An Introduction to Regenerative Art in Impact NFTs

One of my earliest memories of art is a poster of Hundertwasser’s ARCHE NOAH 2000 that my parents hung in our apartment. The sentence "You are a guest of nature—Behave" stuck with me. Also, nature played a significant role in my upbringing, spending time outdoors with my friends and family. This article will explain how this is connected to and inspired my journey in Regenerative Finance (ReFi), Regenerative Art, and Impact NFTs.

The ARCHE NOAH 2000 poster at my parent's place fascinated me as a child. It took me more than 30 years to finally connect the dots—or rather, to fully translate the meaning I draw from it into my private and business life. Friedensreich Hundertwasser is an OG of regenerative art: The "poster announced this Europe-wide conservation and environmental-protection campaign in all media and served as its icon. The proceeds from the sale of the poster went to the campaign.[1]" I've been thinking about this mechanism of creating art to support a cause, a nature protection cause, a lot in recent months: How can art support nature conservation?

Selling art to benefit a cause is nothing new, not even for nature conservation. Think of all the charity auctions that happen whenever a cause needs support. Unfortunately, when I read "charity auction," I have negative connotations. Having been to such events, the self-presentation of the buyers, the social virtue signaling, and the vanity aspect of it all are in the center of attention—and never the cause. Besides, it is very intransparent where the sellers allocate money from the action. It usually benefits traditional charity organizations, which presents a problem within itself. Of course, there are positive examples, too. Some of them live very close to the spirit of Web3-based Regenerative Art already, inspired mainly by regenerative agriculture[2, 3, 4].

Nature conservation is an abstract concept. What is nature, after all? Where do we allocate money for conservation, and what connection do we have to the part of nature we support? A piece of art connected to the cause or a specific ecosystem answers these questions—the cause is represented unmistakably in an Impact NFT.

As proven above, selling art to fund a purpose is not a new idea—but I am convinced that with the development of Web3, it was reborn. With a low entry barrier and transparency, Web3 offers new opportunities.

Art as Inspiration and a Tool

When I started getting into Regenerative Finance (before it was called that), my co-founders and I drew our main inspiration for creating a decentralized natural governance system from the work of an artist collective. The "forest that owns itself" by terra0, "a self-owned forest[5]," was the first time we heard of the idea of what we now call Sovereign Nature. Artists led the way years before ReFi became a growing community in Web3.

Ownership is at the core of what makes Web3 the ultimate building block of the internet. The famous explanation goes like this:

Web 1: Read
Web 2: Read & write
Web 3: Read, write & own

The open and accessible infrastructure allows for new forms of artistic and technological innovation that live in the digital and physical realm, such as a forest that owns itself—integrating communication between all parts of nature (including humans) and creating a level playing field for exchanging information and values. Economics is a language, and although not "sexy," it is an essential communication tool between humans and other species and ecosystems. The brilliant Jonathan Ledgard calls this "interspecies money[6]."

Now, what do I consider regenerative art? If you zoom out enough, you can use my definition of it for almost any art. However, I still want to try:

Regenerative Art is art created to 
raise awareness, financially support, 
or morally support a particular cause in 
human or natural regeneration. 

The way this regeneration works can be manifold. In the case of Impact NFTs, change makers can raise money for a specific cause. The money spent on such NFTs can be traced and work in a trustless environment.

NFTs offer a unique new option of direct monetization of art and even automatization of payment into the benefitting ecosystems. For example, an ecosystem can create, in an automated fashion, artistic outputs and sell them on decentralized markets to raise money for the well-being of the ecosystem.

Why Impact NFTs?

When discussing Regenerative Art in public, I frequently get asked, "why NFTs?"

I see many benefits in using NFTs for art in general. In the case of Impact NFTs, the following are especially relevant in my opinion:

Tracing Assets and Transparency

An ideally designed Impact NFT in a Web3 native fashion allows tracking money flow from the asset's inception (minting of the NFT) to the spending of the funds for the cause. Money allocation is traceable and transparent. This mechanism starkly contrasts the black boxes of existing conservation organizations and the bottomless money pits they created. [I know this is a very steep thesis, and I want to elaborate on it in another article in the future.]

Accessibility

Art with a particular value usually has relatively high entry barriers for the consumer. Besides the price tag, the physical access and delivery take a lot of work. Let alone the awareness of art that lies outside one's comfort zone or geographical area. With NFTs, (digital) art from around the world is at our fingertips. We can immerse ourselves into the narratives of any conservation effort linked to the artwork. Of course, there are limitations, such as onboarding collectors and buyers onto Web3. Still, the above is true for those already involved in Web3. Once users understand how to install and use a wallet (e.g., MetaMask), they can interact with Web3.

After-Sales

In the traditional art market, very seldomly does a buyer interact with the artist; the interaction is often limited to a gallery or an art shop. In NFTs, the buyer very often has easy access to the artist, e.g., through Twitter, other social media, or interacting with Web3 directly. The even more exciting potential lies in after-sales interaction that becomes possible in NFTs. An artist or Impact NFT project can interact directly with their buyers over Web3. A few examples are airdrops for loyal buyers or marketing reasons, token-gated benefits or insights into the project's operations, token-gated communities for participants in a project, and so on.

Integration in Existing Infrastructure

The NFTs supporting a cause are easy to integrate with existing infrastructure, such as popular NFT marketplaces, virtual museums, digital writing, profile pictures, etc. This integration allows for leveraging the existing infrastructure for the cause of the Impact NFT.

