Living in 2024, many of us are coming to terms with the fact that we are living through the meta crisis. We can see the signs all around us: increasing political instability, economic turmoil, ecological disasters, poverty, and climate change. This leaves many with a feeling of paralysis yet simultaneously emboldens the dreamers, builders, and creators to tackle these challenges head-on. The advent of digital ledger technology created a new era of the internet that brought a new layer of ownership, automation, and sovereignty to a world that traditional actors very much drove. The rise of web3 could not come at a more necessary time as we are seeing how the existing frameworks and institutions are failing to deliver on the promise of a better world. From the Sustainable Development Goals, Nationally Determined Contributions, and voluntary carbon markets, we see a global institutional push for tackling the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse the world is facing. Yet, the current projections for global rise in temperature paint a very dim picture. Current institutions and frameworks are failing miserably.
At the intersection of the meta crisis and web3, some regenerative practitioners have started to leverage web3 tools to tackle these challenges on a fundamental level and reimagine our relationships with nature, capital, technology, and community. Regenerative Finance arose as a movement rooted in ecological thinking that attempts to create solutions for the systemic challenges we are seeing in the world by building tools and frameworks that reveal the value of ecosystem services, communities, and nature, and provide transparent, measurable, and verifiable models for tracking climate, and social impact. Projects like Toucan Protocol provide transparency and liquidity to carbon markets, Kolektivo creates tools that value the natural capital assets in service of local communities, and communities like ReFiDAO and RegensUnite bring changemakers and regenerators together in order to build both new technologies and new ways of working together. ReFi and the radical transparency, democratic governance, and techno-potential it possesses has the ability to revolutionize the way we tackle global challenges, but we are seeing that there is still a huge gap between small-scale projects and large-scale adoption and leveraging of ReFi frameworks.
Even within Regenerative Finance, we realize that there is still a long way to go when it comes to mainstream implementation and broad access to funding. Institutions are mostly unaware and uninterested. There is a gap in reputation, a gap in knowledge, and a misalignment between opportunities and funding. Policymakers do not know what Regenerative Finance is, do not know how web3 tools can provide effective, democratic, implementation of climate and social projects, and often have a deep suspicion regarding everything blockchain or crypto. Many policymakers see crypto-initiatives as scams and or risks that need to be managed and not as opportunities and frameworks that can be helpful for their constituencies. One of these reasons also has to do with our communities’ reluctance and aversion to dealing with traditional political actors, but also the lack of contact we have with our own policymakers. Many of our projects are not mainstreamed and our voices are not heard within policy procedures or in multilateral institutions. Something needs to change, and the time is ripe.
The Merge Collective is merging the world of web3 together with the policy world by creating a safe, educational space for policymakers and practitioners to expand consciousness, find new alignment, and see potential future opportunities. We are Gilberto Morishaw and Ruben Russel and we are building on our experiences in web3, policy, and community building in alignment with others like Ecofrontiers or the European Crypto Initiative who also recognize the utmost need to do this deep advocacy and trust-building work together. By bringing policymakers to the table with Refi-community leaders, we are creating new paradigms and bringing the gospel of change to our cities, our countries, and the world. This is not a job we can do alone, we need you, to join us.
Who are we?
This project is being pushed forward by Gilberto Morishaw and Ruben Russel
Gilberto Morishaw
Gilberto works at the intersections of the old world and the new world. He is a futurist, activist, and systems thinker and bridges the fields of policy, tech, innovation, and the arts together in his work. He has worked as Head of Impact, Equity, and Inclusion for Kolektivo and is a contributor to ReFiDAO. He is a John Lewis Senior Fellow, Board of Trustees Member for Krijger & Partners, Global Shaper for the World Economic Forum, and a former youth advisor for the European Commissioner of International Partnerships.
X: @bertmangil
Ruben Russel
Ruben is an aspiring Sociologist with an interest in the opportunities and dangers that new technological tools such as web3 can create in our society. He is a UX/UI designer, Egalitarian model designer, and syntropic farmer. Early DAO contributor, he worked as a User Experience researcher at Kolektivo, PrimeDAO, and Design lead at Breadchain. He has a passion for humans and the natural world and is consistently focused on how the new applications of web3 can benefit the planet and humans mainly through climate action and collective ownership.
X: @0xRRussel
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