological resilience and social resilience we need to move to positive sum Dynamics we need to Showcase all forms of value that benefit F the ecosystems and move away from zero sum extractive Dynamics I think I'm going to stop there and pass it on thanks for that Sarah and thanks for setting us up John really beautiful words powerful I first got involved in climate action using crypto using blockchain because I had grown up in Florida and SED the looming crisis I sensed what was going the waters would rise and the place that I had always known as my home wouldn't be livable for all that much longer that hasn't stopped people from moving to Miami but hey it's a nice place to visit but I always felt like I didn't know how to apply my technical skill set to have a meaningful impact on what was coming and when I heard about clead Dow on the bankless podcast actually I got super excited about the possibility of using my technical skills to have a positive impact on the world for the last 3 years that's what I've been up to and we're still going it's been a long slog but I'm really excited about what we're building in terms of what I'm excited about here the thing that has me feeling re-energized is some difficult conversations but really important conversations where people who disagree with each other who might see themselves as opposed as on opposite sides of a problem of an idea of a movement can actually come together and have meaningful conversations and connect because I do believe that we're stronger together that it is not about Deens Conquering the Regens or Regens driving the Deens to Extinction we can work together to achieve more than we could ever possibly achieve alone great thank you uh my name is penguin so my background previously was in bioinformatics and cancer Diagnostics uh one of the key things that I'm excited about now is the the acceleration of growth that we have had of adoption of the mainstream so there's a been a large number of traditional Finance people that are becoming more interested in tokenization and so as we talk about rwas there's a lot more people that are concerned with how we can improve the world and so I've seen a lot more uh major projects that want to help tokenize the rainforest want to help rebuild the rainforest and use web 3 to do that so those are some of my uh things that I'm most excited about amazing some you know all three of you really kind of pulling a thread through the regen movement in in different ways and and there are these hard conversations that are happening at at at this conference but in the world like how are we going to take care of the places where we live how are we going to take care of the communities that we live in and uh at the same time we have this amazing technology that might just be the answer to solve for these problems uh we just have to come together and we have to all realize that not only can this technology provide abundance for us all but it can also provide abundance for our communities and the land and the water um so as we maybe continue the conversation on at this intersection of web 3 technology and blockchain as a begins to formalize itself in the in climate and environmental movement like where do you see the role of web 3 and blockchain in the climate and environmental movement yeah so I'll take that one first so uh my spicy take on this is that web 3 is uh actually making more progress than most people because a large number of traditional people people and and normies uh have a hard time getting outside of their their own world view as seeing uh the needs of other people seeing the needs of the world so uh I see a large part of web 3 of where we not only share our ideals but we share our beliefs between each other and so that Echoes through everything that we do where we're no longer thinking about ourselves as the primary action trying to think how we can get ahead so in in those ways that we build web 3 products we think about uh everyone and we we get outside of our own shell so we can help other people and complete what we want because uh in our decentralized method Being Greedy being hungry uh are only things that will help push people away from you rather than build support heard that so I want to share two ways in which I think web3 and blockchain can play a role in climate action environmental action one is more tactical and sort of what I work with every day and the other is more strategic about how we make progress as a society how we achieve systems change so tactically the technology being used for monitoring and Reporting tracing climate action in the real world today is quite Antiquated I'm talking like phone calls emails PDFs wire transfers very much technology from uh the last decade if not the last century and so there's a very clear opportunity to apply modern web Technologies including blockchain to modernize those systems so instead of sending a PDF document you upload a data stream directly from a satellite provider or dmrv provider that attests to the fact that your project planting trees in the uh in integrated rainforest actually did increase the amount of carbon being stored or actually did restore biodiversity that had been lost from a more strategic perspective ultimately climate is a coordination problem the incentives are not aligned each polluter each each country in the world is incentivized to pollute as much as they can because they can develop more quickly grow their economy provide a better life provide a better life for their people and that's in ttention with the fact that the more we emit the more the greenhouse gas effect rolls on the warmer on average we get as a planet and that leads to climate catastrophes in the form of wildfires like we've seen in California flooding hurricanes where I'm from in the southeast and so if there's one role that I could see blockchain web 3 playing it's to help solve this really gnarly coordination problem it's a bit hard to see from where we're sitting in 2025 how the technology is going to be applied to solve those problems I mentioned one specific example But ultimately I think that blockchain's ability to coordinate human behavior on both local and Global scales is going to be a really powerful driver for climate environmental action thanks I just want to Riff on that uh as well I think that the climate crisis is the single greatest market and coordination failure of our lifetime and it's pretty scary but it's also we're living through a time in the web 3 space where we can be part of some of the solutions and as someone who's been in the space for about 7even years I can't tell you how many regen and climate projects I've seen that are not around anymore and so I think part of what we need I mentioned capital Capital flow earlier we need to see funding go to projects that have viable business models this is super important um in terms of where the M the movement is at I wanted to use the ecotone metaphor so an ecotone is when two Biore regions meet so think about the mountains meeting High Desert this is an area that's super rich with diversity and I think what's happening in the regen space right now is we have a Nexus of different communities and different subcultures and movements that are coming together and it's so it's a really exciting time we have the ethereum localism movement we have public goods we have the regen movement uh Cosmo localism all of these groups coming together and it's a really rich time to be able to plant seeds and continue to help our climate yeah I think the threat I would pull through all that is I hear meeting people where they're at to some extent in in what you're saying uh ping and and and then as we meet people where they're at then we can begin to