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This chapter has been written by Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson, the authors of Ecofrontiers, with insightful reviews and contributions (in no particular order) from Ataberk Casur, Ruben Russel, Jeff Emmett, Theodor Beutel, Pedro Parrachia, Marcus Aurelius, Vincent Katchavenda, and Terex Price.

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The Green Crypto Handbook is a research volume incubated by Ecofrontiers with two overarching objectives: (1) improve the funding environment for green crypto, and (2) enhance the efficacy of projects devoted to sustainable causes within the blockchain ecosystem.

In this blog, we present a second sample chapter drawn from the book (see first sample chapter here). The book establishes an Environmental Finance Stack for Eco-capitalism 2.0, a framework encompassing six material and conceptual layers that are collectively responsible for the production of green crypto—each chapter detailing a specific layer. The sample chapter published today describes the Market Layer by contextualizing and discussing green cryptomarkets.

The publication of this sample chapter is also an invitation to potential partners who share interest and commitment to green crypto, especially in the ReFi sector. The team is seeking collaborators for:

• Peer reviewing our work

• Amplifying our social presence and voice

• Helping us approach and acquire research financing, such as grants, sponsorships, and funding platforms

• Helping us approach publishing houses aligned with our values

Your involvement can significantly advance the mission to bridge traditional environmental finance to Web3. Those interested in engaging with Ecofrontiers are encouraged to click here to explore potential collaborations.

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Introduction

“[A]ll the information on the behaviors of economic agents circulates in the form of assets [titres] handled by the financial markets.”

— Tiqqun (2020), The Cybernetic Hypothesis : 19

Green cryptomarkets—platforms where green crypto-assets of a materially impactful nature can be freely exchanged—intersect with a number of evolving topic areas in Web3. These include regenerative finance (ReFi), decentralized science (DeSci) and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). The common thread between these labels is their emphasis on the material intersection between green assets and the tools and practices of decentralized finance (DeFi):

Ultimately, the successful production and use of green crypto may come down to the conditions of its exchange in the global financial system. While this book is not meant to be a critique of present-day capitalism, summarizing this global financial system will help provide crucial context and background for the value add, evolutionary innovation, and market opportunities of green crypto. Its adoption may be accelerated or deterred depending on how this system evolves and the moves its key institutional stakeholders make in response to the climate crisis or cryptomarkets themselves. With this in mind, this chapter begins by summarizing the state of the global financial system and green markets. It then dives deep into the added value that cryptomarkets introduce to both, ending with an analysis of key use cases, opportunities, and trends for green crypto entrepreneurs to pursue—likely characterized as ReFi, DeSci, or DePIN case studies.

State of the Global Financial System

Foremost, the global economy is hyperfinancialized. For the last half-century, this system has become increasingly central to the economy, influencing not just business decisions but also public policy and individual behavior. The growth and operations of the financial sector have intensified the concentration of wealth by enabling its self-accumulation under a politically centralized institutional regime. Numbers don’t lie: the net worth of the top 1% of US households is greater than the bottom 90%.[1] The top 10% of Americans own 93% of US corporate stock.[2] The last time the S&P500 was so concentrated was right before the Great Depression.[3] The corresponding concentration of corporate governance rights has led to the sociopolitical overrepresentation of the preferences of a capitalized, wealthy minority, raising critical socioecological concerns about their accountability, regulation, and impact on earth systems.

Adopting a macro perspective, the current concentration of capital is not unprecedented. Historically, when there was a surplus of investable funds relative to the number of viable investment opportunities, the surplus capital problem was solved by opening up resource frontiers for investment and appropriation. These resource frontiers attracted investment because they allowed institutions with excess capital to obtain economic resources—such as labor, food, energy, and materials—at lower costs, thus generating profits. By targeting low-cost investment opportunities in natural resources (such as mining, agriculture, forestry, or biodiverse genetic resources), the excess capital issue was mitigated, shifting investment from financial hubs to lucrative ventures in rural zones.[4] This strategy came with significant long-term costs though, such as environmental degradation and the privatization of communal natural resources.

The practice of wealthier nations trading their surplus capital for natural assets from less capitalized nations hasn’t ended. From 1990-2015, these countries traded “US$10.8 trillion” for natural assets from poorer countries equivalent to “12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor”. This transaction volume was so significant that, theoretically, the resources exchanged could have eradicated extreme poverty multiple times over or established the entire energy infrastructure of the Global South.[5]

This global trade system is facing challenges as natural resources dwindle. For the last 60 years, the world rate of profit has fallen[6] as natural resources have become progressively depleted. Over time, these resources have become rarer and more difficult to exploit without incurring significant environmental and financial costs, and real profits have decreased. Simultaneously, the natural rate of interest—the rate that the real economy would produce without intervention—has declined since the first moneylending operations 700 years ago.[7] Even the prior President of the ECB Mario Draghi noted that the natural rate of interest trends toward zero, and questions the capability of monetary policy to break its hold.[8] Instead, due to hyperfinancialization, capital is being increasingly utilized to produce itself. Share buybacks are a corporate signal that excess cash reserves exist which cannot be invested in productive enterprises that deliver greater shareholder value, and as of 2022, are happening to the tune of $1t/annum.[9] As of January 2024, public corporate cash-on-hand reached a whopping $30t,[10] underscoring the scale of financial capital looking for profitable investment outlets and the profound shift in how it is being utilized in the global economy.

This preexisting concentration of capital and centralized market structure creates challenges for new green markets that aim to do good while also earning a profit, e.g. the growing carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) industry. CDR strategies tend to be designed in a way that ensures that efforts to mitigate climate change do not disproportionately burden certain communities, exacerbate social inequalities, or cause harm to ecosystems. Yet when implemented, CDR activities find themselves increasingly subject to “the emerging tendency toward market-based, unconstrained, and for-profit CDR” that prioritizes resource allocation “based on ability to pay rather than public good”.[11] Recall from the Institution Chapter [editor’s note: chapter not yet published] that the higher an institution is situated on Cantillon’s Hierarchy, the more price-setting power it has, as it pays the lowest cost for capital. The high levels of consumer inflation today are partially explained by this price-setting privilege—“when costs fall, price-setting firms do not have any incentive to decrease prices.”[12] Similarly, when pricing carbon sequestration, it’s expected that financial and corporate institutions—entities higher on the hierarchy—“will pass the costs on to consumers, making energy and transportation more expensive.”[13] In effect, a well-meaning pricing policy could de facto be a form of regressive taxation where costs are passed down the hierarchy to the least emitting, who “feel a greater burden” with “the least ability to pay.”[14]

The immediate reaction to the challenge of unequal capital distribution is to suggest redistributive or equally distributive policies like universal basic income (UBI). However, UBI and similar policies lack broad political support.[15] Efforts to even out global capital distribution face opposition from those who, historically, have benefited from easier access to capital, solidifying their societal status. This group remains largely shielded from global financial downturns, even at the household level. Take for example the 1970s onwards, when US homeowners financed low-cost capital through the subsidies of low-interest rate mortgages, holding onto “an appreciating capital asset, insured by the government, that could be used as a substitute for falling wages.”[16] The surge in consumer inflation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic did not impact these capital holders due to the rising value of their homes.[17]

The challenge of redistributing capital is further complicated by the entrenched interests in maintaining subsidized market advantages, such as those enjoyed by fossil fuel producers. While eliminating these subsidies might theoretically benefit the broader economy and address socioecological costs, it risks raising energy prices for the poorest and provoking significant political backlash by removing protections against external price fluctuations.[18] Coady et al. (2017) suggest that direct subsidies to the poorest could enhance economic efficiency without increasing downstream costs, yet these measures remain politically unpopular.[19] Ultimately, there is a strong resistance to changing the current market system, despite its apparent socioecological and economic inefficiencies, illustrating the complex interplay between economic policies, societal equity, and political feasibility.

Ultimately, one way or another, the green transition will need to be financed regardless of political beliefs or preexisting market structure. The cost of doing nothing is too high. Studies, including those by the Swiss Re Institute and the Network for Greening the Financial System, predict macroeconomic losses due to warming could reach 18% of GDP by 2050.[20] These estimates, focusing on direct economic impacts like increased weather-related damages and health costs, likely fall short of capturing the full spectrum of consequences, including biodiversity loss, stranded assets, and the societal upheavals from increased conflict and migration.[21] The urgency to fund the green transition is paramount; without swift action, accumulating damages and risk will escalate to globally insurmountable levels.

The financing of this transition requires new ways of thinking that eschew previous waves of capital expansion and resource frontierism. Today, negative externalities—unaccounted costs borne by third parties during production or consumption—are not reflected in market prices or represented as assets. The pressurized build-up of unpriced negative externalities creates destabilizing forces that extend back from resource frontiers to financial hubs. When these “hidden costs” are made explicit, they “sum to $12 trillion” for “global food and land use systems”; similarly, in the energy sector, these costs “may be more than 10x larger than infrastructure costs alone”.[22] At a macroeconomic level, this indicates that economic activities have crossed the planet's material thresholds—human civilization is operating beyond its ecological means.

Where will the investment capital that pursues a long-termist solution ultimately come from? Although the global financial system has eased the transmission of cross-border financial flows, it has also exacerbated issues like capital flight, currency instability, and sovereign debt crises. The economic uncertainty triggered by COVID-19, for example, led to a swift withdrawal of investments from emerging markets into the perceived safety of US treasuries and other stable assets, exacerbating the financial strain of already vulnerable economies.[23] A surge in the value of the U.S. dollar often results in a rapid divestment from local currency bonds.[24] This situation begs the question of the consequences if these safe-haven assets were to fail—that is, what happens if the US defaults and its public debt becomes unserviceable? These types of financial paradigm shifts have happened before, going “slowly for a long time and then very quickly.”[25]

These concerns are legitimate, and highlight a growing opportunity for cryptomarkets to reform an existing system whose safe assets are coming under increasing scrutiny.[26] With this understanding, our collective challenge becomes one of generating USD trillions in green crypto-assets whose material claims are backed by trust-minimized, fair, and open-source accounting mechanisms—i.e. Web3.

State of Green Markets

“Our personal temporal orientation and the temporal beat of our society folds around the efficiency imperative… to the ruin of the natural world [...] The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society… from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship… negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.”

— Rifkin (2022), The Age of Resilience : 3

Before delving into cryptomarkets, it's crucial to acknowledge existing efforts within green markets to finance the green transition. There is ample reason to be optimistic about their growth and improving value chain, but they are not without flaws. These markets have been well covered at length by recent literature such as The Value of Whale,[27] The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea,[28] or the series of ‘Nature Market’ publications by the Taskforce on Nature Markets.[29] These publications discuss the successes and challenges faced by green asset markets, offering insights into their operations and impact, and are recommended as supplementary reading to this section. This background sets the stage for exploring how integrating these markets with Web3 technologies could enhance their efficiency, transparency, and scalability.

First Principles: Materiality Means Legitimacy

“But what if technological activists within social movements can reverse this historical process and strategically radically redesign accounting technology […] with favorable affordances that give it transformative material agency to fundamentally change the economic structure?”

— Manski (2020), Distributed Ledger Technologies, Value Accounting, and the Self Sovereign Identity

The key to unlocking green asset markets is to tightly couple any green assets’ materiality to itself. Greenwashing criticism will continue until green assets are fully auditable, transparent, and credible about their underlying material claims.[30] This is a reasonable, realist position to take. Indeed, this is the book’s key thesis, with the addendum that only public blockchains are capable of this feat.

Well-intentioned institutions want to meet climate targets, but rightly fear “reputational damage”. It’s these market players that can ultimately jumpstart the virtuous flywheel needed to scale green markets, and their material concerns must be assuaged. Take for example the voluntary carbon market (VCM), where buyers face reputational risk if the material activities they finance are later shown to have been ineffective. As stated by Citi GPS:

“Companies utilizing carbon credits want to ensure they are purchasing good-quality carbon credits that reduce, avoid, or remove emissions and help scale the investment needed in climate action. They will not participate in this market if they believe their reputation is at risk and if they believe the VCM is not operating transparently and effectively”.[31]

Historically, the task of ensuring materiality has relied on regulators. Many critics would argue that environmental asset markets such as the VCM are subject to material malpractice due to a lack of regulation. Yet, viewing a lack of regulation as an impediment to the growth of green markets is a misconception that overlooks the tradeoffs between the effectiveness of current capital regulators and the urgent socioecological need for green markets to scale.

Consider that the SEC, a major capital formation regulator, could handle only around 1,000 IPOs annually at its maximum capacity. Meanwhile, the crypto-asset sector issued hundreds of thousands of assets within a similar timeframe.[32] This comparison isn't to undermine the role of regulators but to suggest a reevaluation of their regulatory approach to help green markets scale. As discussed later in this chapter, the regulation of the integrity, transparency, and material impact of assets are more effectively facilitated through cryptomarkets, which offer a scalable, innovative framework to support the green transition. A regulatory approach that enhances rather than hinders their potential has consequences for green markets as well.

Scale is Demand Constrained

The goal to dramatically expand the market size of green assets faces a challenging reality, marked by an investment shortfall estimated at a staggering $11t.[33] The annual financial requirement to meet the Paris Agreement alone is estimated between $3-6t; addressing biodiversity loss, climate resilience, and development needs adds an additional $1t.[34] Consequently, climate financing must increase at least eightfold to address these critical environmental and developmental challenges effectively.[35]

When considering how to bridge the significant investment gaps in green markets, many experts suggest the private sector must play a crucial role. However, the expansion of these markets is limited by demand since profitability is the key driver for private sector investment.

No excess of polished consulting reports that give eye-popping estimates on the potential market size for CDR or other green assets can boost demand in the long-term: only profits in excess of the risk-free rate of return will do. Consider that carbon assets have a rapidly inflating asset supply as more and more are produced—in order for their price to increase, this supply will need to be absorbed by buyers. Robert Höglund, a CDR market expert, gets it right when stating that “demand will be the primary constraint on CDR market size: the market needs exponentially more buyers, buying at ever increasing volumes”.[36] The near 50% 2023 crash in the US carbon futures market should be a warning sign that this supply may not be so easily absorbed by buyers, and that early market estimates have been overly optimistic.[37]

Key Technologies and Processes are Getting Cheaper

Green markets are challenged by the scarcity of projects that meet investment-grade criteria—a situation exacerbated by high initial capital requirements and transaction costs.[38] However, there are signs that these markets are becoming more accessible and affordable. “Rapid, nonlinear change is occurring in some sectors and regions,” including “the share of electric vehicles in light-duty vehicle sales” (now 10% of sales since 2022), solar photovoltaic power generation costs (80% decrease in the past decade), onshore wind production costs (65% decrease), and battery storage (89% decrease since 2010). Altogether, these reductions have made these technologies the most cost-effective options for new electricity generation for two-thirds of the world's population.[39] Additionally, battery costs between sectors are converging, suggesting a high level of market maturity as their trade becomes more liquid and fungible.[40] Renewables are poised to double by 2030, although a tripling is needed.[41]

Falling monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) costs are helping enhance the adoption of Web3 technologies. Since its inception, the MRV framework for carbon markets has been characterized by manual processes, subjective assessments, and a complex network of stakeholders. Digital tools for conducting MRV are crucial for enhancing accuracy, transparency, and the capacity for high-integrity investments in emission reduction and removal activities. Take for example the shift to satellite-based monitoring, which is helping modernize many green assets—especially environmental assets:

“Despite remarkable advances in satellites and machine learning, many credit calculations today still rely on costly, labor-intensive methods. Field crews measure individual trees by hand… and cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars... Satellite-based carbon mapping offers a scalable, cost-efficient approach to crediting. Satellites are also essential to enhancing credit quality, because they can observe forest change both within a project and the surrounding region, enabling a data-driven approach to computing a project’s emissions impact. Without a satellite view of the landscape, status quo crediting can rely on assumptions that can lead to accusations of over-crediting.”[42]

This modernization ultimately enables scalable, cost-efficient carbon mapping. In addition to its own benefits, it also complements ground-truthing data for comprehensive ecosystem analysis.[43] With these technological gains, most CDR suppliers see costs drastically decreasing over the next 25 years.[44] When factoring in inflation, this trend points to a lower real cost of high-quality carbon assets.

