As the world continues to move toward sustainability, we have the power to usher in an entirely new economic system that financially incentivizes preservation, institutes climate justice, and, ultimately, heals the world. Outside of the web3 ecosystem, nations, inter-governmental organizations, and corporations are scrambling to meet climate goals by mandating more eco-friendly practices that fundamentally misalign financial and social incentives. These faulty incentive structures have slowed the progress we’ve made toward fighting climate change – with the U.S. and China still over 30 years away from achieving net-zero emissions.

A variety of projects are emerging in web3 to underpin or accelerate climate innovation in the real world. Hundreds of web3 projects will emerge as climate data, credits, offsets, supply-chain provenance and footprint, and countless other problems require novel solutions. The space is still nascent, but one thing is certain: We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create, and scale, technology that will help us save our planet.

Today, we’re launching Aera Force to do just that. Using Aera VC as a bridge to traditional capital, we’re shepherding “web2 finance” forward into an ecosystem that includes web3 investors, climate pioneers, and industry specialists, to allow everyone in the emerging regen space to leverage the network effect and exponentially increase collective impact. Over the coming months, we will build an investing movement that will begin to infuse  capital into regenerative projects, people, and ideas underpinned by web3.

Aera Force was born out of Aera VC, an Auckland based global climate venture fund, and Gotham Labs, a New York based blockchain launchpad and co-creators of the Dream DAO.

For over five years Aera VC has been investing in high growth, early stage businesses around the world tackling systemic sustainability issues while having the potential to deliver material financial returns. The Aera community is already full of scientists, founders, and investors dedicated to pushing the boundaries of climate innovation.

Over at Gotham Labs, our community has launched Civics Unplugged and the Dream DAO – which was recently featured by Coinbase as one of the DAOs “Rewiring the World”. The Gotham team has been investing in blockchain technology since 2014, and launched Onward Labs in 2017 to not only dream about using this technology for impact - but actualizing it - and have been pushing it out to the world ever since.

Okay, now that we’re done setting up why we should be launching this thing, let’s talk about why we need to infuse massive amounts of capital into regen projects.

Investing in our Collective Future

Currently, there is no real incentive for climate markets to have transparency, interoperability, and global buy-in. Early experiments such as Toucan and Regen Network have proven regenerative-finance (“ReFi”) technology’s ability to fill these gaps, while also making it profitable to take part in the system. Unfortunately, outside of the billions of dollars created within the web3 ecosystem, there has yet to be a massive investment in ReFi use cases that address our climate’s greatest challenges.

As 4156 of Nouns DAO called out recently:

"Crypto-natives increasingly have the power and capital to have a positive impact in the real world, but to date, most of the real world ‘signals’ people have seen from us are not so compelling. Crypto-outsiders may not understand the machinations of the cryptoverse, but they do understand the real-world fallout. If crypto imparts us with capital-aggregating superpowers, and we only use these superpowers to buy Rolex watches and lavish trips to Dubai, the outside world will reject [the crypto community and its visions for the future] (and rightly so)."

Projects like Powerledger, Toucan Protocol, RefiDAO, and Regen Network are beginning to break through, but have yet to make traditional headlines and craft beautiful narratives about web3 that we all know are possible. These projects are also just the beginning. Regens are building as we’re flying, but here are some of the broad categories that regen crypto is working in:

• Better marketplaces: solutions to enable seamless transactions for carbon or ecosystem-related offsets or credits (including novel verification methodologies)
• Minimizing, and ultimately or reversing, blockchain’s impact on climate
• Solutions aiming to track, measure and price the carbon footprint (or ecological externalities) of materials, products, commodities across the supply chain
• Scalable new ways to fund or organize climate initiatives with DAOs’ community-ownership
• Assigning prices to environmental costs or natural ecosystems to tax the polluters (circumventing regulation) or protect ecosystems like fisheries
• On-chain records, ledgers, data, or insights which more efficiently underpin physical decarbonization
• Unlocking offsets for new types of business transactions

We know this all needs to exist, but there has yet to be a focused investment effort in the Refi Space – Until Now.

A New Way Forward

Aera Force will begin with DAO armed with a venture fund that involves investors, founders, and community members at every point in the process— making them more excited and engaged with technology that benefits our planet. As we’ve seen with our Dream DAO launch, the most successful DAOs start with an existing community of evangelists ready to formalize their involvement through incentive structures in the DAO ecosystem. Aera Force is following the same model, bringing our Aera VC community of innovators, scientists, radical founders, and investors into the fold and inviting many more to participate. In this way, we are also bridging the worlds of crypto natives and more traditional investors.

As Aera Force begins to deploy capital, the DAO will expand, forming spin-off groups to fund research, incubate startups, and build a home for those that want to lend their superpowers to our mission. Community members can organize into teams, and earn rewards for sourcing deals, running diligence, launching hackathons, and so much more. When combined with a governance token which gives token holders the right to actively participate, the DAO will self-fund these different sections, sparking upward spirals and growth for years to come. Combined with a community treasury of tokens and strong underlying foundations (voting rights, rules, and a unified north star), Aera Force has the power to supercharge our efforts in ultimately saving the planet.

We’re just getting this off the ground, but here are some ways YOU can help:

1. Read the Aera Force Greenpaper
2. Invest in Aera Force
   1. To invest, qualifying accredited investors can mint “Investment Tickets” on the Aera Force website. Each ticket represents a 10 ETH investment. Once minted, a smart contract will hold funds in escrow until the KYC process has been completed. We know this is a barrier – and we hate it too – but we are complying with legal regulations that will allow us to raise this fund quickly and deploy it even quicker. Investment Ticket NFTs gives holders voting rights in the DAO and unlocks a share of the fund’s proceeds proportional to ETH invested.
3. Contribute to Aera Force
   1. We are building a foundation for community members to spin up new projects, funds, and initiatives from. Outside of investing, community members can join the discord, participate in DAO teams and earn rewards for contributing to the community.

So…What’s Next?

We all know there have been a lot of missteps and false promises in the blockchain ecosystem. However, believers who know how to wield this technology to achieve its promise need to rise up to usher in a new era. If we are going to create a global paradigm shift and save the world, we must create a community that funnels capital into problem solvers, ideators, and builders.

We are going all-in, but we need your help to make Aera Force the engine of change it can become. If you’re interested in contributing to the community, launching something to scale climate investment, pitching Aera Force for investment, or anything else, hit us up in the discord.

For the Future,

The Aera Force Core Team