coordinate people uh as Marcus is saying because that this technology has this amazing ability to coordinate capital and humans together around new incentive mechanisms and that's such a powerful it's it's such a powerful tool for everything we build in this space but if we put in the context of huge problems in the world uh it's likely the only way these things are going to happen the governments aren't coming for us it's up to us um but at the end of the day it does take funding and and support and so I think the invite as we continue the conversation with all of you out there is come talk to us there's bunch of Regens and Folks at the next stage over like look for ways and maybe you can get into a project maybe if you're a developer out there maybe there's a project just waiting for the right developer to come in and say yeah I could take that that big idea you have and I could really execute on it and I could help you build this uh because as as I said before it really does take all of us and it is a great Economic Opportunity so if at the end of the day really all you care about is making some money there's a ton of money to be made in the climate Space full stop um so as we wrap up uh got about five a little over five minutes left uh you know it's been a long week I know majority of us probably been here at least a week if not more uh had a million discussions and things but what is really resonating for you to leave the audience with um you know what what Reflections or things you've learned or or anything you'd like to share about the this week we've shared together go first I've realized how valuable it is to share Knowledge from fields that are completely outside of the context that we are visiting here uh so in particular I studied philosophy and physics and uh I've been trying to share some of the ideas that I learned in my training with people here and I found them really productive so I want to share a couple of ideas Concepts that might be helpful um one is this framework insiders Outsiders and beyonders it's from organizational psychology and the basic idea is that when you're trying to coordinate systems change uh let's say you want a corporation to change its privacy policy uh or you want to get handicap ramps installed in your local stores uh there's sort of three main strategies you can pursue uh you can either work inside the system you know go get a position in the city government try to pull the levers of power uh you can work outside you can be in the street you can you know write on your signs and go stand in front of the of the mayor's office demanding change or you can be outside of the system entirely Beyond off in a field somewhere building some new tool and I would encourage you not to think of these as oppositional roles actually the most powerful way to achieve systems change is for these three groups to coordinate their action and work together in addition if you're interested in the climate issues specifically I highly recommend checking out a book called the ministry for the future it's sort of my guide book for what we're trying to do here um it's pretty dark honestly but it's really interesting um and provides a compelling vision for what a world where we actually do manage the planet as a public good where we do get the climate crisis under control looks like and how we might get there using technology including blockchain technology actually figures in the book pretty heavily um so yeah highly recommend checking out Ministry for the future and generally go read some like academic papers go learn about some weird esoteric field that uh sparked your interest back in college but you never gave the time to learn about I think it can be really valuable to cross-pollinate ideas from outside of the blockchain space so I think uh my my final thought is along that same line it's uh one of my favorite things that Mato always told me is thinking globally and acting locally uh as I said earlier our ability to to grow outside of our own space is critical but we also need to make sure that we're bringing that impact back to the people around us so we can share and help make the lives around us better as well as globally thanks for that yeah I think what I want to share I want to give a a shout out to spor Dow um spor Dow has been really cool this week they are are seaing an experiment that's taking place in the regenerative movement it's very Dynamic it formed this week as a response to it being the year of the regenerates and the the regen folks feeling like they they wanted more of a stage to be surfaced on with their projects and beliefs so I had the humble privilege of being part of the programming on that stage the last few days and it was really um amazing to to see folks elevated and projects elevated that maybe didn't otherwise um you know have a chance to be on stage the stage should have been streamed I will say that but Spork Dow is definitely doing their best and they are seating a regenerate uh Commons that's forming and that's a group of stakeholders that are exploring a process of what it means around the regen movement what it means uh for other groups to use that and uh I think it's going to be a really interesting process and I'm I I think spark is really doing the best they can so I'm I'm just hopeful and excited that they were willing to listen uh willing to give us a stage thank you for that and I I hope the ethereum ecosystem really doubles down on its core values um the regenerative movement is such an important aspect of all of this uh if we don't have a planet then you know we don't have any of our meme coins or tokens so on that note it's not about a single project there's no single project or token that can really save the movement uh we're all interconnected and it's a living Dynamic ecosystem so on that note we need to continue to you know help each other out uh I'd love to see more Mutual care around the dialogue that's occurring in the space and I guess I would also just say it while I'm excited that it's the year of the regenerates I think that this is really just the beginning of the dialogue that is needed um in order to really Propel the movement and catalyze the space forward well tough folks to follow here I think what I want to leave you with as we wrap here the last minute is that it's it's easy to get overwhelmed when you start to think about something like climate and and biodiversities and like a lack of biodiversity and the planet dying and uh everything that's going wrong around the world it's so easy to just drop into kind of a dark place and it's it's easy to just ignore it because I think people often times feel like they can't do anything about it so the easiest thing to do is just ignore it and I think the reason I wear this hat here that says hope dealer is that I'm pretty committed to Bringing hope to the world that that that you can do something that that everyone of us is needed to make this work that if we want to have a planet where our communities are flourishing where the people around us are flourishing uh everyone plays a part and so start doing that searching in yourself what are the little things you can do what's the little bit of hope you can provide for the people around you on a daily basis because sometimes just a little bit of Hope is all someone needs to make it to tomorrow and hope is free and it only grows and so I would ask you to join me and being the Hope dealer for the climate for your communities for the people around you continue to be a light uh in what can be a dark world so I really appreciate you all for for sitting with us thank you so much to our our panel and uh please join in the discussions and and we uh we look forward to talking to you more