Beyond technologies, the processes immanent to green market value chains are besieged by bottlenecks, gaps, and inconsistencies that create opportunities for intermediaries to profit and agent-principal issues to arise. These gaps emerge from fragmented standards, opaque methodologies, and a lack of technical and methodological interoperability in existing frameworks.[45]

The current structure of selling carbon, for instance, is characterized by several key practices and challenges that have implications for the integrity of carbon assets. Consider that many incumbent registries structure their fees as a percentage of the per-tonne cost of carbon removal, or receive payments from the project developers they are tasked with scrutinizing.[46] The commission-based model incentivizes registries to issue more credits at higher prices, as their revenue is directly tied to the volume and value of carbon assets verified and sold. Accepting money from developers is a clear conflict of interest, as registries are incentivized to approve projects to ensure future earnings. Furthermore, this places the onus on buyers to advocate for a rigorous material due diligence process, increasing their cost of purchase.

Transition Spending is Not Adequately Diverse

‘Doing nothing’ to spark the green transition also means ‘failing to do the right, diverse combination of things.’ A wide material focus must acknowledge the interconnectedness of ecological systems and the multitude of environmental services they provide. While green assets are beginning to emerge in the market that aim to encapsulate the value of water quality, soil health, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services, they are woefully underrepresented vis-à-vis carbon products. CDR investments pale in comparison to clean energy—the former measured in billions and the latter in trillions.[47] Even within the sphere of CDR, there is room for tinkering and innovation. The traditional focus on forestry and land use is expanding to include a variety of technological and nature-based solutions, from biochar and ocean fertilization to enhanced weathering techniques. By structuring products around these diverse methods, markets have the potential to cater to specific environmental needs and regional capacities.

To make informed decisions about the allocation of diverse green investments and identify where opportunities lie, it's crucial to understand the size and scope of each sector. Let’s briefly re-examine the variety of green assets available according to the Asset Chapter mapping with their respective market sizes—to the extent that they can be accurately assessed. The Asset Chapter provided a structured way to classify green assets, ranging from new, crypto-native assets like LP tokens to already existing clean RWAs. By reviewing the market sizes of these sectors, we can draw insights as to their current economic impact, growth potential, and the areas that are over or underrepresented in cryptomarkets:

This exercise reveals a few critical insights:

• The disproportionate social emphasis on environmental assets, such as carbon assets, obscures the need for greener commodities and land use. In many ways, environmental process assets are receipts of the upstream assets and green or gray infrastructures that produce them, such as a forest or a solar farm. Commodities, land, and energy producing assets make up trillions in value and more work needs to be done to improve their sustainability at the source. The growing emphasis on the differentiation between Scopes 1-3 emissions is a good first step towards addressing this.

• Renewable energy technologies are soaking up high levels of investment. While this is good, it invites fair criticism as to whether or not these investments could be better made elsewhere, and if the investment dynamics for renewables are achieving a just energy transition. Much of the financing for renewable infrastructures originates from centralized financial institutions. Part of a just transition is to democratize ownership over these energy-generating assets. As discussed later in this chapter, renewable energy technologies are uniquely poised to do so: a solar panel is a far more decentralized energy-producing technology than a gas plant.

• Cryptomarkets are uniquely poised to scale many types of green assets. Cryptomarkets have a means of entry and innovation in green asset markets by building up sectors that don’t yet exist, such as green digital collectibles and digiphysicals or any type of green currency. All existing assets that would benefit from Web3’s sophisticated data management primitives (see Data Chapter) [editor’s note: chapter not yet published], such as ecological data rights or any sort of performance-based asset, such as a green bond. This chapter closes by covering these opportunities at length.

Enter Cryptomarkets: Eco-capitalism 2.0’s Value Add

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”

— Nakamoto (2009), Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency

“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”

— Nakamoto (2008), The Bitcoin Whitepaper

Under today’s global financial system of rising inflation, high levels of debt, high concentration of capital, and increasing risk, it’s hard to see how green markets can adequately service the green transition without structural market reform. Without structural changes, green markets may replicate existing financial system flaws, harming the underlying material reality they aim to improve. For instance, the tension in Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes—bounties that conserve or restore nature—illustrates this issue well, where the push for market efficiency under the current market structure often leads to wealth redistribution from poorer to wealthier communities.[76]

Cryptomarkets and public blockchains offer a novel path forward to bridging the climate financing gap. At their core, these systems are immutable, transparent, and decentralized tools that are game changing for green markets, where provenance, materiality, and accountability are paramount. Cryptomarkets afford unprecedented access and the accelerated capital formation a just and rapidly scaling climate transition requires. Unlike Cantillon’s Hierarchy, which socially segments the rulemaking of, access, and cost of capital, cryptomarkets are characterized by their unified open liquidity environment. They are a level playing field, where capital can form and flow freely. They are global, 24/7, universally accessible, and move capital at lightspeed, driving operational settlement costs to near-zero.

An open liquidity environment structurally affords the necessary conditions for market-based environmental asset pricing. Nobel-prize winning Nordhaus’ The Spirit of Green notes that most experts agree “the carbon price should be equal in every sector and every country.”[77] The IMF, in a similar vein, has proposed a ‘global carbon price floor.’[78] Neither Nordhaus nor the IMF identify that a radical change in market structure—an open liquidity environment—is necessary to realize either proposition. In contrast, Chris Dixon, GP at A16z, notes in his book Read Write Own that blockchains “are perfectly suited to solve large-scale economic coordination problems, especially when one side of the network has more [institutional] power than the other side.”[79] Does this not perfectly characterize the struggles of financing a just climate transition, where one side (developed countries) is far more embedded in the global financial system than the other (developing countries)?

Instead of leveraging cryptomarkets, a great deal of operational time and public money is being spent on mechanisms such as the Paris Agreement’s Article 6 where a “country (or countries) will be able to transfer carbon credits earned from the reduction of GHG emissions to help one or more countries meet climate targets.”[80] As crypto-assets, carbon assets would not need these types of permissioned multilateral agreements. Any country would be able to acquire or transfer credits in a universal cryptomarket on a level playing field. While it is important to tally mitigation and understand if national actors are honoring their agreements, there is no need to artificially restrain the travel of environmental crypto-assets that are global by default.

The structural benefits afforded by cryptomarkets have softened previous criticisms as these markets have proven their worth. A 2023 ECB working paper concluded that global market dynamics and volatility significantly influence Bitcoin (BTC) trading—particularly in emerging and developing economies. In these economies, BTC is increasingly used as a store of value due to domestic currency instability. The paper affirms that “macroeconomic instability” spurs “greater cryptoasset usage”,[81] helping preserve the purchasing power of crypto-asset holders. This working paper’s nuanced take contrasts to a 2022 ECB blog titled Bitcoin’s Last Stand, where the ECB’s Director General of Market Infrastructure and Payments, Ulrich Bindseil, argued that it is “neither suitable as a payment system nor as a form of investment” and “should not be legitimized”.[82] Despite this alarmist sentiment, the facts are clear: in its 15-year lifespan BTC has consistently beaten inflation metrics by comfortable margin; its holders are behaving rationally.[83] This trend is amplified by younger, risk-tolerant populations lacking traditional financial services—populations left out by existing markets. Areas such as Latin America are particularly prescient, as they have some of the highest levels of unbanked users; there, financial “innovation is driven overwhelmingly by need” which cryptomarkets uniquely fulfill.[84]

Cryptomarkets have reached a critical point of market maturity in terms of their technology, regulatory status (BIS now permits 2% crypto exposure among banks—albeit with a 100% capital charge[85]), and commonly used market metrics, such as volatility and liquidity. While BTC bears the same general correlative properties as other asset classes, vis-à-vis the S&P500 it’s less correlated than many other assets and its correlation is decreasing over time.[86] In parallel to this, research has revealed that cryptocurrencies and sustainable or clean/renewable energy indices exhibit little co-movement during stable market periods,[87] making them ideal assets to pair together in a portfolio. Bitcoin’s volatility has massively decreased since its origination, and its previously characteristic long-tail of extreme volatility events has all but vanished.[88] Liquidity has drastically increased: from 2017 to the present the market cap of all stablecoins outstanding has increased to $134b, and as of early 2024 is rising month-after-month.[89] These are metrics of a healthy, maturing market structure unrestrained by intermediaries or unfair market design.

Diving Into Disintermediation

“A typical consumer payment will pass through multiple layers of intermediaries on its way to a recipient. A patchwork of systems run by banks, merchants, card networks, and payment processors must all coordinate [...] By creating a neutral layer that can raise money, maintain shared data, and make strong commitments to users…Blockchain networks can make payments a public good.”

– Dixon (2024), Read Write Own : 212-213

The big private money needed to push humanity towards a new civilizational level of negentropy is not going to come from business-as-usual,[90] top-down distribution of capital, but a million bottom-up assets of verifiable material impact. Douglass North, Nobel-prize winning economic historian, reminds us that:

“Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty. In the long run it produces stagnation and decay as humans confront ever new challenges… that require innovative institutional creation… [A] range of choices is a superior survival trait…”[91]

Scaling sustainable, regenerative, or green investment is not about electing the right minority to make these decisions on all species’ behalves (while state funding proposals such as the ‘Green New Deal’ can be helpful, they should not be viewed as a panacea), but about disintermediating market structure in a way that everyone can participate in a free, fair, and truly equal playing field. Enhanced market accessibility means a diverse array of participants can create their own materially green forms of capital, thus broadening the market's base and potential for impact. As discussed in previous chapters, crypto democratizes previously exclusive asset utilities—such as locking collateral to mint money—thus lateralizing the financial system. Without this authority to create capital and mint assets, labor—especially new and young labor—is unfairly locked into an already existing rentier society where previously distributed low-cost capital in the form of “real estate, shares”, “accumulated and inherited wealth” earn returns greater than “the national rate of economic growth”.[92]

This strategy of disintermediation—putting the means of capital production in the hands of ordinary people—plays well with both ‘Green Keynesians’ and ‘Degrowth Communists’ alike, leveraging the benefits of free markets while avoiding the pitfalls of a “vertical, nationalized management style characteristic of a welfare state” that is “incompatible with the horizontal nature of the commons.”[93] Cryptomarkets represent both a qualitative and quantitative departure from existing market infrastructure, broadening the Overton window to new forms of social, technical, and financial innovation. Their extension to the material, environmental, and ecological is a natural progression driven by need.

At a technical level, an open liquidity environment requires the development of technologies that protect order flow fairness. Fair sequencing and execution ensures the equitable treatment of all market participants and protects the efficiency of markets. Being able to manipulate order flow creates opportunities for financial intermediaries to unfairly profit from exchange. In the global financial system, intermediaries facilitate and clear transactions, handle logistics, provide market information, or guarantee some other form of trust or security.

Traditional financial intermediaries such as The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)—a US security clearing and settlement services provider—have been criticized for privileging large financial institutions at retail’s expense. Today, these criticisms are conspiratorial in nature, being passed between crowdsourced due diligence documents on Reddit and other social media platforms, but they are not unwarranted.[94] As long as any profit opportunity exists for a corporate institution to gain from monopolizing the process of exchange, we should expect it to be taken. The head of Citadel Securities, one of the largest market makers in the world, recently issued a statement on how their active managers set the prices of securities according to “where we think they should be valued”.[95] It’s no wonder that market regulators such as the head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, are concerned about Citadel: at a congressional hearing he lamented that "one firm now has 40% to 50% of the retail order flow, what does that do to pricing of capital in this country?”[96]

In contrast to this chain of intermediaries, each taking their slice of the pie, cryptomarkets operate on blockchain technology that inherently democratizes the payments and trading process. In payments alone, $74b minimum could have been saved by US credit card users alone in payments fees using crypto.[97] Unlike the traditional financial system, where dark pools and OTC deals obscure market movements, cryptomarket orderflow—even private orderflow—is designed to enhance competitiveness among parties.[98]

In an open liquidity environment, innovators freely and fairly compete to solve Web3 orderflow fairness challenges like Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)—the maximum value that can be extracted from blockchain transaction order manipulation by miners or validators. MEV encompasses strategies like front-running, back-running, and sandwich attacks, where actors reorder, insert, or exclude transactions to profit. Most approaches rely on ‘market-ifying’ order flow itself, such as verifiable sequencing rules that ensure fairer trade executions by providing a way to control the order in which transactions are processed.[99] Ultimately, this results in more direct and efficient trade execution. In one recent example, 35 entities competed to process a single transaction, decentrally coordinating through this marketized orderflow environment to “get a great price”.[100] While challenges such as MEV in orderflow fairness persist, the general trajectory of the technology’s development is moving towards a more inclusive and transparent model where every participant has a fair chance to execute trades efficiently.

Disintermediating centralized financial powerhouses of significant market control and influence is a matter of political merit, as these entities exert substantial market discipline over more than just retail traders. Their reach extends to sovereign governments and other powerful rule-making institutions; they actively shape the rules of the global financial system and install regimes that monopolize their rights to create and manage assets. American Investor Ray Dalio notes in his study of failed civilizations, The Changing World Order, that “the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of wealth production… they work with the people who have political power… to set and enforce the rules.”[101] Green Keynesian proponents of a “zero marginal cost society” that’s “organized collaboratively… to create sufficient lateral economies of scale” never took into account that there are significant costs, intermediaries, and hostile gatekeepers enclosing the process of capital formation.[102] These entities too must be disintermediated.

Take for example the role of some of the largest index providers today. The significant but often subtle impact of these entities and their networks in molding global politics and policymaking illuminates the power of hidden influences in financial policy. Buller notes in Value of a Whale that index providers are:

“[P]owerful gatekeepers for sovereigns' access to capital. Inclusion in these indices can attract more and lower-cost investment, while exclusion can have the opposite effect. For instance, a 2019 index reclassification of emerging economies triggered a seismic shift in fund flows, amounting to $120 billion”.[103]

In contrast, DeFi takes these types of complex financial instruments subject to high operational deployment costs and drops them to near-zero. This empowers more flexible capital management strategies for anyone, anywhere, and not just an elite group of capitalized financial institutions. From automated liquidity management strategies that dynamically adjust asset balance across a defined range[104] or concentration,[105] the automated swapping of revenues into a preferred pre-defined treasury asset,[106] or the disintermediation of the setting of interest rates where the borrowers themselves can determine their risk appetite,[107] DeFi’s innovations ultimately drive down the operational cost of capital formation and management. These lowered costs are especially pertinent to environment asset markets, whose public good attributes make them difficult to structure and expensive to deploy.[108]

Cryptocurrency firms, with their innovative approaches and financial protocols, pose a competitive challenge to existing financial intermediaries whose profits are sustained by not competing in an open liquidity environment. This has not gone unnoticed or without retribution. The EU’s Markets on Crypto-Assets legislation has been characterized as “a sledgehammer to crack a nut”, imposing an unwieldy regulatory regime relative to cryptomarket risks.[109] Legislative actions proposed by US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Roger Marshall, which aim to impose regulations on crypto more stringent than the existing financial sector, exemplify the ongoing efforts of financial incumbents to curtail cryptomarkets. The legislation, criticized as unconstitutional and impractical by cryptocurrency advocates, was backed by The Bank Policy Institute, chaired by Jamie Dimon,[110] the head of the world’s 5th largest bank by assets and 1st by revenue.[111] Multiple economists have demonstrated that states have “strong incentives to behave opportunistically to maximize the rents of those with access to the government decision-making process”,[112] and this is exactly the case with these types of legislative proposals.

