The Evolution of Ecological State Protocols - Gregory Landua

hey everybody [Applause] all right so i'm going to be uh taking you from uh that amazing expose on uh d5 degeneracy to a deep dive on regen network and what we're working on and have been working on for a few years who here is familiar with the emerging refi movement who here is familiar with carbon credits who here knows what region network is okay and who here has heard of the cosmos ecosystem okay just calibrating my expectations here so i know what to talk about cool so um ecological state protocols were first we first wrote about them uh back in 2017 and sort of were proposing a way to create tools for communities to generate consensus about ecological state and changes of ecological state and quantify and produce value out of that if they so choose so i'm going to kind of go on a walk through about where the where this technology is now what it's being used for i'm also going to take everybody on a little bit of a walk through around region network more broadly the blockchain application development framework that we've been working on and then do some specifics on ecological sorry on eco credits and how how communities are creating their own representations of ecological value whether that's carbon credits or biodiversity credits etc and hopefully i'll do all of that and still have a little bit of time for questions at the end all right so what's region network so at a really broad level what we're trying to do is link this amazing process of the social construction of value to ecological health so at a high level i guess we have some assumptions we believe that it's kind of a basic human right for people to socially construct value doesn't matter if it's dogecoin or the us dollar or ancient tribal wampum or cacao like people come together they generate ways to value each other we really feel like that process should be grounded firmly in ecological health right that is something that we all depend on and so you could we sort of are in in a similar sort of sphere of how do you quantify and incentivize public goods but very specifically around ecological health so we've we build tools to monitor and quantify as i said this the ecological state and change of state and tools to help exchange that find price discovery trade that value okay so again i kind of want to just be emphasizing what we're trying to do is build tools for communities to come together and create consensus about ecological health i'm going to ground that in some pretty concrete ways we already do that as a society that's what carbon credits are and in that framework there's a centralized black box bureaucracy with a bunch of professional people who bequeath upon society the stamp of a carbon credit we here maybe in this room might have a different paradigm or different perspective about where legitimacy is sourced from and what we might like what we might trust as far as a statement about reality right and you know broadly speaking i think we could all agree we're kind of in a bit of a you know a sense-making crisis globally and a lot of that has to do with lack of faith in institutions so we really feel strongly that you need to build open source tools with open source science so that people can do this work themselves whether it's a indigenous community in the amazon or a group of scientists in switzerland that the tools are kind of the same gather around and decide i was joking earlier today like i kind of don't care if the ecological state protocol is i'm going to walk up and like kick the tree and if four people kick the tree and all hurt their toe we generate consensus that the tree's there i mean you know joking aside at a pattern level that's what we're talking about right there's a process whereby we we agree that something's true and that it's valuable okay what the is regen network so first and foremost region network is a community of people who are dedicated to this work that i'm talking about so there's people all over the world participating there's region network is a public proof of stake network there's validators running on every continent except for antarctica maybe we'll get something at mcmurdo before too long i don't know and then there's the technology so the technology is sourced from the use case and it's sourced from the community needs not vice versa so i'll get into this but that means that we've been building for several years a bespoke application and community specific blockchain and consensus structure and specific tools that we feel can meet the need of farmers and scientists and other people and sort of like ask what do those users need and what can we build for them not sort of like tried to bring existing tools and force users into the sort of square peg into a round hole so right now region network is comprised of a single block chain with really two main features we have regen registry which is a set of components that allow people to register ecological claims and mint ecological assets essentially and coming soon a lot of curatorial and governance capability so that people know who is saying what about where using what methodology who else has confidence in it who's audited it you know and that stuff can all lower the cost of you know somebody checking in on is this actually valuable do i want to buy it or not do i place my faith in it and then on the other side marketplace functionality that's the other feature so we we've been building an order book based dex it's one of the nice things about building in cosmos is we have enough compute power to to run a nice you know batch matching system to run an order book system that can then plug straight into amms so who's our community region network community is made up of project developers people who are taking risk to try to develop carbon credits mostly at the moment but biodiversity credits water quality marine conservation blue carbon i mean there's a huge variety of different things happening land stewards just people on the ground who are actually stewarding landscapes are a major part of the constituency of the network credit designers methodology developers scientists monitors and verifiers it's important