Sovereign Nature Initiative : How to ReFi without carbon credits with Andrea Leiter (CER)

Jun 30, 2024

Andrea Leiter, Co-founder of Sovereign Nature Initiative, talks about using blockchain for ecological data to fund conservation efforts. They discuss DEEP protocol, ethical challenges, and the potential of blockchain for environmental stewardship.

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INSIGHT

Eco-Data, Not Nature, Holds Market Value

SNI turns ecological field data into digital assets that capture market demand rather than pricing nature directly.
This reframes value from 'trees as dollars' to 'eco-data as digital economy inputs.'

ADVICE

Reuse Steward Data; Avoid Extra Reporting

Work with stewards to reuse existing monitoring data rather than adding new reporting burdens.
Connect that data through standards and APIs into digital products to create revenue streams.

ANECDOTE

Lion Catalog NFT Raised $100K

Kenya Wildlife Trust provided a lion catalog that fed into a MonSama game and generated $100K via NFT sales.
Kenya Wildlife Trust received $70K while SNI kept $30K from that sale.

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This episode is part of a subseries where I've partnered with my comrade Giulio Quarta from the Crypto Commons Association and their initiative called the Commons Economy Roadmap (CER) where we will be interviewing some of the projects listed as part of the CER. In this interview we spoke to Andrea Leiter, co-founder of Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI). SNI uses blockchain to turn real-world ecological data into dynamic digital assets, such as NFTs, that fund conservation efforts directly through their Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP). This approach aims to break free from the donation model and carbon credits, offering a fresh way to support environmental stewardship.

During the interview we discuss how DEEP works, how this transcends the pitfalls of the carbon credit market common in ReFi, and the socio-economic implications of it. The conversation also tackles the ethical challenges of integrating financial systems with ecological goals, underscoring the potential of blockchain to drive meaningful, sustainable change in the fight to preserve our planet.

You can find a transcription of the interview on the CER website here.

The CER is a knowledge base and promotion protocol to highlight and empower what we consider to be among the most relevant 20 projects in the current economic juncture: companies and ecosystems that are building open infrastructures to regenerate society, to support the struggle of citizens, farmers, activists, scientists, tech experts and entrepreneurs on the ground at the dawn of global collapse.

The Crypto Commons Association is also a project within Breadchain, an organization I co-founded for building blockchain apps from a left-wing political POV.

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