Similarly, rather than promoting an open liquidity environment and the benefits it creates in terms of technical and structure disintermediation, the SEC has instead opted to discourage capital formation and hurt innovators. The vague and unhelpful standards they use to define and regulate cryptoassets as if they were traditional securities have hurt the reputation of cryptomarkets by reinforcing intermediation in capital formation, building a “regulatory moat… filled by countless predatory VCs dumping on consumers… making the markets worse and more unsafe.”[113] Rather than having unprecedented access to capital formation, regular people—namely, US citizens—are excluded as Web3 projects cannot take on the risk of giving them fair and equal access to this new open financial infrastructure.

Critics have gone as far as to suggest that evolving cryptomarkets could limit the effectiveness of monetary policy due to their unique nature as both a medium of exchange and cryptocurrencies emerging role as a distinct asset class.[114] They argue that cryptomarkets could dilute the impact of exchange and interest rate differentials, reshaping international capital flows and traditional credit transmission channels.[115] When considering this, it’s important to remember the political side of these concerns. Who are issuing these policies? To whose benefit—or loss—are these policies? Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Modern financial institutions have fostered a comfortable relationship with moral hazard, monopolizing the privilege to create assets, privatizing the profits derived from this privilege, and distributing losses among the public when their 'too big to fail' systems collapse. If giving all market actors equal access and opportunity to innovate in an open liquidity environment results in financial stress for these private institutions, maybe it’s finally time they re-evaluate their business models.

Disintermediation Means Real Price Discovery

“To reach its potential, the VCM must be able to accurately, transparently, and reliably value carbon credits based on their credit quality (i.e., climate performance). All credit quality is derived from the integrity of both the underlying performance data (i.e., data integrity) and the process through which it is developed, vetted, purchased, and claimed (i.e., process integrity)”.

— Rocky Mountain Institute & Climate Collective (2023), Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) Landscape Guide

Since Hayek's time, economists have understood that the price mechanism distributes knowledge, enabling adaptation and the emergence of socioeconomic order.[116] Distortions in the price mechanism can hinder technological innovation and sectoral adoption. This is especially true in green markets, such as carbon, where effective price discovery remains elusive. Mainstream economists agree that for a carbon price to be effective, it must be uniform and universal, both industry-wide and geographically.[117] This ideal standard is challenging to meet in current carbon and green bond markets, where trading primarily occurs through OTC desks that lack transparency and uniformity. The Rocky Mountain Institute & Climate Collective highlight that information on carbon asset prices and contracts is frequently private, restricted by paywalls, and kept exclusive to brokers and intermediaries, complicating the price discovery process.[118]

The opacity of transactions and an overreliance on brokerage systems have allowed a small coterie of intermediaries and brokers to exert disproportionate influence on price setting through predatory tactics and margin-setting. Investigations by Unearthed and SourceMaterial revealed that carbon brokers earn high profits, particularly from small-scale projects in the Global South.[119] As it stands today, the carbon market is less focused on the quality and unique attributes of carbon assets and more on exploiting information gaps for profit. These findings, achieved through on-the-ground interviews and leaked emails, highlight the need to migrate these assets to public blockchains that enhance their transparency and data availability. More importantly, real price discovery cannot happen until these issues are resolved. Liquidity, the lifeblood of any market, suffers in this shadowy exchange environment; the VCM's status quo has been aptly characterized as a "prime example of an illiquid market”.[120]

As discussed in the Protocol Chapter [editor’s note: chapter not yet published], decentralized exchanges (DEX) and automated market makers (AMM) are two public blockchain primitives that solve these challenges. AMMs, in particular, represent a significant shift from traditional financial markets by using a bonding curve algorithm to determine asset prices based on supply and demand, ensuring transparent efficient trading without order books or intermediaries.[121] Independent market makers can leverage these algorithms to inject liquidity and uphold market efficiency, circumventing the need for centralized market makers with their own rent-seeking and price-setting agendas. This not only democratizes the market making process but also ensures transparent and efficient price discovery. AMMs are composable, and can easily be combined with other Web3 pricing primitives, such as batched auctions, to further optimize fair price discovery.[122]

AMMs offer unique benefits to green markets, as they are poised to become the mainstay in smaller and newer markets characterized by the long tail of assets.[123] They simplify complex trading activities across audiences through easy-to-use interfaces. This is critical: in a just and bottom-up green transition, all market participants should have straightforward UX. In comparison, today’s gated green asset marketplaces largely target corporates, relying on costly product subscriptions and account antipatterns (such as permissioned seats) that hurt equitable access.[124] Furthermore, the long tail of green assets are enriched by detailed material attributes—e.g. the origin of an asset, the developmental methodologies employed, and the identities of third-party validators. The complexity inherent to NbS makes it hard to measure biodiversity and prove outcomes; when outcomes are proven, they refer to many different attribute results simultaneously.[125] Automated Regression Market Makers (ARMM) are AMMs that evaluate high-dimensional attribute spaces, empowering buyers to appraise the data-rich characteristics of these types of green ‘semifungibles’.[126] With ARMMs and increasingly innovative Web3 mechanisms that intersect with AI,[127] reported outputs and attributes can directly influence price and foster a more accurate discovery of asset value.[128]

The potential for cryptomarkets to price assets more efficiently and equitably is significant in the context of commodity trading. Refer to the earlier table showing natural assets as the green market's largest segment by size. When we zoom in on single commodities, such as coffee, it becomes clear that ample opportunities exist to disintermediate pricing distortion in their supply chains. Currently, coffee farmers receive only a small portion of their product's final retail price, with the bulk of profits going to a complex network of intermediaries including brokers, exporters, roasters, and retailers, who frequently collude against primary producers.[129] In contrast, a DeFi-centric approach would allow coffee farmers to sell commodity assets rich with attribute data P2P via cryptomarkets. Doing so, they would retain a larger surplus and also provide buyers with a more transparent understanding of the commodity origin, vintage, and value—a win-win solution.

Social Narratives and Price Discovery

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

— Carroll (1871), Through the Looking Glass

The concept of memetic warfare, or the strategic use of memes and narratives to affect the valuation and perception of assets, plays a continuous role in this dynamic.[131] Newcomers in the memetic arena are handicapped by the status quo bias, where “phobias”—such as the fear of loss—are easily “triggered by novel technologies or ways of doing things.”[132] Such biases can lead to irrational fears or resistance against new technologies or approaches, effectively handicapping newcomers and stifling potential innovation and progress. This complex interplay between social narratives, media influence, and market dynamics underscores the importance of fostering a more balanced, accessible, and open discourse, particularly in areas as critical as ecological and technological advancement.

Think of the financial economy as a big game where everyone speaks a certain language made up of rules and norms, such as the general idea of what constitutes polite behavior. These rules presuppose what is socially valued before it is priced. When a single overrepresented media voice can dominate the conversation, these values can shift. Consequently, when the pricing of goods and services is unfairly delimited to institutions who are specialized in handling the financial forms of assets (e.g. Citadel), values become distorted. What these firms value, and what most people value, are two different things entirely. In contrast, when planetary stewards—individuals or entities responsible for managing natural resources—issue green crypto-assets representing the environmental value they oversee, capital takes on a new, material form generated directly from conservation efforts or sustainable practices. Expanding actor participation sharpens intention within the market, fostering a more robust public discourse on sustainability.[133] By engaging a wider array of voices and stakeholders, markets evolve to better reflect the diverse needs and perspectives of society, driving triple bottom line innovations. This being said, even within green discourses, the narrow focus on certain values contributes to a broader "values crisis" that is intertwined with biodiversity loss, climate change, pandemics, and socio-environmental injustices.[134]

There is often a normative judgment attached to speculation in the crypto world expressed by traditional financial institutions to discredit the real utility of crypto-assets,[135] despite the SEC’s performative role in fostering an innovation environment where real utility is risky. These same financial institutions often reject the semiotics of ‘crypto’ in lieu of ‘blockchain’. This narrow view contra speculation fails to recognize the power of storytelling in shaping social and technological paths. Arthur Hayes, the world’s youngest black billionaire, frames this speculative tendency well:

“We are all speculators. Every instant we exist in this universe is filled with uncertainty. In our attempt to wade through an unpredictable existence, our brain constantly constructs a probabilistic map of our environment. Our actions are based not on facts but on perceived probabilities across various outcomes [...] I’m telling stories about thieving central bankers and politicians who are destroying the value of time and human labour by printing fiat money. I’m telling the story of how Bitcoin and the crypto ecosystem are an antidote to this organised theft of human dignity.”[136]

Speculation is an essential economic force that allows society to pursue the future narratives it values most. It is a means of garnering the necessary focus and interest in new technologies and innovations that build momentum towards groundbreaking paradigm shifts. When a social minority can leverage a certain futurity, but the remainder cannot, society performatively develops towards a certain future; it precludes certain mechanisms, assets, and markets from existing in the socially acceptable Overton window.

While cryptomarkets alone will not necessarily generate democratic and efficient processes, their open liquidity environment widens the possibility to produce a future where a new set of institutional governance practices, values, and ethics can thrive. Governmental statements and discourses should aim to foster rather than hinder liquidity formation in green cryptomarkets, keeping in mind the overarching goal of scaling up “global climate finance by nearly $500 billion per year throughout the remainder of this decade”.[137] The state should facilitate a discursive environment where private capital of all sizes is incentivized—or at the very least, not ostracized—to bridge this gap, with no actor considered too small to invest in or produce positive impact.

White Boxes for Transparent Finance

“The way entities collectively handle their finances as reflected in their income statements and balance sheets is the biggest driver of changes in internal and world orders.”

— Dalio (2021), Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail : 105

Today, traditional markets function as a "matrix of black boxes," where institutions manage their credit inventories on spreadsheets,[138] making it challenging to track and verify transactions and ownership. This opaque system, largely indifferent to geographic boundaries, leads to economic inefficiencies and excess risk as intermediaries control and limit access to information.[139] In contrast, DAOs—the de facto institution of cryptomarkets—are ‘white boxes’. Today, their financial operations and transactions are for the most part transparent and verifiable. Not only is it possible to see with clarity the quantity of existing entities and their network relations, their assets, financial operations (e.g. lending), and associated risk profile are fully visible.

Financial networks can quickly transition from being robust shock-absorbers to fragile shock-amplifiers. Web3’s white boxes help institutions understand their interconnections, alleviate dependencies, and avert crises.[140] Consider that when Alameda Research—a centralized cryptocurrency trading firm and sister company of FTX—failed, they prioritized clearing their DeFi debts over centralized financial obligations. The reasoning was simple: it was far more punishing to keep these debts open given the public nature of DeFi and its unforgiving and automated liquidation mechanisms.[141] DeFi alone stands out for its ability to encode the rules of engagement within smart contracts, enabling more efficient and accurate monitoring, analysis, and pricing of risk. Adopting Web3 means a future where financial crises can be averted due to the rich balance sheet availability. Such a system would prevent risks from spiraling out of control, eliminating the obfuscation caused by off-balance-sheet instruments normalized by traditional finance.

Beyond risk, there is a growing trend where financial aid and climate finance from richer to poorer nations is being redirected and inefficiently allocated, affecting critical areas like health, education, and infrastructure. This lack of oversight and data has led to the funding of projects with questionable relevance to climate change goals. Simply put: there’s a lot of grift in climate finance.[142] These challenges mirror internal national aid distribution challenges as well. Consider that hundreds of billions USD were plundered by intermediaries during the COVID-19 pandemic,[143] and that a mere 20% of the overall aid package was directly issued to the population.[144] Such mismanagement dilutes the impact of climate or state-issued aid and raises concerns about the sincerity and effectiveness of these financial efforts. This undermines the primary purpose of climate and aid finance, depriving entire nations and populations of fundamental adaptation support.

With Web3’s white boxes, it becomes possible for anyone to see how crypto-assets are moving, and which entities are siphoning them away from their intended impacts. By enabling a clear view of how much capital reaches project developers versus other intermediaries, blockchain technology fosters an environment where funds are more efficiently allocated to their intended purposes.[145] This is desirable by both sides of any sort of aid distribution or green asset. Ultimately, the public nature of DeFi not only protects against bad optics for fund distributors but ensures a higher, immediate accountability of its receivers.

Beyond Balance Sheets: Supply Chain Provenance

In 2024, an investigation led by Le Monde and Radio France revealed that Nestlé and other food industry players had been illegally treating bottled water to hide contamination and continue business as usual. Nearly 30% of bottled water brands were non-compliant with regulations, and specifically, all Nestlé brands used forbidden treatments. In a secret 2021 meeting between Nestlé Waters and the French Ministry of Industry, it was revealed they were already using prohibited treatments and sought government permission to continue such practices. Nestlé Waters admitted that without these treatments, it would be impossible to maintain operation of their mineral water plants due to regular contamination of their water sources. Despite these practices clearly violating public health codes, the French government initially chose not to inform judicial or European authorities.[146]

This case study highlights currently opaque supply chains that reinforce the market dominance of large corporations and prioritizes their market position over honest and transparent product information—even products as crucial to life as water. This dynamic leads to situations where state institutions consciously and without remorse protect corporate interests at the public’s expense. Blockchain's capacity for traceability and transparency is crucial for purging supply chains of products tainted by industry pollution, degenerative land use, and labor malpractice.[147] A public blockchain-based system for water supply chain transparency would level the playing field by recording each batch of bottled water, from source to shelf, cradle-to-cradle, detailing critical data points such as source location, treatment processes, quality control measures, transportation, and final distribution. Each of these stages would be immutably timestamped, and any attempt at data manipulation would be easily detectable. Consumers, equipped with unalterable data, would be empowered to make informed decisions about their purchases. They could, for instance, scan a QR code on a bottle of water to access the entire chain history of that specific batch—information that is currently difficult or impossible to obtain.

By shedding light on corporate supply chains, public blockchain can catalyze a shift towards more sustainable business models, where transparency is not just a regulatory requirement, but a cornerstone of corporate strategy towards greater investability or more efficient green logistics. In the former case, DAOs can help bridge the “inadequate… quality of ESG data available today… to make investment decisions” as identified by a recent Dow Jones survey of financial professionals.[148] In the latter case, by applying operational research techniques (e.g. linear, nonlinear, integer, and dynamic programming, network analysis and optimization models, game, queuing, and inventory theory…) across entire supply chains, blockchain can optimize processes and resource flows with the intent of reducing overall carbon footprints and reaching higher levels of local, circular efficiency.[149] Decentralized used goods and secondhand marketplaces can achieve higher economic efficiency by lowering platform take rates.[150]A recent report by Bank of America expects that “DLT/BCT-powered infrastructure” will optimize “inventory management and shipping routes, as well as enhance the detection of fraud and counterfeit items, which accounted for 3.3% of global trade in 2016”.[151]

Smart contracts provide a secure and automated means of managing the ownership and control of both digital and physical assets. Phygital (physical-digital) designs lend themselves well to achieving self-coordinating networks of smart objects that structure and economize their own “distributed, multisegment, [and] intermodal transport” as part of a higher efficiency “open supply web.”[152] These small improvements pave the way for innovative lending practices, where smart property serves as collateral. This could significantly lower the barriers to credit, making it more accessible and fostering a competitive lending market. Add in AI, and phygitals become key primitives for new agent-to-agent economies. The key point is that as white boxes proliferate across the supply chain, they transcend and combine programmable assets and supply chain provenance into new markets and use cases.

Green Crypto Opportunities

A more sustainable, inclusive, and efficient global economy is possible, but it requires green cryptomarkets to iterate and evolve. While early-stage financing from pre-seed to Series B rounds in Nature Tech are on the rise, subsequent funding phases are not keeping pace, indicating that the market is waiting for a new cohort of technologies to mature.[153] The infancy of Web3 technologies presents a landscape ripe with potential. Web3’s nascent state is evidenced today by the many green blockchain projects that have not yet advanced beyond proof-of-concept. This slow maturation curve aligns with the growth trajectory of blockchain generally: Ethereum, the pioneering smart contract platform itself debuted in 2015.[154] Most tech start-ups begin to realize their value after a decade in the market.[155] With this understanding, newly established DAOs and Web3 projects today are sowing seeds for environmental progress that may take years to bear fruit. To close this book, the following section will delve into these specific opportunities, discussing how they can be harnessed to catalyze significant, positive change and innovation.