to understand that this is sort of you know there's a lot of overlap between different groups here and in some cases some people or organizations play several if not even all of these different roles but also some people or organizations only play a single role right but this is the community that owns and operates regen network as a public blockchain and is building this set of tools together so just briefly taking a moment to look at what does it look like to build your own credit this is a nice example of of a credit we sort of did from beginning to end and sold to microsoft back at the end of 2019 beginning of 2020. so this was a carbon removal credit force based on soil health outcomes for regenerative grazing in new south wales so you can sort of see what were the components here we were monitoring soil health and broader ecosystem health and animal welfare in order to generate a credit there was specific methodologies specific auditors and really a whole articulated protocol that the farmers the auditors and microsoft in this case as counterparties all generated consensus hey this is valuable and we're going to pay you for this outcome that just took place right okay so um now i want to talk a little bit about regen ledger so um we're so r d inc which is the company that i'm the founder of and and regen network more broadly which is has a bunch of different organizations and it tends to sort of have a cosmos bias in our in our thinking about blockchain what that means is the right tools for the community we really want to see a direct overlap between layer zero or that is to say the in this case mostly humans but there could be other agents involved in consensus the the the community and the tool that you use to generate consensus about parameters that are important to have consensus around really think there needs to be a one-to-one overlap in governance there so we really buy into this concept of sovereign but interoperable blockchains or that is to say the interchain vision so it doesn't really matter if you're running an evm or a wasm-based virtual machine or you know maybe you have a concept that doesn't include arbitrary smart contracting frameworks the the sort of cosmos maximalism is the community that's using the tool needs to govern the tool and and that's sort of you know one of the reasons why we've been quite compelled and are pretty deep in that in that ecosystem which i would say is sort of like a friendly cousin to the ethereum world so what is regen ledger region ledger is a as a public proof of stake blockchain built with the cosmos sdk see the consensus mechanism here is tindermint which is fast finality allowing us to have um sort of the foundation for interoperability and light client light client based trustless bridging with other blockchains which is important cosmos sdk toolkit for creating your own on-chain executable logic and then regen ledger in this case is our blockchain with the specific modules and the specific functionality that our community deems is important and secure in order to create these sort of ecological assets and bring them into the marketplace i sort of talked about this a little bit already i got a little bit ahead of myself our approach here is really to create a public blockchain that is community specific that is to say the actors that want to create consensus about ecological health um and application specific which is you know really the pro that is a specific process right um so our blockchain doesn't have an arbitrary smart contracting framework you can't go launch random stuff on regen ledger you know you need to go through a community process for the community say yeah that's definitely something that is going to further this goal and that's sort of a lean application specific logic we have amazing sort of sister chains juno and evmos launching and other things where arbitra arbitrary smart contracting is the way it is and you can do interchange calls and people can have all sorts of fun but in our world view you really want that sort of like governance restraint around what's happening it all comes back to how are you generating legitimacy how are you generating consensus about ecological state as the foundation for a new value exchange between people okay so um i sort of have said the word module a few times essentially modules are kind of governance permission smart contracts with specific executable functionality so each module is sort of an audited bit of code that does something really specific so in our system we have an eco credit module which is the representation of ecological credits we have the data module which allows you to anchor sign and resolve data either on or off chain in support of those eco credits or other functionality group module which is essentially a dao functionality and then the the sort of the standard proof of stake set of modules as well as an order book decks coming some of these just to the eco credit module and the basket module which isn't on here are live right now and in use data and groups and order book are coming in q2 and some of this stuff is up on experimental test net some of it not yet um just a quick detour on on and off chain data so we're really um interested in and have essentially focused on the rdf resource description framework w3c standard for how we approach on and off chain data totally if you're a data geek it's really worth looking up um and kind of understanding it's really a fantastic way of expressing things in triples which allows you to create a knowledge graph where you can actually make sense of the data in relationship to other claims and then what it's being used for so it's pretty fantastic i would definitely recommend looking into that if you're into sort of geospatial data and claims and things i we're sort of gambling this will become a pretty significant web 3 standard this sort of approach to semantic data okay now let's talk a little bit about the eco-credit module specifically because this is really where the state of um ecological state protocols is which is the creation of a unit of account that represents some form of ecological value and in in our case at the moment this is mostly carbon