Target Group Access

With the integration of existing infrastructure, NFTs allow access to new target groups for impact causes. NFT buyers that might have come to the scene for flipping monkey pictures get in touch with a project that goes beyond the interest in collecting or making money off the assets they follow. The buyers can be attracted by the NFT artwork and become interested in a regenerative cause. E.g., nature conservation when researching the narrative behind the NFT—or in the most extreme cases, supporting a good cause without even knowing it.

Community Building

After-sales, infrastructure, and target groups allow for creative ways of community building. These communities, connected by the purpose of the NFT, can have a positive impact beyond acquiring an NFT. Community members can advocate and inform new members about the underlying issue. Members' real-world actions could be anything from tree planting to political action in their respective communities. The common interest in an Impact NFT or a Regenerative Art project unifies their activities for the cause.

Examples of Regenerative Art in Impact NFTs

Nature Impact

CRED is a platform that allows users to buy carbon credits from regenerative projects from rainforest protection to financing more efficient cooking stoves to lower carbon emissions. For every dollar spent on these offsets, the user receives tokens that can be redeemed in NFT artworks. With this around-the-corner mechanism, the NFTs become impactful because they incentivize buying the specific carbon credits from the featured projects.

Sattva! was created in the Sovereign Nature Initiative hackathon[7] in 2021. "Sattva was built to automatically take images, created or owned by the park and convert them into art using Generative Adversarial Networks [...] These artworks were converted into Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and were posted for sale on platforms on behalf of the park[8]." This mechanism of raising money would be impossible without Web3—in this case, opening an income stream disintermediated from humans after launch.

Sādu is a play-to-earn application that tracks movement data and incentivizes users to do more for their fitness and well-being. Based on the tracking data, nature conservation projects are supported. The team partnered with artists and nature conservation projects to finance the application development. NFTs are sold, and the money generated is split between the company, the nature conservation project (e.g., Re-Climate in Ukraine), and the artist. A triple-win situation—ultimately benefiting nature through art and technology.

Honorable Mentions

Rrreef Resilience is an initiative in collaboration with the ETH spin-off rrreefs that sells NFTs featuring reef animals. The money generated in the sale benefits the rebuilding of reefs. (At the time of writing, the project has yet to start selling NFTs.)

Ecosapiens, "the world's first perpetual carbon-capture NFT that doubles as a PFP," are digital collectibles (PFP = profile picture) that evolve and evolve the more carbon is offset by the owner. Their whitepaper is an exciting read. (At the time of writing, the project has yet to start selling NFTs.)

Flow3rs is an NFT art collection that uses parts of the sales proceeds to retire carbon credits from nature-based carbon reduction projects. It features renowned artists to attract a new buyer group. (At the time of writing, the project has yet to start selling NFTs.)

Nature Speaks! was a writing competition hosted by Sovereign Nature Initiative, asking for new perspectives on nature. The winning texts were minted as NFTs and sold for the benefit of a partner organization.

Human Regeneration

Human regeneration is a broad spectrum, of course; I want to limit my examples and comments to the direct support of humans under challenging circumstances. Although less abstract than nature conservation, the same problems arise with the allocation of money and transparency of who is supported.

One of my favorite examples I dove into very profoundly is the support of artists who live under dire circumstances and need financial help. With the sale of art NFTs, these artists can benefit directly from a global market and, without intermediaries, earn money no matter how difficult their circumstances (e.g., living in a warzone). I will dedicate a separate blog post to this topic.

More Examples

Besides the projects I mentioned above, I created a Twitter list of Impact NFT projects and Regenerative Art artists (neither vetted by me nor do I necessarily support them; I will continue to add accounts).

Conclusion and Personal Opinion

Art is a beautiful tool for highlighting the importance of a regenerative cause. In the case of Regenerative Art and Impact NFTs, it can create new ways of financial support for these causes. Web3 allows for doing so in a transparent and disintermediated fashion with low entry barriers and direct connection between all participants in the effort.

We are just witnessing the beginning of Regenerative Art in Impac NFTs. The creativity of the involved innovators will lead to many more spectacular projects. I will follow the space closely and keep talking about it.

Thank you for reading. If you have questions or comments or find something I should add, reach out on Twitter via @YannickZehnder.

If you want to learn more about ReFi, read my blog post "What is Regenerative Finance—a Brief Introduction to ReFi."

Acknowledgments

I want to thank a few people for the inspiration to write this article. List in no particular order:

• Trent McConaghy for his inspiration with the article “Nature 2.0”

• Jonathan Ledgard for his inspiration

• All the artists that I follow in this wild NFT-verse and those I've never been in touch with but inspire me too

• The people at SNI have always been great intellectual stimulation, first and foremost Ale; thank you, my friend

• My muse

Endnotes

1. https://hundertwasser.com/en/texts/friedensvertrag_mit_der_natur

2. https://earthcanvas.com.au/

3. https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/blog/art-reg-ag.shtml

4. https://salttree.art/regenerative-art/

5. https://terra0.org/assets/pdf/terra0_white_paper_2016.pdf

6. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Chapter-Five_Breakthrough.pdf

7. https://sovereignnature.com/programs/summer-2021-hackathon-challenge

8. https://medium.com/@sovnature/introducing-sattva-b9c90c7288b1

Additional Sources (Not Quoted)

• https://www.stewartship.xyz/

• https://www.ceven.earth/

• https://earthcanvas.com.au/

Disclaimer and Transparency Disclosure

This article is for educational purposes only and does not provide financial or investment advice. The reader knows that unique risks are involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency assets. The author might have a financial interest in companies, assets, and projects mentioned in the article. The article was written by the author himself and expresses his own opinions. The author does not receive compensation for it (other than from mirror.xyz).