Ecotechnic Knowledge Commons

As introduced by economist Jason Potts, the concept of an Innovation Commons refers to a collaborative framework where resources and information are pooled to facilitate the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities under conditions of extreme uncertainty. New ideas have a nonrivalrous and nonexcludable nature, which, unlike physical goods, can be shared and used by multiple parties without depletion. With this, markets alone cannot efficiently drive the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge due to issues like indivisibilities, nonconvexities, and uncertainty—factors that contribute to market failure in innovation. Innovation commons help overcome the entrepreneurial discovery problem—the challenge entrepreneurs face in identifying and capitalizing on new business opportunities that have not yet been recognized by the market. Potts notes that these commons operate on two levels: firstly, as material and technological resource pools and secondly, as repositories of entrepreneurial information. This dual structure underscores the innovation commons as an originator of innovation, where access to valuable entrepreneurial insights is gained through cooperation.[158]

Building on the framework of Innovation Commons, the authors introduce the concept of Ecotechnic Knowledge Commons (EKC) that focuses specifically on the integration of ecological and new technological knowledge. These collaborative spaces should aggregate, share, and enhance the connections between sustainable practices and the latest in open-source technologies. They could include cooperatives, eco-villages, homesteads, urban maker spaces, seed banks, fab labs, or even forest schools. These spaces should enhance access to technological innovation resources that can be leveraged for environmental use cases.

Sociologist Martin Arboleda proselytizes a “lost unity between algorithmic knowledge and folk knowledge” that can be “restored within the context of an advanced technological future”, where rural cultures produce alongside international advocacy networks “their own organic intellectuals” and “vernacular scientific knowledge.”[159] Indeed, EKC should be hotbeds for citizen science, and facilitate network collaboration among innovators, researchers, scientists, financiers, legal experts, and global enterprises. Ultimately, they have a pivotal role in incubating and accelerating the early adoption of Web3, AI, and IoT ecotechnologies, helping egress discovery costs and the challenges of large-scale deployment while maintaining the anarcho-crypto ethos of political decentralization.

EKC are required due to the growing complexity of managing ecosystems and the urgent need to integrate specialized, often hyperlocalized knowledge into Web3. With the rapid transformation and intensification of agricultural systems, there's been a significant loss of traditional ecological knowledge,[160] highlighting the importance of preserving and integrating this knowledge into modern innovations that ensure their continued survival and usage. Artisanal skill shortages are now chronic as well in various industries, including engineering and technology.[161] Bioregionalist Joe Brewer describes well these types of integrated knowledge spaces in his Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth:

“Of particular importance is the need to create bioregional learning centers for each regenerative economy… there must be ways to retain and pass on knowledge about native species, understanding of how to build houses in the local climate using locally-sourced materials, comprehension of… sustainable food systems in this particular place [...] There are current efforts to combine these kinds of data from sensor networks with digital ledgers that track the creation of value… Here we can see that a robust circulation of financial resources aligns with empowered participation for local groups to co-create edge-effect abundance where humans and landscape interact.”[162]

By proliferating the intersection of ecotechnical and place-based epistemologies, EKC can support small-scale, sustainable enterprises, and contribute to territorial-scale adaptations. EKC can support rural job shifts as labor intensive work such as retrofitting, micropower generation, commons-based peer production and regenerative agriculture play a larger role in society. Comprehensive toolkits and playbooks offer valuable resources in this direction, like those provided by Web3 projects Regen Registry and basinStack.[163] Ekonavi—a Web3 ecological impact network—offers free resources on agroforestry and regenerative practices in their multilingual e-library.[164] The Traditional Dream Factory recently published a guidebook on How to Build a Regenerative Village.[165] Organizations such as LexDAO, Kolektivo, the ReFi Summit, and Crypto Commons Association have been working to integrate technology with place-based design, organizing workshops, clinics, and events that disseminate knowledge and establish vital connections with local communities.

This being said, significant gaps have been revealed by these early interactions, such as the intersection of law and DAOs and crypto-assets. Education around legal frameworks and the integration of environmental Web3 projects within existing systems is paramount to mitigating regulatory and securities risks, ensuring that novel, place-based ventures can flourish.[166] Everything from designing and drafting agreements (leases, licenses, mutual aid, membership, co-ownership, etc…), structuring entities, the taxation of exchange, land use employment, production, and crypto-asset regulations must be navigated by EKC, as mutualist legal professionals already know.[167] Some promising directions are moving forward, though—consider the proposal by Delphi Labs for cybernetic, DAO-adjacent entities deemed ‘BORGs’:

“Each BORG has a relatively specialized purpose, is incorporated in an appropriate, purpose-appropriate jurisdiction, utilizes DAO-connected smart contracts as much as possible, publishes its governing documents, and, in addition to smart-contract-based checks/balances, creates accountability by giving limited legal rights to the DAO or DAO members [...] Because these BORGs are business entities, they can comply with regulations, can enforce agreements (whether governance-related and internal or commerce-related and external), pay workers, and pay taxes.”[168]

As these legal models become replicable over time, we should ideally see the opportunities for place-based DAOs, crypto-assets, and token-based fundraising flourish.

Eco/spatial Data Primitives

Web3 Geographic Information Systems (Web3GIS) hold promise as a future area of R&D and market opportunity. Web3GIS would provide decentralized, transparent, and verifiable ecological and spatial data services. In his book Shared Governance for Sustainable Working Landscapes, ecosystem markets expert Tim Gieseke outlines the high-level specifications of such a hypothetical platform:

“This book proposes the development of… a geographical-based platform… delineating the landscape into accessible units with the capacity to calculate ecosystem services [...] The use of the word ‘unit’ is an attempt to focus attention on the need to spatially quantify the ecosystem service as it relates to an economic value [...] These eco-services become a geo-referenced index package and… simplify measurement, ownership, valuation and transactional processes [...] In this new space, the network community is able to interact using a GIS-based technological architecture that accounts for natural capital using landscape index data.”[169]

As discussed in the Data Chapter, many primitives need to be developed this direction, such as private, secure, and reliable data storage and management primitives (e.g. MPC, FHE, ZKP, material data oracles—see Data Chapter)[editor’s note: chapter not yet published], for handling sensitive, asset-linked ecological and geospatial data. The citizen science system iNaturalist illustrates the importance of data privacy, where the locations of endangered species must be generalized to protect them from poaching.[170] Precise human location data is of concern to certain regulators, who ban its “collection, use, and sale” without informed consent.[171] Alternatively, as a matter of social concern, data privacy is increasingly an issue in the EV sector, where new taxes and other policies are being considered to make up for taxation shortfalls from fuel taxes.[172]

The world is awash in ecological data that can and should be coupled to cryptomarkets. A well-designed Web3GIS should unlock new GIS functionalities such as geographic or bioregional liquidity formation. With this, capital could form or be efficiently allocated with specific spatial, ecological, or logistical network parameters. Transitioning rural land management from linear to holistic approaches, which produce natural assets and public goods like water, soil, and biodiversity, demands precise measurements by verified observers, risk-minimizing oracle primitives, and smart incentives targeting material impacts.[173] The next logical step beyond current trends in smart logistics that make “each component in the production process… able to communicate” sharing their “position and state”[174] is co-incentivization by the components as smart agents themselves. Positioning is of the utmost concern: liquidity is sociospatially biased, generally flowing from rural areas to urban ones. Could a Web3GIS better manage this flow, helping load balance capital between expanding “cosmopolitan, green and smart cities” and the “polluted towns, shanty towns, and overcrowded camp sites” that aggregate at new resource frontiers?[175]

Web3GIS plays a crucial role in enabling collaborative geoprospective scenario creation, allowing for the modeling and anticipation of future territorial developments. It should aid stakeholders in efficiently allocating adaptation funding through participatory methods. To ensure impartiality and accuracy, there's a growing consensus in environmental asset markets that Validation and Verification Bodies should be independent from standard-setting entities. It's suggested that a significant budget, ranging from 10-25%, be allocated towards independent MRV.[176] Web3GIS systems should simplify the process by incentivizing a decentralized array of place-based participants to provide these sorts of services through geo-pinned bounties and other trustless mechanisms. To this end, Web3GIS should not be approached as a mere tool for observation, but a multi-sided stakeholder platform that provides foundational geographical and ecological data, business, and liquidity formation services for the production of high quality green crypto-assets.

AI/ML Technologies

“If blockchain technology provides a new template for transaction settlement, data storage, and system design, AI is a revolution in computation, analysis, and content delivery.”

— Tcheyan (2024), Understanding the Intersection of Crypto and AI

With predictive AI/ML technologies, stakeholders across domains can construct vast predictive models and prototypes that deeply enhance their understanding and management of socioecological systems. This approach transitions from rigid, control-based management models to dynamic, responsive methodologies that handle environmental uncertainties and change.[177] AI is pivotal in creating evolving repositories of causal models and real-world data. These repositories aid agents, from investors to scientists, in becoming incrementally more informed about the world and the consequences of their actions. The Celo Climate Collective observes that:

“Using digital twins for relevant ecosystems and networks, reliable and interpretable estimates of historical and future Earth states will become accessible to the public. Corporates, investors, governments and members of civil society will be able to use these digital twins in “simulation mode” to visualize the consequences of action (or inaction).”[178]

AI can uncover complex interactions within socioecosystems, enabling solutions for large-scale resource optimization, EV fleet management, and climate disaster response. By identifying trends and forecasting threats, AI can play a key role in preventing environmental harm, including illegal deforestation, poaching, and pollution. A handful of foundation models have already been released that focus on ecological and spatial contexts and support these observational use cases, such as the Large Nature Model, focusing on ecological data,[179] NASA’s Prithvi GeoAI model which is used for “tracking changes in land use, monitoring natural disasters, and predicting crop yields”,[180] and ClimateGPT, a task-specific LLM that “synthesizes interdisciplinary climate change”.[181]

The probabilistic models generated by AI tend to consume a blend of self-reported data from agroecology projects and public satellite data, delivering machine-verifiable assessments that provide high-integrity, science-based quantification of a project's historical and projected performance. In essence: yield estimation. Such rigorous assessments are invaluable tools for stakeholders making critical funding decisions; increasingly, green asset buyers leverage new AI startups such as Viridios AI to reduce risks.[182] Moreover, AI is instrumental for scientists discovering new knowledge, and practitioners seeking to implement scientifically validated practices with a more immediate feedback loop.[183]

It would be a mistake to solely view AI as an observational and predictive technology. With Web3, AI takes on a proactive role, as it allows for the development of incentivized inferences and independent economic agents. Recall the previous discussion on the role environmental and spatial indexes play in quantifying material impacts. AI-generated composite indexes, derived from inferences, evolve the complexity of these indexes substantially. Consider the Human Impacts Index (HII) proposed by Martinez-Rivera et al. (2022):

“[HII uses] publicly available and spatially explicit panel data (i.e. structured and regularly published such as monthly or annual datasets) to quantify the marginal effect of a specific event… on human-centric measures such as changes in suicide rates, substance abuse, excess mortality, and unemployment… [It’s] essentially modular in that the type of event and unit of analysis are adaptable.[184]

These verifiable and transparent composite indexes, combined with novel mechanism design, introduce a new cybernetic design frontier. All of these inferences can be enhanced by incentivization that can only take place within an open liquidity environment. Moving towards independent economic agents, Vitalik, in his post ‘The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications*’*, describes four broad categories of use cases: (1) AI as a participating onchain agent, (2) AI as interface to the onchain, (3) AI as an onchain decision-maker, and (4) Recursive, self-improving onchain AI.[185] This typology is extremely useful for understanding and mapping green crypto opportunities as well:

Green Real-world Asset Tokenization

According to insights from Phyken Network and a report by BCG, the tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market is projected to grow to $16t by 2030, but is still a mere fraction of the reported $126t of existing global assets.[197] Green RWAs (GRWA) represent tokenization of already existing physical or tangible assets that offer environmental benefits or positively contribute to the underlying material reality. GRWA is a low-hanging market opportunity fueled by the tokenization benefits of accessibility, democratization, enhanced transparency and immutability, increased liquidity, and improved efficiency at lower costs.[198] GRWAs include most assets discussed in the Asset Chapter, e.g. NAC equity, renewable energy PPAs, sustainable forestry and agriculture, genomic IPs, natural assets, green infrastructures such as wind farms, solar installations, hydroelectric projects, etc…

A wide GRWA definition would include tokenized commodities produced in a sustainable or regenerative manner. These GRWAs could provide “an exemplary numéraire… to which portfolio values should be measured”, augmenting existing efforts in the stablecoin sector to produce non-volatile crypto-assets.[199] Tokenized commodities already amount to ~$1b, but nearly entirely in gold, lacking a sustainability component.[200] Some GRWA already exist, including experiments with tokenized natural asset commodities via Agrotoken,[201] or Helios’ funding of solar projects.[202] The Phyken Network is focused on building tools for green RWAs, such as fractionalization mechanisms.[203]

GRWAs bear the additional benefit of being able to disintermediate data associated with a tokenized real-world good. Imagine dynamic NFTs that embed relevant data like their associated Scope 1-3 emissions, or associated climate risks. These types of NFTs should automatically append new metadata around their direct energy and emissions costs, as well as shifting supply, transport, distribution, and consumption costs. Markets of RWA tokens that enshrine their material metadata would be a 1000x improvement to today’s predominant voluntary disclosure regime, and unlock many new use cases across the sustainability sector when paired with DeFi.

Complex Green Assets and Derivatives

• Indexes, baskets, and token pools that represent everything from micro-carbon credits to ecological assets, impact certificates, dMRV proofs, bespoke RECs, and more.[204] As observed by Scotland’s Nature Agency, “project aggregation through investment funds or aggregation vehicles” is shown to “improve cost efficiencies and facilitate replication.”[205] Tokenized yieldcos, climate tech ETFs, and bundled solar leases/loans hold potential, especially when combined with the broader DeFi ecosystem.

• Hedging assets and tools, such as green perpetual futures contracts (perps). When dealing with environmental finance, the timeframe from project idea to implementation can be unpredictably long, underscoring the necessity for dynamic and adaptive risk management strategies that can accommodate the evolving landscape of environmental asset projects.[206] Perps—a unique Web3 offering—offer corporate buyers and project developers an innovative asset for hedging, speculating, or leveraging positions without the constraints of traditional futures contracts. Using perps, a corporate buyer could engage in tokenized forward carbon contracts with significantly discounted rates for future delivery, lowering risk premiums.[207] These types of instruments significantly help issues of durability risk (e.g. planted forests burning down prior to maturity). As perps increase in usage, tools to measure risk must develop alongside them. In this context, the Imbalance Score is an example designed to measure protocol risk in pool-based perps DEXes—i.e. DEXes that use a collective liquidity pool to facilitate continuous, leveraged trading of perps—with a specific focus on RWA impacts.[208] By evaluating risk through the lens of volatility, correlation, and imbalance, the Imbalance Score provides a comprehensive tool for assessing and managing the complex risks associated with green assets.

• Insurance products and tooling. Previous economic paradigm shifts have required that conversion of uncertainty into risk, e.g. the development of marine insurance kicking off Western globalization.[209] The green transition is no different, and will require many new forms of climate insurance to transform climate uncertainty into calculable risk. Take for example the emergence of specialized insurance products for environmental assets. For instance, biochar carbon removal technology company PYREG and carbon insurer Kita aim to launch the largest durable biochar carbon removal project pool globally by “protecting offtake agreements from the risk of under-delivery of projected CO2 credits.[210] The implementation of automated solutions in parametric insurance that pay out based on environmental conditions hold potential, as periods of record heat, storms, and flooding become more common. Annual losses from extreme weather events have already reached a quarter trillion USD, and are poised to grow,[211] and traditional insurance companies are increasingly pulling out of jurisdictions where they can no longer profit due to climate risk.[212] The biggest losers of this shifting regime are regular people, who even when they purchase insurance, have no major guarantees that they will even be paid.[213] Automating this process holds promise to regain consumer trust in these markets.