credits right that's where the bulk of the market action is um and as i mentioned earlier there's also a lot of other stuff going on but those are unproven markets as yet so eco credit module essentially this is enabling um communities to manage new classes of ecosystem service credits right so you could think of each credit class has an administrator that administrator can either be a single entity or a dow right so you can build community around a specific credit class so what do we mean by that right now we're in a process with the carbon plus grasslands credit which was that initial pilot that we sold all of these credits to microsoft it was a really big deal when it happened there's a community forming around that to govern that it includes ranchers and scientists that are sort of like owning that and developing it into the future right so biodiversity credits etc it allows us to create the right sort of social consensus system around this new unit of account that's being created right issuers can also be considered dao so you have this sort of like nested dao framework one uh community is setting the criteria the minting criteria essentially right the issuance criteria and then the issuer is following that criteria right and and making sure that it's being executed and then issuing those credits okay so i keep using the term credit class right what is that what does that mean you know sort of abstractly this is the the um representation of how we think about um the the new unit of account you know is this a is this a ton year is it a you know ton hundred years is it a avoided emissions credit conservation credit biodiversity you have to define that specifically and define how you're measuring it who has the ability to sign off on it you know all of those things need to be defined in the credit class and here's sort of like the actual on-chain this is what it looks like there's class id who's the administrator who are the issuers who are allowed to you know issue these credits what's the credit type you know what's the unit of account that we're talking about any associated metadata that must be included and then the number of batches so you sort of have kind of microgovernance control over these each credit class credit types is very important um so this is an example of carbon carbon what's its abbreviation what's the measurement unit what sort of decimal precision do you have these are sort of just basic bits of logic that if you're going to be generating a credit on region ledger this is you know this is how it comes out on on the ledger itself batches so each credit you could think of in in ethereum world you might think of these as fractional nfts right in terms of how things show up so you have they're fungible amongst themselves within a batch because you have a unit and then you have a number of units that have been issued maybe that's a you know a ton from a particular farm in a particular year those are fungible amongst each other but they're not fungible with credits of a either different dnom or even the same credit class but you know on a different farm necessarily unless you choose and that's sort of a cool we think a cool functionality to drive price discovery around specific rigor or other qualities maybe when we get into q a we can talk about liquidity and other sort of market mechanisms so i'm just going to take a second to look at this see if there's anything important to to bring your attention to i think it's pretty self-explanatory well i'll just say this has really been thoughtfully designed to try to create circumstances where credits are on chain and machine auditable right so we're trying to express all of the important data about the agreement about ecological state which has been generated by a group of people right so that can be quickly and cheaply audited so part of the theory of change here is to lower the cost of auditing right now if you go to try to audit a carbon credit it costs it's cost prohibitive you essentially need to hire a you know white collar professional sort of like phd level person to spend three months to like go through pdfs and you know interview people and all of these it's like quite expensive to actually like legitimately audit a project whereas if you have all of this stuff it made explicit on chain and including who has actually audited it before you and who has generated consensus that this is indeed a methodology that's worth following you can lower the cost of auditing and we think even make it like one click audit like you could actually run an audit before you make a purchase of an asset okay so what's a life cycle of a credit look like you have the admin that creates the credit class you have issuers that issue those credits in the case of carbon credits these are a commodity they need to be retired you know that's there's a life cycle of a credit it has utility to retire to offset an emission that happens somewhere else that's the specific purpose of that type of eco credit there's probably a lot of design room to find to and people are as i've mentioned designing other credit types that aren't necessarily sort of this sort of retirement focus but that's the life cycle of a carbon credit so each one of these has on-chain executable logic you can create the batch you can send retire and cancel the batch that's what credits do as an on-chain entity so at the moment we we're still working with command line interface for all the eco credit modules um there's a ui coming soon which is going to be really exciting and help us accelerate the in sort of the types of users that we can bring into the ecosystem to interact with all of this um there's a rest api available for third-party developers um and we have a pretty robust um community and discord so if people are interested there's a lot of support and um you know and a pretty big community people leaning in to think about this so you can see the available commands you can can't one of the interesting things is you can cancel a credit batch which we thought was quite important in in the case of credits moving between registries that don't yet have api calls between them you know to avoid double counting so you can