Despite the promises these types of complex green assets hold, they should be viewed with a degree of skepticism given their high levels of material abstraction. Ultimately, they should primarily exist to empower and de-risk the communities and networks producing high-quality green assets. Today, softwares like Blackrock’s Aladdin Climate© already model risk for investment decision-making. Nonetheless, as noted in Value of a Whale, they tend to fail to account for the radical uncertainties presented by climatic and environmental tipping points. These models, by focusing on accessible data, often overlook abrupt and catastrophic shifts in natural systems, favoring a projection of gradual changes like sea level rise and average temperature adjustments.[214] This approach might offer climate-aware investors short-term gains, but the exclusive reliance on a financial risk-based framework for decision-making could have dire consequences in the long term. The inherent challenge lies in the fact that low-probability catastrophic events, though rare, can have devastating impacts.

Automating Performance-based Assets

Automating the settlement for reported outcomes for green, performance-based assets is pivotal to ensure their accountability and effectiveness. An automated design approach would mandate that incentives are dispersed upon meeting verifiable material targets or outcomes. As discussed throughout this book, for green financial assets to be effective, there must exist a direct link between the assets and the underlying material reality. The step towards automation helps remove counterparty risk by removing payment and enforcement intermediaries. Consider a few examples:

• Green bonds—one of the largest green asset markets as identified in this chapter—could incorporate penalties for failing to meet material targets, enhancing commitment through guaranteed punishment. This is conceptually similar to the notion of slashing, where proof-of-stake validators lose their stakes for dishonest or malicious behavior.

• Conditional tokens represent a nuanced approach to environmental financing, where tokens could be redeemed only when specific conditions or events, such as emission reductions or conservation milestones, could be verifiably met.[215] This structure naturally embeds a layer of accountability and motivation for project developers to adhere to their environmental commitments.

• The growth of PES programs highlights the expanding role of performance-based financing in supporting ecosystem services.[216] However, the diversity and complexity of these programs demand comprehensive and reliable data for effective implementation and scaling. Automated escrow systems, where funds or tokens are held until predefined conditions are met, represent a practical tool for enforcing conditionality in PES.[217]

• In carbon asset markets, leakage and reversal events—where intended environmental benefits are negated or reversed—require new forms of insurance and retroactive accounting. Scope 3 emissions dynamically evolve over time over product lifecycles, and would benefit from equally dynamic financial mechanisms that mirror their shifting materiality. Today, mechanisms such as buffer pools are used to deal with impermanence, where a “reserve of credits” is “set aside to protect against unforeseen carbon losses due to events like wildfires or disease.”[218] These mechanisms can be automated, permanently enhancing the whole lifecycle value of any tokenized carbon asset. Alternatively, ‘performance risk scores’ like those developed by Sylvera that evaluate durability risk could dynamically adjust premiums and payout mechanisms for holders of carbon assets if scoring evolves over time.[219]

Note that automation need not execute solely based on discrete boolean events. Dynamic parameter tuning can optimize system performance in real-time based on environmental outcomes and changing conditions.[220] With it, asset or market parameters would continuously adjust depending on a material state. Such adaptive mechanisms enable more responsive and flexible financing models that can better cope with the complexities and uncertainties of environmental efforts, and are necessary for complex green asset proposals such as green flatcoins and tracercoins (see Asset Chapter).

Network Negotiation Interfaces

“If our aim is to foster crypto-institutional resilience… then DAOs need cooperation, distribution, and sense-making tooling, such as:

• Descriptive map(s) of their control network neighborhood

• Match-making algorithms to know which organizational neighbors and skillful agents are useful to engage (or alternatively, which neighbors may be hostile)

• Negotiation interfaces and protocols that help accelerate mergers, acquisitions, and trade (DAO-to-DAO interactions)

• Computational social choice algorithms like quadratic funding, conviction voting, and pairwise preferencing to intelligently distribute large sums of capital and ownership through neighborhoods

• More specific ways to define ownership rights — i.e. What do I own? Cash-flow rights? Monetized data incomes?

• Effective signaling and feedback interfaces to align the polis on control network strategy”

— Rawson (2021), Ownership in Cryptonetworks

The concept of DAO2DAO (D2D), originally introduced by Rawson & Weller (2018),[221] refers to a framework for interactions between Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). As discussed in the Protocol Chapter [editor’s note: chapter not yet published], D2D can be understood as a P2P framework for these autonomous entities to engage with one another: to declare norms of shared behavior (Ø2), form alliances of shared protocol or co-created socioeconomic structures (Ø3), or engage each other’s external-facing APIs (Ø4). D2D is a form of extrastatecraft uniquely enabled by public blockchain.

In his book The Ecotechnic Future, futurist John Greer tries to imagine what a post-industrial capital world may look like. He posits that a ‘new resource nationalism’ will emerge, where inefficiencies inherent in contemporary industrial societies, particularly in transportation and land use, will shift towards more localized autarky.[222] This shift anticipates a broader transformation where trustless negotiation mechanisms—D2D interfaces—will be essential to implementing these local networks. As cryptomarkets increasingly enmesh themselves in the material, new pricing efficiencies arise through collaborative consumption, and new risks become of concern. In terms of price efficiency, imagine, for example, P2P wholesale food or other commodity auctions coordinated by smart contracts. These types of mechanisms are already used today:

“Preorders… reinforce the cooperative and participatory culture. There are two ‘rounds’ to the preorder process. Members submit the first round of orders on the Monday before Market day… An email is then sent… with details on what has been ordered, and how much more for each item must be acquired to receive the greatest bulk discount. Members can then choose to buy more, or recruit family and friends to add to their original order, so that everyone can receive the lowest possible price for their food…”[223]

On the other hand, consider some of the major risks in the commodities sector, including transportation (damage to goods during transport), delivery (poor quality of delivered commodities), and credit (unpaid invoices despite delivery).[224] D2D can address these risks by tracking market participant reputation, providing real-time data on goods' lifecycles to all involved in the supply chain, and securely completing transactions using smart contracts, and trustlessly settling contracts via smart contract escrow flows. When combined with some of the complex green assets previously discussed, such as hedging or insurance instruments, it becomes clear that D2D offers a pathway towards major innovation and disintermediation for real-world P2P trade, potentially replacing traditional commodities clearinghouses.

D2D can not only support the establishment of efficient, localized economic systems, or the reinforcement of existing cooperative networks, but can ensure through negotiation that these systems meet certified material requirements. Today, community-supported agriculture and supplier relationship management systems help supply chain stakeholders (suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors) align on sustainability performance metrics.[225] NbS mechanisms are expected to convincingly demonstrate to all stakeholders what impacts are made and how material impacts are monetized, with clear explanations of the methodologies employed for impact measurement and calculation.[226] D2D tools should support these efforts by reducing operational overhead, from facilitating co-design and multi-party ratification of decentralized project design documents, to exposing transparent and verifiable data that support material project claims.

Local efficiencies for D2D to harness are abundant across sectors. New types of energy exchange platforms are needed as energy production transitions away from fossil fuel-based commodities (and their trading platforms) towards distributed renewable networks. It's long been known that distributed energy networks can significantly reduce electricity costs for households and industries. In Germany, the simulation of local energy trading by GridSingularity demonstrated a 4% savings in household electricity bills, with savings soaring up to 20 percent when trading is extended across all communities and regions. GridSingularity affirms:

“Market platform models should be researched and developed to ensure holistic operation of P2P electricity markets, enabling the operational and regulatory framework to control, protect and settle financial transactions (effectively enlarging the current, more limited scope of community coefficient-based exchange).”[227]

Every local energy collective is a DAO trading energy resources, and offers a truly worthwhile infrastructural use case for D2D. This model not only offers cost savings but also enhances the matching of electricity generation with consumption at various levels, suggesting a move towards a more adaptable, bottom-up prosumer-first energy market.

Finally, beyond regional trade, project co-design, or prosumer infrastructures, sectoral M&A must also be a priority for D2D interfaces. The negotiated deconsolidation of the commodity sector is paramount: large trading companies pose significant challenges to equitable land transition and any reasonable environmental sustainability.[228] The concentration of control over natural resources has led to adverse ecological impacts and hurt adaptation efforts.[229] This control includes monopolistic rights to exploit public land; in the US 90% of public land is “available to oil and gas drillers, while only ten percent are a focus on conservation and other values.”[230] Markets for water, one of the most important natural assets, are dominated by only ten companies.[231] Nearly half of the genetic sequences of marine species have been patented by a single German company.[232] The dominance of a few agribusiness giants over global trade in grains, seeds, and agrochemicals cannot be decentralized overnight,[233] nor deep distributive justice conflicts regarding the strategic production and distribution of minerals essential for the green economic transition.[234] It will take an active process of negotiation on a free, fair, and equitable, open-source D2D platform to streamline divestment of economic power.

Commons Capital Platforms

New platforms for capital formation in green cryptomarkets that address ongoing challenges faced by impact investors are necessary. Democratization of finance through coin offerings and platforms that facilitate fractional ownership should allow anyone with minimal capital to contribute to the environmental movement. Nadine Wilke, co-founder and chief growth officer of Particula, a G/RWA data dashboard reminds us that “Every bit counts; and when millions of individuals contribute, it can lead to significant capital.”[235] ICOs and token warrants (privately negotiated agreements of token sales) have already demonstrated their prowess for green crypto-asset capital formation: one survey of Web3’s carbon sector found that “the highest TRLs” for projects today were financed by “private investment and initial coin offerings”.[236]

This being said, ICOs have yet to demonstrate their prowess as mechanisms for forming slow or performance-based capital. Token sales face the challenge of aligning the time-sensitive nature of investments with the inherently prolonged duration required for environmental projects to yield tangible results. This temporal disparity is exemplified by the tree carbon mismatch issue recently brought to the forefront by recent climate legislation in the United States.[237] Strategies for wildfire reduction and forest planting demonstrate the complex interplay between short-term impacts and long-term benefits, emphasizing the need for flexible financing models that can accommodate extended timeframes over which ecosystem services are delivered.[238]

Bioregions possess unique rhythms that necessitate capital formation and management strategies with corresponding timelines. These unique rhythms are highlighted by rewilding expert George Monbiot’s observations:

“In the early years, rewilding required plenty of labor: planting trees, reintroducing lost plants and animals, removing fences and controlling exotic invasive species... As the ecosystem recovered, the rewilding workforce would decline, but the potential for generating money from tourism would rise… It is possible to envisage a thriving community of former farmers acting as wardens and guides, providing bed and breakfast, farm shops, clay-pigeon shooting, bicycle hire, horse riding, fishing lakes, falconry, archery and all the other services that now help rural communities to survive”.[239]

The balance between ecology, extraction, and profits is a delicate one across all socioecosystems. Timberland Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs) manage substantial investments in forests, and many must work to achieve their financial returns in balance with protections for the ecological value of the land they manage. Companies like Lyme Timber balance financial goals with ecological preservation through sustainable forestry and conservation easements. These easements protect the land by restricting certain uses indefinitely, while still allowing for financial gains by selling the restricted land.[240] Similarly, some economists advocate for the management of non-renewable resources as shared inheritance assets. They propose managing mineral proceeds for intergenerational wealth, distributing dividends to citizens as beneficial owners.[241]

The main takeaway is that as time passes, and green initiatives are undertaken, so too does the need to update agreements and adjust green crypto-asset tokenomics. Given these timeframes and ecological shifts, complex performance-based protocols are needed that retain, distribute, and release commons capital at the right time to the right stakeholders. These protocols need to specify land-based rights and divide revenues effectively, streamlining easements and temporary use licensing.[242] This ultimately enhances their investability, as it greatly simplifies the assessment process by making strong future guarantees.

These mechanisms will need to benefit collectives as well as individuals, leveraging community funding and revenue sharing. While community governance may be overlooked as a critical component of environmental capital formation, its material necessity is proven, as noted in Value of a Whale:

“[A] recent review of over 80,000 land acquisitions published in *Nature…*the supposed ecological superiority of private control over natural resources into question, finding that in the vast majority of cases, exclusive purchases—whether made by private companies or foreign governments—resulted not in robust stewardship as a by-product of self-interest, but rather in accelerated deforestation, biodiversity loss and negative outcomes for local communities.”[243]

Take for example the idea of ‘Green Improvement Districts,’ which exemplify how collectivized local investments can be mobilized through voluntary associations for the benefit of their communities.[244] As crypto-capital forms, robust DAO governance structures that incorporate transparency and facilitate stakeholder engagement should be turnkey, underscoring the need for a comprehensive 'governance stack' that combines traditional and innovative governance primitives (e.g. BORGs) to adaptively manage these territorial designs.[245]

The role of traditional financial institutions can help incubate this new wave of green, Web3-native investments platforms. Development finance institutions, state-backed green banks, public finance, and blended finance modalities play pivotal roles in de-risking and catalyzing co-investments. By utilizing a combination of financial guarantees, first loss or subordinate capital, and preferred returns, these institutions can modify the risk-return profile for green crypto-assets, making it easier to attract capital to high-impact projects. Additionally, technical assistance facilities provided by many National Funds offer pre- and post-investment support to investees, helping enhance project success rates.[246] This being said, one key challenge that remains for many projects is that when they take investment from these traditional actors, they tend to also expose themself to US regulatory actors such as the SEC, whose regulation by enforcement continues to hurt crypto-capital formation. Altogether, green cryptomarkets need more space to breathe and test financing mechanisms without the destructive burden of regulatory excess—especially when considering the disproportionate burden of transition costs on nature-rich but economically poorer nations.

Material Intents-based Architectures

Intents represent a paradigm shift in user interaction in digital platforms, moving away from the imperative approach—where users must specify each transaction detail—towards a declarative method that focuses on desired outcomes. This approach enhances UX by allowing users to articulate what they want to achieve through exchange, leaving the intricacies of execution to sophisticated systems and third parties.[247] Intents facilitate seamless N-agent settlement across the open liquidity environment, enhancing interoperability and user experience across different platforms and services. This method not only simplifies the trading process but also enhances the match between supply and demand, leading to more efficient and satisfactory outcomes for all parties involved. The process of intents-based exchange flows as follows:

• The User: The individual or entity that specifies their desired outcome, such as acquiring a specific type of carbon credit, through a signed message outlining their intent and conditions for fulfillment. Notably, intents allow private bartering to take place, so users can express their outcome preferences without revealing their identity[248]—a critical feature for material supply chains.

• The Application: The user interface or platform where intents are expressed, enabling users to easily communicate their desired outcomes without navigating complex transactional parameters.

• The Solvers: The agents or algorithms tasked with fulfilling the user's intent by executing transactions on-chain. These solvers analyze the intent and the market conditions to achieve the best possible outcome for the user.

Intents open up a new avenue for originating and exchanging green crypto-assets, which often possess a diverse set of characteristics that are important to entities across the value chain. By focusing on material prospects and outcomes rather than transactional details, intents can help address the nuances and preferences associated with these assets.

Interspecies Exchange

“We might supplement Hobbes’s position and say it is not only this capacity to “speak for” that determines personhood but also, often, a perceived suitability to be “spoken for.” Over the course of the modern period, it seems obvious that corporate entities are the sort of entities that may be spoken for… As environmental protection rapidly takes on a degree of existential urgency, whatever people believe about how the world works, there may indeed be some value in placing the mask of personhood on other entities than those who have been at the center of our attention for the last several centuries: to let rivers speak or to let people attuned to what rivers are speak for them.”

— Smith (2021), Nature Is Becoming a Person

The concept of interspecies exchange introduces a new approach to environmental conservation and rights by using blockchain to facilitate direct interaction and representation of biodiverse agents. This novel paradigm acknowledges the intrinsic value of ecosystems and their non-human constituents by proposing innovative mechanisms for their participation in financial systems and institutional governance.

The development of blockchain-based AI agents capable of banking themselves represents a significant leap forward in this direction, illustrating the potential for these agents to exercise their agency by holding, managing, and transacting value independently or on behalf of other entities. Such capabilities highlight the limitations of traditional banking systems in catering to AI's needs, positioning crypto as the preferred infrastructure for banking AI entities.[249] In this context, it becomes possible to imagine AI/biodiverse hybrids transacting on the blockchain.

Futurist and author Jonathan Ledgard describes “interspecies money” that will be ”held by nonhumans” and become “a significant financier of conservation.’[250] Indeed, the intelligence of non-human entities—such as sperm whales with their unique communication patterns—demands the development of interfaces that allow us to understand, interact, and trade with them on a meaningful level.[251] These insights, often derived from AI interpretability techniques, emphasize the need for a greater appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of non-human intelligence. While it may sound presently silly, the next step after interpretation and communication is making sure non-human intelligence can profit from the important work they do, as well as recruit the participation of human agents to their own ends.

In parallel to these technical efforts, advancements towards recognizing the Rights of Nature and establishing Locus Standi for ecosystems is pivotal. While the movement towards granting legal recognition to animals and ecosystems challenges the traditional view of property law, advocating for a shift to acknowledge these entities as sentient beings with distinct lives and relationships, it helps ensure that their contributions to our planet are recognized and protected.[252] Until these types of sweeping legal changes are implemented, corporations will enjoy a de jure and de facto interspecies advantage in courts of law, being able to sue for lost revenues due to conservation enforcement.[253] These legal mechanisms complement ideas like interspecies money or biodiversity-themed perpetual purpose trusts, further empowering interspecies economic participation.[254]

Incentivized Infrastructures (DePIN)

DePIN networks facilitate a participatory model where their growth and deployment are rapidly bootstrapped through the active engagement and incentivization of their participants, its “primary goal is to replace the monopolized coordinator and use native tokens to transform participants into stakeholders of the network.”[255] This approach contrasts starkly with traditional infrastructures by empowering users through autonomous governance mechanisms or rewarding contributions towards network health and data richness. These networks challenge a long market history of infrastructures, where “small numbers of major shareholders seeking to maximize their dividends”[256] have been pre-eminent vis-à-vis collaborative consumption patterns.

DePIN's scaling potential is enhanced in green cryptomarkets by the growing trend of infrastructure miniaturization, where centralized infrastructures such as agriculture and energy production are substituted by market gardens or distributed solar networks. Bruce Usher’s notes in Investing in the Era of Climate Change that:

“Solar panels are a form of distributed power generation, as PV panels can be placed in almost any location and at any scale… Solar power can also be used off-grid, providing electricity in locations too remote or too costly… This stands in contrast to traditional centralized power generation [...] Solar could provide nearly 40 percent of U.S. power needs simply by installing panels on every rooftop.”[257]

Infrastructure miniaturization ultimately affords more decentralized, local and efficient resource management. These types of technologies play extremely well together: solar PVs, for instance, can be combined with smart batteries that arbitrage and energy shift grid loads or EV-to-grid systems that do the same; solar panel farms can be co-designed as biodiversity habitats.[258] Most importantly, they scale well through voluntary collectivization, pairing strongly with Web3 DAO primitives in governance and data management—that same EV could be rented or co-owned through a Web3 product service platform. Rifkin, a popular green economist and futurist, notes in his book Age of Resilience that:

“[B]illions of people will be able to deploy, aggregate, disaggregate, and reaggregate… components of the infrastructure in fluid blockchain platforms, at will… This is ‘power to the people,’ literally and figuratively.”[259]

In the same book, he speculates on the types of use cases that DePIN is uniquely poised to develop (albeit not using the term), highlighting a “water internet made up of… smart meters and censoring monitoring”, “ecosystem coordinators, tracking wildlife and providing data”, or sensor networks “helpful in monitoring air pollution”.[260]

Ultimately, Rifkin believes these technologies should make each of us “a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.”[261] As discussed at length in the Data Chapter, this dreamy objective becomes far easier on an immutable, interoperable substrate. While DePIN as an emerging crypto sector encompasses a wide variety of actors, and is still semantically evolving, it is possible to identify many use cases relevant to green crypto:

Carbon Dioxide Removal Networks

As DePIN potentials, CDR Networks could offer a transformative approach to climate mitigation. A CDR-DePIN Network would likely involve the deployment of many CDR methods across a network of distributed, locally managed sites, rather than centralized, large-scale facilities. Envision a platform-coordinated network of CDR hubs, each tailored to harness the environmental and socioeconomic strengths of its locale—e.g. urban centers abuzz with innovative DAC and biochar projects; rural landscapes flourishing via NbS implementations, or coastal communities culturing seaweed and employing mineralization techniques. Instead of being isolated, these hubs would be intricately linked by a sophisticated digital platform that enables seamless data exchange, coordination, and collaboration across continents. This digital backbone would support real-time monitoring of carbon sequestration efforts, facilitating a vibrant marketplace for originating carbon assets, and share breakthroughs and best practices. At the heart of this CDR-DePIN vision lies a commitment to community engagement, ensuring that the benefits of these endeavors—economic, environmental, and social—are equitably shared across a mosaic of prosumers and place-optimized CDR initiatives.

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The Green Crypto Handbook is a volume incubated by Ecofrontiers to provide theoretical and technical knowledge for better accounting and representation of natural capital using Web3. The team, consisting of Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson, offers new and established Web3 projects consulting and advisory services.

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Endnotes

[1] FRED, “Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles)”, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134#0

[2] Jennifer Sor, “The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks even with market participation at a record high”, Business Insider, January 10th, 2024, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1

[3] Christiana Sciaudone, “Investors Have Piled Into 'Magnificent Seven' Stocks—Why That May Not Be Good”, Investopedia, February 13, 2024, https://www.investopedia.com/magnificent-7-stocks-overcrowding-8576644

[4] Jason W Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about “The” Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism“, in: “Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation”, edited by C. Suter and C. Chase-Dunn (2014) : 285-314, https://jasonwmoore.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Moore-The-end-of-cheap-nature-2014.pdf

[5] J. Hickel, C. Dorninger, H. Wieland, and I. Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”, in: Global Environmental Change (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467

[6] Deepankar Basu; Julio Huato; Jesus Lara Jauregui; and Evan Wasner, "World Profit Rates, 1960-2019", in: Economics Department Working Paper Series (2022) : 318, https://doi.org/10.7275/43yv-c721

[7] Dorothy Neufeld, “Visualizing the 700-Year Fall of Interest Rates”, Visual Capitalist, February 4th, 2020, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interest-rates/

[8] Mario Draghi, “Stabilisation policies in a monetary union”, European Central Bank, October 1st, 2019, https://www.bis.org/review/r191002d.pdf

[9] Dorothy Neufeld, “Charted: The Rise of Stock Buybacks Over 20 Years”, Advisor Channel, December 1st, 2022, https://advisor.visualcapitalist.com/rise-of-stock-buybacks/

[10] CompagniesMarketCap.com, “Top public companies by cash on hand”, https://companiesmarketcap.com/companies-with-the-highest-cash-on-hand/#google_vignette

[11] Emily Grubert & Shuchi Talati, “The distortionary effects of unconstrained for-profit carbon dioxide removal and the need for early governance intervention”, in: Carbon Management 15 (2024) : 1, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17583004.2023.2292111

[12] Tom Perkins, “Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds”, The Guardian, 19 January 19th, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/us-inflation-caused-by-corporate-profits

[13] Sophie Boehm, Louise Jeffery, Judit Hecke, Clea Schumer, Joel Jaeger, Claire Fyson, and Kelly Levin, “State of Climate Action 2023”, Bezos Earth Fund, Climate Action Tracker, Climate Analytics, ClimateWorks Foundation, NewClimate Institute, the United Nations Climate Change High-Level Champions, and World Resources Institute : 163, https://doi.org/10.46830/wrirpt.23.00010.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Hannah Gilberstadt, “More Americans oppose than favor the government providing a universal basic income for all adult citizens”, Pew Resarch Center, August 19th, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-americans-oppose-than-favor-the-government-providing-a-universal-basic-income-for-all-adult-citizens/

[16] Yakov Feygin, “The Deflationary Bloc”, Phenomenal World, January 9th, 2021, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/deflation-inflation/

[17] Katharina Buchholz, “2022 Inflation Tops Previous Decades”, Statista, January 12th, 2023, https://www.statista.com/chart/29101/us-annual-inflation/

[18] Sophie Boehm et al., ibid. : 164

[19] David Coady, Ian Parry, Louis Sears and Baoping Shang, “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?”, in: World Development, vol. 91, issue C (2017) : 11-27, https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeewdevel/v_3a91_3ay_3a2017_3ai_3ac_3ap_3a11-27.htm

[20] Barbara Buchner, Baysa Naran, Rajashree Padmanabhi, Sean Stout, Costanza Strinati, Dharshan Wignarajah, Gaoyi Miao, Jake Connolly, and Nikita Marini, “Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2023”, Climate Policy Initiative, November 2023 : 11, https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Global-Landscape-of-Climate-Finance-2023.pdf

[21] Ibid.

[22] Cerulean Ventures & Jahed Momand, "How to Invest to Decarbonize the Economy: Supply-Side Decarbonization”, Cerulean Ventures, January 3rd, 2024, https://ceruleanventures.substack.com/p/how-to-invest-to-decarbonize-the?utm_source=substack&publication_id=1011139&post_id=140319803&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=62gb

[23] Australian Government, “A perspective on the financial system through COVID and beyond”, September 28th, 2022, https://www.industry.gov.au/news/perspective-financial-system-through-covid-and-beyond

[24] Adrienne Buller, “The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism”, Manchester University Press (2022) : 206-207

[25] Ray Dalio, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail”, Simon & Schuster (2021) : 478

[26] Billy Bambrough, “Flashing Red Warning’—$33 Trillion U.S. ‘Debt Death Spiral’ Could Suddenly Trigger A Bitcoin Price ‘Vicious Circle’”, Digital Assets, October 2nd, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/10/02/flashing-red-warning-33-trillion-us-debt-death-spiral-could-suddenly-trigger-a-bitcoin-price-vicious-circle/

[27] Adrienne Buller, ibid.

[28] Guy Standing, “The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea”, Penguin Books UK (2022)

[29] Taskforce on Nature Markets, “Making Nature Markets Work: Extended Report”, October 13, 2023, https://www.naturemarkets.net/publications

[30] Wes Geisenberger, “The SIF Investment Thesis Part I: Making Climate Finance Auditable”, HBAR Foundation, January 30th, 2023, https://www.hbarfoundation.org/blog-post/the-sif-investment-thesis-part-i-making-climate-finance-auditable

[31] Elizabeth Curmi, Jason Channell, Ying Qin, and Andrea Fleming, “VOLUNTARY CARBON

MARKETS: A Critical Piece of the Net Zero Puzzle”, Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions, July 2023, https://ir.citi.com/gps/54Q1IKRxQ75YSNUOjj2kijg56eXQXQBXhOjww8AFi88%2Bo%2FnVKWNZcazxD2R36VTtDRgmJZkkI4LNHBbejOE%2F7g%3D%3D

[32] Lex_node, Twitter, December 22nd, 2023, https://x.com/lex_node/status/1738193507112669419?s=20

[33] Alan Kennedy, “Can We Close the $11 Trillion Climate Investment Gap?”, June 5, 2023, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/closing-eleven-trillion-climate-gap/

[34] Weareflowcarbon, Twitter, November 16th, 2023, https://x.com/weareflowcarbon/status/1725175130131689566?s=20

[35] Sophie Boehm, et al., ibid. : 152

[36] Robert Höglund, “You can't wait with buying carbon removal: Why are so few companies purchasing removals at scale, and how can that be changed?”, Marginal Carbon, January 5th, 2023, https://marginalcarbon.substack.com/p/you-cant-wait-with-buying-carbon

[37] Investing.com, “Carbon Emissions Futures - Dec 24 (CFI2Z4)”, https://www.investing.com/commodities/carbon-emissions-streaming-chart

[38] Wes Geisenberger, ibid.

[39] Sophie Boehm, et al., ibid. : 2

[40] BloombergNEF, “Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Prices Hit Record Low of $139/kWh”, November 26, 2023, https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-hit-record-low-of-139-kwh/

[41] Katye Altieri, Dave Jones, and Uni Lee, “Tracking national ambition towards a global tripling of renewables”, Ember, November 21st, 2023, https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/tracking-national-ambition-towards-a-global-tripling-of-renewables/

[42] Pachama, “Why Satellite-Based Carbon Mapping is Key to Scaling Forest Carbon Markets”, October 5th, 2022, https://pachama.com/blog/why-satellite-based-carbon-mapping-is-key-to-scaling-forest-carbon-markets/

[43] MRV Collective, Serena, and Nature4Climate, “The State of Nature Tech: Building Confidence in

A Growing Market” : 50, https://nature4climate.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/N4C-The-state-of-nature-tech-final.pdf

[44] CDR.fyi, “2024+ Market Outlook Summary Report”, January 17, 2024, https://www.cdr.fyi/blog/2024-market-outlook-summary-report

[45] Wes Geisenberger, ibid.

[46] Lukas May, “Aligning Incentives”, Isometric, December 8th, 2023, https://isometric.com/writing/aligning-incentives

[47] Tank Chen, “2023 Investment Landscape in Carbon Removal”, CDR.fyi, January 11, 2024, https://www.cdr.fyi/blog/2023-investment-landscape-in-carbon-removal

[48] Paul Tostevin, and Charlotte Rushton, “Total Value of Global Real Estate: Property remains the world’s biggest store of wealth”, Savills World Research, September 2023, https://www.savills.com/impacts/market-trends/the-total-value-of-global-real-estate-property-remains-the-worlds-biggest-store-of-wealth.html#:\~:text=Global%20real%20estate%20universe%20in,View%20project%20in%20full%20screen.&text=The%20total%20value%20of%20the,at%20the%20end%20of%202022.

[49] Taskforce on Nature Markets, “Global Nature Markets Landscaping Study”, December 2022 : 21,

[50] Ibid. : 22

[51] Ibid.

[52] Precedence Research, “Renewable Energy Market (By Type: Wind Power, Hydroelectric Power, Solar Power, Bio Energy, Geothermal; By End User: Residential, Industrial, Commercial, Others) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, Regional Outlook, and Forecast 2023 – 2032”, https://www.precedenceresearch.com/renewable-energy-market#:\~:text=The%20global%20renewable%20energy%20market,8.50%25%20from%202023%20to%202032

[53] Sophie Boehm, et al., ibid. : 167

[54] Polaris Market Research, “Environmental Monitoring Market Share, Size, Trends, Industry Analysis Report, By Application; By Component; By Product Type (Environmental Monitors, Environmental Monitoring Sensors, Wearable Environmental Monitors); By End-User; By Region; Segment Forecast, 2022 - 2030”, May 2022, https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/environmental-monitoring-market

[55] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid.

[56] Verified Market Research, “Global Water Market Size By End User, By Competitive Landscape, By Geographic Scope And Forecast”, November 2022, https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/water-market/

[57] CarbonCredits.com, “What is the Voluntary Carbon Market?”, https://carboncredits.com/what-is-the-voluntary-carbon-market/#:\~:text=As%20of%202022%2C%20the%20real,valued%20at%20around%20%242%20billion.

[58] Anders Porsborg-Smith, Jesper Nielsen, Bayo Owolabi, and Carl Clayton, “The Voluntary Carbon Market Is Thriving”, Boston Consulting Group, January 19th, 2023, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/why-the-voluntary-carbon-market-is-thriving

[59] CDR.fyi, “Methodology”, https://www.cdr.fyi/docs/methodology

[60] Ibid.