like cancel it off of our registry without it being considered retired right so um that's a you know a nice nice functionality there all right so how do you build your own credit and i just need to check on time here see where i'm at this is a nice uh little visual that was put together by some of our community members um the era brazil and ikonavi folks they're building a credit class dedicated to jaguar rainforest preservation and conservation so it's a biodiversity credit and they were trying to create a little visual that would help them articulate this to their stakeholders i thought this was pretty nice so credit type is sort of the trunk credit classes are different ways you know like carbon credits are all going to have similar credit types and then credit classes are going to be specific you know like our grazing credit or an agroforestry credit or a blue carbon credit class each one of these is going to have sort of a specific set of agreed-upon methodologies to generate that consensus about ecological state which we'll continue to come back to and then the batches of credits of course are how these are issued so one of the things we've really been shooting for is this concept of nested and composable governance around the places where people need to be generating consensus and have a social process to say we agree that this is valuable and here's why and so again this is like we work with scientists so our community i mean i'm not i guess people may have varying degrees of exposure of what region network does and how long we've been around but like we work with the usda and major research institutions and like there's this whole really interesting crypto pilling science and farmers and stuff that's taking place right so we've run quadratic funding experiments with you know like large institutions where they're like how do we allocate our funding for open source science and software so so when we're talking about governance we're talking about both institutional governance over credit classes and the approach to monitoring and verifying an outcome like carbon sequestration into soil or something and the stakeholders who are going to participate in that are scientists and companies and universities right so methodologies are coming on chain as as entities with governance themselves which is you know really exciting peer review processes on chain so one of the things you could sort of think about the taking place here is kind of a formalization of peer review and scientific method in a community process directed towards again this sort of fundamental question of what is the health current health of our ecosystems and what's the health outcome that we would like to be incentivizing together and we would like to be issuing assets in order to generate new forms of liquidity and resources out resource allocation for these outcomes that we all want so again native web 3 carbon and ecological asset registry so it's very radically different from existing registry programs where again you sort of have this centralized bureaucracy you know and i think everybody has great intentions so i don't want to sort of talk too much smack about that approach but it's really expensive it's really slow and it's really opaque and so the hope here is to make this much more commun much more dynamic much more community oriented and much more transparent and really accelerated because that's what we need right now in terms of you know we're in an ecological crisis so thank you i feel like i'm sort of saying the same things over and over again here which is probably good um this is really based on an idea of show your work don't trust verify right what is the work that's underpinning a claim can you express that clearly so that other people can see it and then choose whether or not they agree so here's an example of a credit batch metadata that shows up in the command line interface and here's a couple examples of different um eco-credits that are being developed right now so we have we're all we're working with toucan for instance to bring existing registry systems on chain which is exciting that functionality is pretty much all already built so we're going to be launching the nct carbon standard into the cosmos ecosystem here very shortly which is really exciting there's also our own natively community produced carbon plus credit crediting system which has credits that are going to be coming on chain there's organic farming and aquaculture systems all sorts of really amazing stuff happening um so things that are coming in q2 decentralized credit exchange interface for people issuing and purchasing credits a lot of this is cli at the moment unfortunately and then coming up actually in about a week i think we have a governance proposal up right now about the basket function where you can basically say hey any credit that meets the following criteria can be pooled turned into a funk a fungible token they all represent each other and then turned into an ibc compatible token which is the inter blockchain communication standard which allows us to send those tokens to places like osmosis and get people engaged in yield farming and liquidity like liquidity mining and building liquidity and really turning this into a green money lego which i think is one of the bigger use cases so i'm going to end by just saying you know where are we at right now we have about 40 methodology and credit class developers actively developing at this moment representing more than 12 million hectares of ecological regeneration which is really rad you know kind of a kind of a dream we couldn't have envisioned that this would really we'd be this far this fast and credit type spanning blue carbon ocean conservation soil carbon agroforestry biodiversity it's really really fantastic so if people want to learn more go to region.network resources and all of these docs are there and you can sort of like dig in and get a deeper dive so i'm gonna end there may be time for one question i'm not sure it looks like got like two minutes left unfortunately we're really close on time but thank you for the presentation let's give it up [Applause] uh in the meantime we're going to flip the stage for