[61] Lea Bauer, “The Convergence of Voluntary and Compliance Carbon Markets”, Neutral, October 18, 2023, https://www.neutralx.com/blog/convergence-of-voluntary-and-compliance-carbon-markets

[62] BloombergNEF, “The Untapped Power of Carbon Markets in Five Charts”, September 16, 2022

[63] The World Bank, “Carbon Pricing Dashboard”, https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/

[64] CarbonCredits.com, “Live Carbon Prices Today”, https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/

[65] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid. : 22

[66] DGB Group, “Biodiversity credit market poised for potential $180 billion boom by 2050”, December 7th, 2023, https://www.green.earth/news/biodiversity-credit-market-poised-for-potential-180-billion-boom-by-2050

[67] Zion Market Research, “Renewable Energy Certificate Market By Energy Type (Solar Energy, Wind Power, Hydroelectric Power, And Gas Power), By End-Use (Voluntary And Compliance), By Capacity (0-1000KWh, 1100-5000KWh, And More Than 5000KWh), And By Region - Global And Regional Industry Overview, Market Intelligence, Comprehensive Analysis, Historical Data, And Forecasts 2023 – 2030”, October 2023, https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/renewable-energy-certificate-market#:\~:text=The%20global%20renewable%20energy%20certificate,26.5%25%20between%202023%20and%202030.

[68] Climate Bonds Initiative, “Sustainable Debt Global State of the Market 2022” : 2, https://www.climatebonds.net/files/reports/cbi_sotm_2022_03e.pdf

[69] Statista, “Green bonds worldwide - statistics & facts”, December 18th, 2023, https://www.statista.com/topics/9217/green-bonds-market-worldwide/#topicOverview

[70] BloombergNEF, “Sustainable Debt Issuance Breezed Past $1.6 Trillion in 2021”, January 12, 2022

[71] CDR.fyi, “Methodology”, https://www.cdr.fyi/docs/methodology

[72] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid.

[73] Roy Manuell, “Developed biodiversity market schemes have seen $8 mln pledged for credits -report”, CarbonPulse, May 23, 2023, https://carbon-pulse.com/204564/

[74] Transparency Market Research, “Power Purchase Agreement Market Outlook 2031”, https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/power-purchase-agreement-market.html

[75] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid. : 39

[76] Kathleen McAfee, “The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets”, in: Development and Change 43 (2012) : 105-131, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01745.x

[77] William D. Nordhaus, “The Spirit of Green - The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World”, Princeton University Press (2021) : 275

[78] Ian W.H. Parry ; Simon Black ; James Roaf, “Proposal for an International Carbon Price Floor Among Large Emitters”, International Monetary Fund, June 18, 2021, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/staff-climate-notes/Issues/2021/06/15/Proposal-for-an-International-Carbon-Price-Floor-Among-Large-Emitters-460468

[79] Chris Dixon, “Read Write Own”, Random House (2024) : 221

[80] The World Bank, “What You Need to Know About Article 6 of the Paris Agreement”, May 17th, 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/05/17/what-you-need-to-know-about-article-6-of-the-paris-agreement

[81] Paola Di Casola, Maurizio Michael Habib, and David Tercero-Lucas, “Global and local drivers of Bitcoin trading vis-à-vis fiat currencies”, in: ECB Working Paper Series No 2868, https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2868\~0c2ad2e6e7.en.pdf

[82] Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf, “Bitcoin’s last stand”, in: The ECB Blog, November 30th, 2022,

[83] Ecoinometrics, Twitter, October 13th, 2023, https://twitter.com/ecoinometrics/status/1712880932330656126?s=20

[84] Camiinthisthang, “The Deadend of Eurocentric Crypto”, Mirror, October 5th, 2023, https://mirror.xyz/camiinthisthang.eth/qUCbEGmphCHTYQVD27G_MFCL53tr96y3A3qqXt5l3ts

[85] Bank for International Settlements, “Prudential treatment of cryptoasset exposures“, December 2022, https://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d545.pdf

[86] TimmerFidelity, Twitter, December 7th, 2023, https://twitter.com/TimmerFidelity/status/1732851022098305400?s=20

[87] Zaheer Anwer, Saqib Farid, Ashraf Khan, and Noureddine Benlagha, “Cryptocurrencies versus environmentally sustainable assets: Does a perfect hedge exist?”, in: International Review of Economics & Finance, vo. 85 (2023) : 418-431, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iref.2023.02.005.

[88] Ecoinometrics, Twitter, November 7th, 2023, https://twitter.com/ecoinometrics/status/1721922704725688679?s=20

[89] DeFiLlama, “Stablecoins Circulating”, https://defillama.com/stablecoins

[90] Note that: “70% of all climate finance needed must come from the private sector”, see: https://ir.citi.com/gps/54Q1IKRxQ75YSNUOjj2kijg56eXQXQBXhOjww8AFi88%2Bo%2FnVKWNZcazxD2R36VTtDRgmJZkkI4LNHBbejOE%2F7g%3D%3D

[91] Douglas North, “Understanding the Process of Economic Change”, Princeton University Press (2005) : 42

[92] Tom Butler-Bowdon, “50 Economics Classics”, Nicholas Brealey Publishing (2017) : 219-220

[93] Kohei Saito, “Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth”,

Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2024) : 93

[94] u/atobitt, “A House of Cards” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p9ZmGsfnn9uko4Yeai_JvTpz9AouhyLU/view

[95] George Washington’s Mount Vernon, “The Business of America: Democracy and Capitalism”, YouTube, November 10th, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FID0BLkZXuY&t=3s

[96] Tom Maloney, “Citadel Securities Gets the Spotlight”, Bloomberg, April 6th , 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-06/citadel-securities-feels-the-heat-of-the-political-spotlight

[97] Coinbase, “Saving >$74 billion, as a start: How Crypto makes everyday finance fairer, cheaper, and easier”, February 7th, 2024, https://www.coinbase.com/en-de/blog/saving-greater-than-usd74-billion-as-a-start-how-crypto-makes-everyday

[98] Jiawei, “Orderflow: The Status Quo, Observation, and Competition Equilibrium”, in: IOSG Ventures Medium, December 12th, 2023, https://medium.com/iosg-ventures/orderflow-the-status-quo-observation-and-competition-equilibrium-fe2a501edea5

[99] Maeven11Research, “The Cross-Domain Thesis Part 3.1: Ordering”, Mirror, January 9th, 2024, https://maven11.mirror.xyz/4EWfWgqJGNQufJOXe66aqmYTttu9r0o3sArMLZVbNyo

[100] Angela Lu, “Illuminating Ethereum's Order Flow Landscape”, January 17th, 2024, https://writings.flashbots.net/illuminate-the-order-flow

[101] Ray Dalio, ibid. : 24

[102] Jeremy Rifkin, “Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”, St. Martin’s Griffin (2015) : 29

[103] Adrienne Buller, ibid. : 212

[104] OlympusDAO, Twitter, December 8th, 2023, https://twitter.com/OlympusDAO/status/1732916776491442493?s=20

[105] GyroStable, Twitter, January 21st, 2024, https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/GyroStable/status/1748974853288501517?s%3D20&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1710165487454326&usg=AOvVaw1CKP-sfbfWfnx5FjoDxoVK

[106] Mechanism Institute, “Swapper”, https://www.mechanism.institute/library/swapper

[107] LiquidityProtocol, Twitter, February 15th, 2024, https://twitter.com/LiquityProtocol/status/1758151325802488313

[108] Stuart M. Whitten, James Salzman, Dave Shelton, and Wendy Procter, "Markets for ecosystem services: Applying the concepts", 2003 Conference (47th), Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, February 12-14, 2003, https://www.cbd.int/financial/pes/australia-pesapply.pdf

[109] Patrick Hansen, and Helmut Bauer, “MiCA's Significance Regime for Stablecoins - A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?”, SSRN, January 18, 2024, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4699043https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4699043

[110] MattWalshInBos, Twitter, December 20th, 2023, https://twitter.com/MattWalshInBos/status/1737485566185255268?s=20

[111] Wikipedia, “JPMorgan Chase”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase#:\~:text=With%20US%20%243.9%20trillion%20in,largest%20U.S.%20corporations%20by%20revenue.

[112] Douglas North, ibid. : 67

[113] Vahrez273, Twitter, February 3rd, 2024, https://twitter.com/vahrez273/status/1753767294336221369?s=20

[114] Burcu Hacibedel, and Hector Perez-Saiz, “Assessing Macrofinancial Risks from Crypto Assets”, International Monetary Fund, September 29th, 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2023/09/30/Assessing-Macrofinancial-Risks-from-Crypto-Assets-539473

[115] Samuel Enajero, “Cryptocurrency, Money Demand and the Mundell-Fleming Model of International Capital Mobility”, in: Atl Econ J 49 (2021) : 57–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-021-09701-w

[116] Jason Potts, “Innovation Commons: The Origin of Economic Growth”, Oxford University Press (2019) : 114

[117] Adrienne Buller, ibid. : 68

[118] Rocky Mountain Institute and Climate Collective, “‘Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM): Landscape Guide”, August 1st, 2023, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6155af7da5675116403c9136/t/64de45efdea3513d1cfc2fbc/1692288502204/VCM%2BLandscape%2BGuide%2BFull.pdf

[119] Wes Geisenberger, ibid.

[120] Wes Geisenberger, “The SIF Investment Thesis Part IV: Discovering A Global Carbon Price”, HBAR Foundation, February 2, 2023, https://www.hbarfoundation.org/blog-post/the-sif-investment-thesis-part-iv-discovering-a-global-carbon-price

[121] Mechanism Institute, “Automated Market Maker”, https://www.mechanism.institute/library/automated-market-maker-amm

[122] Maven11 Research, “The Cross-Domain Thesis Part 3.1: Ordering”, Mirror, January 9th, 2024

[123] Wes Geisenberger, ibid.

[124] Ibid.

[125] MRV Collective, Serena, and Nature4Climate, ibid. : 11

[126] BlockScience, “Introducing Automated Regression Market Makers (ARMMs): A New Price Discovery Mechanism for Semi-Fungible Assets”, Medium, October 27th, 2021, https://medium.com/block-science/introducing-automated-regression-markets-arms-a-new-price-discovery-mechanism-for-semi-fungible-935d31ca457c

[127] Toni Witt, “How Web3 and AI Use Cases Move the Sustainability Needle”, Acceleration Economy, January 25, 2023, https://accelerationeconomy.com/ai/how-web3-and-ai-use-cases-move-the-sustainability-needle/

[128] Wes Geisenberger, ibid.

[129] Tanushree Haldar, and A. Damodaran, “Identifying market power of retailers and processors: Evidence from coffee supply chain in India”, in: IIMB Management Review, vol. 34, Issue 3 (2022) : 286-296, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iimb.2022.09.002.

[130] Bloomberg and Carbon Growth Partners, “Investing in Carbon Markets: Cleared for Take-Off” : 17,

[131] Jeff Giesea, “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare”, https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/jeff_gisea.pdf

[132] Jason Potts, ibid. : 209

[133] Vitalik Buterin, “My techno-optimism”, Limo, November 27th, 2023, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html#environment

[134] Pascual, U., Balvanera, P., Anderson, C.B. et al., “Diverse values of nature for sustainability”, in: Nature 620 (2023) : 813–823, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06406-9https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06406-9

[135] SebVentures, Twitter, December 6th, 2023, https://twitter.com/SebVentures/status/1732501500952543264?s=20

[136] Arthur Hayes, “Chief Story Officer”, Crypto Trader Digest, February 21st, 2024, https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/chief-story-officer

[137] Sophie Boehm, et al., ibid. : 6

[138] Carbon Business Council and Climate Collective, “Digital Infrastructure for Carbon Removal” : 4, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6054db4efc6c3622f12682fe/t/654ac95e5f50b1484221ffc6/1699400030364/Digital+Infrastructure.pdf

[139] Claudio Borio, and Hyun Song Shin, “BIS Annual Report 2017 - media briefing by Claudio Borio and Hyun Song Shin”, Bank for International Settlements, https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2017e_tcintro.htm

[140] Matthias Sydow, Aurore Schilte, Giovanni Covi, Marija Deipenbrock, Leonardo Del Vecchio, Paweł Fiedor, Gábor Fukker, Max Gehrend, Régis Gourdel, Alberto Grassi, Björn Hilberg, Michiel Kaijser, Georgios Kaoudis, Luca Mingarelli, Mattia Montagna, Thibaut Piquard, Dilyara Salakhova, and Natalia Tente, “Working Paper Series: Shock amplification in an interconnected financial system of banks and investment funds”, European Central Bank, August 2021, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2581\~63c8ffb7dc.en.pdf

[141] Mudit__Gupta, Twitter, November 9th, 2022, https://twitter.com/Mudit__Gupta/status/1590253413601751040

[142] Vijaya Ramachandran, and Alex Schmith, “The Dark Side of Climate Finance”, Foreign Policy, December 1st, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/01/cop28-climate-finance-global-south-development-aid-energy-wind-solar-renewable/

[143] Kanishka Singh, “Over $200 billion potentially stolen from U.S. COVID relief programs, watchdog says”, Reuters, June 28, 202, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/over-200-billion-likely-stolen-us-covid-relief-programs-watchdog-says-2023-06-27/

[144] US Government Accountability Office, “COVID-19 Relief: Funding and Spending as of Jan. 31, 2023”, February 28th, 2023, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106647

[145] Wes Geisenberger, “The SIF Investment Thesis Part I: Making Climate Finance Auditable”, HBAR Foundation, January 30th, 2023, https://www.hbarfoundation.org/blog-post/the-sif-investment-thesis-part-i-making-climate-finance-auditable

[146] Marie Dupin, “Nestlé et d’autres industriels ont purifié illégalement de l’eau contaminée pour continuer de la vendre”, France Inter, January 30th, 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/nestle-et-d-autres-industriels-ont-purifie-illegalement-de-l-eau-contaminee-pour-continuer-de-la-vendre-6817370

[147] Taskforce on Nature Markets, “Making Nature Markets Work: Shaping a Global Nature Economy in the 21st Century: Extended Report”, October 2022 : 69,

[148] Dow Jones, “ESG Investment Expected to More Than Double in the Next Three Years New Research from Dow Jones Shows”, September 7th, 2022, https://www.dowjones.com/press-room/esg-investment-expected-to-more-than-double-in-the-next-three-years-new-research-from-dow-jones-shows/

[149] Mishra, Mukesh Kumar, “Application of Operational Research in Sustainable Environmental Management and Climate Change”, ZBW – Leibniz Information, Centre for Economics, 2020, https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215782/1/Application%20of%20Operational%20Research%20in%20Sustainable%20Environmental%20Management%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf

[150] Chris Dixon, ibid. : 116-118

[151] Bank of America Institute, “Beyond Crypto: Tokenization”, July 20th, 2023

[152] Jeremy Rifkin, ibid. : 267-68

[153] MRV Collective, Serena, and Nature4Climate, ibid. : 15

[154] Adam Sipthorpe, Sabine Brink, Tyler Van Leeuwen, and Iain Staffell, “Blockchain solutions for carbon markets are nearing maturity”, in: One Earth, vol. 5, Issue 7 (2022) : 779-791, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.06.004.

[155] James Currier, “The Durability Formula – How It Will Determine Your Startup’s Future Value”, NfX, February 2022, https://www.nfx.com/post/durability-formula-will-determine-your-startups-future-value

[156] Tim Loughran, and Paul H. Schultz, “Liquidity: Urban Versus Rural Firms”, SSRN, September 29th, 2004, https://ssrn.com/abstract=597682

[157] Taskforce for Nature Markets, ibid.

[158] Jason Potts, ibid.

[159] Martín Arboleda, “Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism”, Verso Books (2020) : 222

[160] Gómez‐Baggethun, E., Mingorría, S., Reyes‐García, V., Calvet, L., & Montes, C., “Traditional Ecological Knowledge Trends in the Transition to a Market Economy: Empirical Study in the Doñana Natural Areas”, in: Conservation Biology, 24 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01401.x.

[161] Govender, T., & Davidson, I., “Artisan Development and Training - An analysis of the Apprentice, Learnership and ARPL Trade Test Results of Candidates Tested at TEK-MATION Training Institute”, in: Southern African Universities Power Engineering Conference/Robotics and Mechatronics/Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (SAUPEC/RobMech/PRASA) (2019) : 643-647, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8704795

[162] Joe Brewer, “Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth”, TCP Press (2023) : 126-159

[163] Thomas Morgan, “RWA x ReFi: Real World Positive Impact Using web3 and Blockchain Technologies”, February 16th, 2023, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IyHX8b_M9MjKG6UyXE6T53IMaP42BzZzXk-T6zY3cWY/edit

[164] Ekonavi, “Library of Ecological Resources”, https://ekonavi.com/biblioteca

[165] Traditional Dream Factory, “How to Build A Regenerative Village”, https://www.traditionaldreamfactory.com/how-to-build-a-regenerative-village

[166] Thomas Morgan, ibid.

[167] Janelle Orsi, “Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies”, American Bar Association (2013) : 17-19, 99-100

[168] Delphi Labs, “Assimilating the BORG: A New Framework for CryptoLaw Entities’, Medium, April 20th, 2023, https://delphilabs.medium.com/assimilating-the-borg-a-new-cryptolegal-framework-for-dao-adjacent-entities-569e54a43f83

[169] Timothy M. Gieseke, “Shared Governance for Sustainable Working Landscapes”, CRC Press (2016) : 15, 46, 107, 170

[170] Prakrit, “Danger of locations on iNaturalist”, iNatForum, September 2019, https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/danger-of-locations-on-inaturalist/6602

[171] Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Order Will Ban InMarket from Selling Precise Consumer Location Data”, January 18th, 2024, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-order-will-ban-inmarket-selling-precise-consumer-location-data

[172] Josh Goodman, “As Electric Vehicle Growth Squeezes Gas Tax Revenues, Data Helps States Prepare”, Pew, October 3rd, 2022,

[173] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Wake Up Before It Is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in A Changing Climate: Trade and Environment Review 2013”, United Nations (2013) : 2, https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditcted2012d3_en.pdf

[174] Nick Srnicek, “Platform Capitalism”, Polity Press (2017) : 65

[175] Martin Arboleda, ibid. : 31

[176] MRV Collective, Serena, and Nature4Climate, ibid. : 48

[177] The European Space Agency, “Geospatial Data Analytics for Landscape Intelligence”, August 16th, 2017, https://www.bing.com/search?pc=OA1&q=Landscape%20intelligence%20definition

[178] Climate Collective, “Harnessing AI to Transform Climate Action: Part II – Exponential Progress Towards a Planet-Positive Future”, January 2024, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6155af7da5675116403c9136/t/659c48504d2b48241d960c8a/1704740946727/Part+II_Harnessing+AI+to+Transform+Climate+Action_Climate+Collective+2024.pdf

[179] Dataland, “A museum and Web3 platform dedicated to data visualization and AI arts”,

[180] Josh Blumenfeld, “NASA and IBM Openly Release Geospatial AI Foundation Model for NASA Earth Observation Data”, EarthData, August 3rd, 2023, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/impact-ibm-hls-foundation-model

[181] ECI, ClimateGPT, https://www.eci.io/climategpt

[182] Iridios, “The Leader in Enabling Global Carbon Markets Through Data and Technology”, https://viridios.ai/

[183] Roman Leventov, and Rafael Kaufmann Nedal, “Gaia Network: a practical, incremental pathway to Open Agency Architecture”, LessWrong, December 20th, 2023,

[184] Philipe A. Dias, Thomaz Kobayashi-Carvalhaes, Sarah Walters, Tyler Frazier, Carson Woody, Sreelekha Guggilam, Daniel Adams, Abhishek Potnis, and Dalton Lunga, “GeoAI for Humanitarian Assistance”, in: Song Gao, Yingjie Hu, and Wenwen Li, “Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence”, CRC Press (2023) : 271

[185] Vitalik Buterin, “The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications”, Limo, January 30th, 2024, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/30/cryptoai.html

[186] Vinay Gupta, “Why AI and the blockchain need each-other to access the physical world”, in: Mattereum - Humanizing the Singularity, Medium, January 11th, 2023, https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/ai-oracles-super-empower-real-world-assets-on-the-blockchain-and-super-empower-ai-to-act-in-the-619aa2ba5bf1

[187] Jbrukh, Twitter, February 27th, 2024, https://twitter.com/jbrukh/status/1762469695809089827

[188] rAPI3r, Twitter, May 25th, 2023, https://twitter.com/rAPI3r/status/1661739537851355139

[189] Lucas Tcheyan, “Understanding the Intersection of Crypto and AI”, Galaxy, February 14th, 2024

[190] Vinay Gupta, ibid.

[191] Olas, “Prediction Agents: Predict the future, autonomously”, https://olas.network/services/prediction-agents

[192] Vitalik Buterin, ibid.

[193] Lucas Tcheyan, ibid.

[194] Wikipedia, “Gaia Hypothesis”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

[195] Together Crew, “Multi-layer knowledge graphs and their cutting-edge applications for community management”, Medium, February 1st, 2024, https://medium.com/togethercrew/multi-layer-knowledge-graphs-and-their-cutting-edge-applications-for-community-management-9d317e1447a0

[196] Shaughnessy119, Twitter, January 12th, 2024, https://twitter.com/Shaughnessy119/status/1745939374888640799?s=20

[197] Phyken Network, “What are #RWAs, why #GRWA, and what is the market size and scope?”, Medium, January 21st, 2024, https://phyken.medium.com/what-are-rwas-why-grwa-and-what-is-the-market-size-and-scope-0ddb5853819e

[198] Solomon Favour B, “The Rise of Real-World Assets and Green Real-World Assets in Modern Economy”, Medium, January 28th, 2024, https://medium.com/@boyesolomon8/the-rise-of-real-world-assets-and-green-real-world-assets-in-modern-economy-54889cf25fa3

[199] Helyette Geman, “Commodities and Commodity Derivatives: Modeling and Pricing for Agriculturals, Metals and Energy”, John Wiley & Sons (2005) : xv

[200] Tokenized Asset Coalition, “The State of Asset Tokenization: 2024 Outlook”, January 2024,

[201] Agrotoken, “Llevá la revolución digital del agro a tu negocio”, https://www.agrotoken.com/

[202] Helios, “The Evolution of Solar, Open to Everyone”, https://helios.eco/

[203] Phyken Network, “Leveraging Web3 For A Green Energy Future!”, https://phyken.network/

[204] Thomas Morgan, ibid.

[205] Finance Earth and Economics for the Environment Consultancy, “Facilitating Local

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[206] Ecosystem Marketplace, “Paying for Quality: State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2023”, November 28th, 2023 : 9, https://3298623.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/3298623/SOVCM%202023/2023-EcoMarketplace_SOVCM-Nov28_FINALrev-1.pdf

[207] Filecoin, “Making ReFi Real - Liquidity and Pricing of Ecological Assets - Jahed Momand - Selva (Track 2)”, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7mhp-1qmqs

[208] OstiumLabs, Twitter, January 2nd, 2024, https://twitter.com/OstiumLabs/status/1741968176198422740?s=20

[209] Douglas North, ibid. : 17

[210] Dimana Doneva, “PYREG and Kita To Collaborate On Biochar Carbon Insurance Structure”, CarbonHerald, November 23rd, 2023, https://carbonherald.com/pyreg-and-kita-to-collaborate-on-biochar-carbon-insurance-structure/

[211] MunichRE, “Record thunderstorm losses and deadly earthquakes: the natural disasters of 2023”, January 9th, 2024, https://www.munichre.com/en/company/media-relations/media-information-and-corporate-news/media-information/2024/natural-disaster-figures-2023.html

[212] Financial Times, “The uninsurable world: what climate change is costing homeowners”, https://www.ft.com/content/ed3a1bb9-e329-4e18-89de-9db90eaadc0b

[213] Climate Survivor, “The Insurance Crisis is Here”, Medium, February 6th, 2024, https://medium.com/@climatesurvivor/the-insurance-crisis-is-here-6e09ecf2c552

[214] Adrienne Buller, ibid. : 131

[215] Mechanism Institute, “Conditional Token”, https://www.mechanism.institute/library/conditional-token

[216] James Salzman, Genevieve Bennett, Nathaniel Carroll, et al., “The global status and trends of Payments for Ecosystem Services”, in: Nat Sustain 1 (2018) : 136-144, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0033-0

[217] Mechanism Institute, “Escrow”, https://www.mechanism.institute/library/escrow

[218] Grayson Badgley, “Nearly a third of California’s forest offset buffer pool has gone up in smoke”, CarbonPlan, November 29th, 2023, https://carbonplan.org/blog/buffer-update-three

[219] Sylvera, “Permanence in carbon credits: why it matters, and how to evaluate it”, December 16th, 2022, https://www.sylvera.com/blog/permanence-carbon-credits

[220] Mechanism Institute, “Dynamic Parameter Tuning”, https://www.mechanism.institute/library/dynamic-parameter-tuning

[221] Patrick Rawson, and Ezra Weller, “DAO to DAO Reputation Sharing”, 2018, https://docs.google.com/document/d/18GF3f130miEsaASw-TRCHR-qRtbL8y-UsfusV7pXuZg/edit?usp=sharing

[222] John Michael Greer, “Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World”, New Society Publishers (2009) : 69

[223] Meleiza Figueroa, “Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life: Toward a People-centered Approach to Food Systems”, in: Globalizations 12:4 (2015) : 498-512, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14747731.2015.1005966

[224] Hélyette Geman, ibid. : 3

[225] PlanA, “Sustainability Trends 2024”, https://7067873.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/7067873/Sustainability%20Trends%202024%20(Updated).pdf?utm_campaign=Whitepapers&utm_medium=email&\_hsmi=287088072&\_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8f5C0Y_fNhQvJfAwPCdi4oMN5FnJ_lMJZC7feL_I6Qf7PSN5vYH5wzwxos_tJHiL7IQr_VMqkN8JwVrOfxie62nPN8vQ&utm_content=287088072&utm_source=hs_automation

[226] MRV Collective, Serena, and Nature4Climate, ibid. : 52

[227] Grid Singularity, “A Vision of a Decentralised Energy Market for Germany in 2030”, Medium, November 30th, 2023, https://gridsingularity.medium.com/a-vision-of-a-decentralised-energy-market-for-germany-in-2030-66463e87fac6

[228] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid. : 55

[229] Poor Assis Moreira, “New EU Rules Against Deforestation Reach 80% of Brazil's Agricultural Exports”, Valor International, September 14th, 2022, https://valorinternational.globo.com/agribusiness/news/2022/09/14/eu-new-rules-against-deforestation-reach-80percent-of-brazils-agricultural-exports.ghtml

[230] The Wilderness Society, “Open for business (and not much else): Analysis shows oil and gas leasing out of whack on BLM lands”, https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/open-business-and-not-much-else-analysis-shows-oil-and-gas-leasing-out-whack-blm-lands

[231] Hilal ElverHilal Elver, “The emerging global freshwater crisis and the privatization of global leadership”

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[232] Ryan P. Smith, “Nearly Half the Patents on Marine Genes Belong to Just One Company”, Smithsonian Magazine, June 13th, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nearly-half-all-patents-marine-genes-belong-just-one-company-180969325/

[233] Kate Raworth, “Doughnut Economics”, Random House Business Books (2017) : 148

[234] Marcena Hunter, and Gideon Ofosu-Peasah, “Organized Crime in Green Minerals: COP 27 and Climate Change”, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, December 14th, 2022, https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/organized-crime-green-minerals-cop-27-climate-change/

[235]Andrew Singer, “Demand Rises For Tokenized Green Finance”, Global Finance, November 4th, 2023, https://gfmag.com/sustainable-finance/demand-rises-for-tokenized-green-finance/

[236] Adam Sipthorpe, Sabine Brink, Tyler Van Leeuwen, and Iain Staffell, ibid.

[237] John W Coulston, Grant M Domke, David M Walker, Evan B Brooks, and Claire B O’Dea, “Near-term investments in forest management support long-term carbon sequestration capacity in forests of the United States”, PNAS Nexus vol. 2, Issue 11, November 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad345

[238] Finance Earth and Economics for the Environment Consultancy, ibid. : 22

[239] George Monbiot, “Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life”, Penguin Books (2014) : 178

[240] Finance Earth and Economics for the Environment Consultancy, ibid. : 19

[241] Rahul Basu, and Scott Pegg, “Minerals are a shared inheritance: Accounting for the resource curse”, in: The Extractive Industries and Society, vol. 7, Issue 4 (2020) : 1369-1376, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214790X20302410

[242] Matt Prewitt, and Jack Henderson, “PCO: A New Model of Ownership”, February 20th, 2024, https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/

[243] Adrienne Buller, ibid. : 261

[244] Finance Earth and Economics for the Environment Consultancy, ibid. : 19

[245] Taskforce on Nature Markets, ibid. : 59

[246] Van Raalte, D. and Ranger, N., “Financing Nature-Based Solutions for Adaptation at

Scale: Learning from Specialised Investment Managers and Nature Funds”, Global Center

on Adaptation and Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford (2023) : 5,

[247] Quintus Kilbourn, and Georgios Konstantopoulos, “Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks”, June 1st, 2023, https://www.paradigm.xyz/2023/06/intents

[248] Christopher Goes, Awa Sun Yin, and Adrian Brink, “Anoma: A Unified Architecture for Full-Stack Decentralized Applications”, August 21st, 2022, https://github.com/anoma/whitepaper/blob/main/whitepaper.pdf

[249] ian @syndicateio, “AI Agents That Can Bank Themselves Using Blockchains”, Mirror, November 16th, 2023, https://mirror.xyz/0x16de9a0d10EFc67EF575e72E40FD4a2A826fdEA7/yBj-fWQxrueXNs8jEjUo-Ozu_Nwt04GaXf1D8LjemtM

[250] Jonathan Ledgard , “Interspecies Money”, in: John W. McArthur, Homi Kharas, and Izumi OhnoBreakthrough, “The Promise of Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development” (2022) : 77-102, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Chapter-Five_Breakthrough.pdf

[251] begusgasper, Twitter, December 5th, 2023, https://x.com/begusgasper/status/1732069051512598797?s=20

[252] C4ssdotorg, Twitter, December 8th, 2023, https://twitter.com/c4ssdotorg/status/1732947352900509935?s=20

[253] Ragnar Tómas, “Hvalur Files Claim Against Icelandic State Over Whaling Ban”, Iceland Review, January 26th, 2024, https://www.icelandreview.com/politics/hvalur-files-claim-against-icelandic-state-over-whaling-ban/

[254] Jonathan Ledgard, ibid.

[255] SevenX Ventures, “Critiquing DePIN: False Hope or Real Dawn?”, Mirror, February 8th, 2024

[256] Kohei Saito, ibid. : 187, referencing Thomas Piketty, “Capital and Ideology”, Harvard University Press (2019) : 513

[257] Bruce Usher, “Investing in the Era of Climate Change”, Columbia University Press, Columbia Business School (2022) : 27-28

[258] Michelle Lewis, “Here’s how utility-scale solar farms may just help save the bees”, Electrek, January 23rd, 2024, https://electrek.co/2024/01/23/utility-scale-solar-farms-bees/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

[259] Jeremy Rifkin, “The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth”, St. Martins Press (2022) : 175

[260] Jeremy Rifkin, ibid. : 187

[261] Jeremy Rifkin, ibid. : 17

[262] Sami Kassab, “Navigating the DePIN Domain”, Messari, July 19th, 2023, https://messari.io/report/navigating-the-depin-domain

[263] IoTeX, “DePIN Scan”, https://depinscan.io/#all