Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Gregory Landua: Regen Network – The Blockchain for Planetary Regeneration

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Regen Network is a blockchain focused on ecological regeneration and reversing climate change. Their aim is to reinvent the economics of agriculture so that farmers are seen not only as food producers, but also as land stewards. Regen Network serve as the foundation on which which other projects and protocols may build upon and harness to execute their own climate-focused business models. Using a distributed ledger and modern remote sensing technology, the Regen team are creating new tools allowing humanity to reconnect with the environment.We were joined by CEO & Co-founder of Regen, Gregory Landua, to chat about what has motivated him to create Regen. We took a deep dive into how Regen Network works and especially discussed carbon credits and the Nature Carbon Ton (NCT), a novel carbon credit token they are launching.Topics covered in this episode:Gregory's background and what motivated him to create RegenWhy he chose to build Regen on CosmosWhat are carbon credits and how is their impact measured?How the Nature Carbon Ton (NCT) token works and what is the vision for how it evolvesThe 2 modules Regen have built on Cosmos SDK - Ecocredits and DataRegen 4.0 - what is coming next?Episode links:Regen websiteRegen on MediumRegen on TwitterGregory on TwitterSponsors:Chorus One: Chorus One runs validators on cutting edge Proof of Stake networks such as Cosmos, Solana, Celo, Polkadot and Oasis. - https://epicenter.rocks/chorusoneParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - paraswap.io/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/440

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Quichu, and I'm here with my co-host, Brian Fabian Crane. And today we're speaking with Gregory Landua, who is the CEO and co-founder of Regen. Before we talk to Gregory, though, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. Notice is a safe is a smart wallet that enables you to control your digital assets with much more granular permissions involving multiple private keys, a subset of which is required for executing transactions. These keys can be stored in different hardware or software wallets or even be stored

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JavaScript library helping developers connect to Ethereum. And they recently announced a pledge to commit 2.5% of their token supply to a Gitcoin aqueduct. Head over to tallyho.com to try to try the tallyho community edition and play around with some of the features before its upcoming V1 and Dow launch. Gregory, hey, thanks for joining us. It's like really great to have you. You know, you're like, I think one of the people that I think we've been wanting to have on for so long, like, you know, Brian and I would always be like, when should we have Gregory on? which you haven't gone. And like, now is the right time to have you on. And so, yeah, we're going

to be talking about region, carbon credits. I think, like, I really want to try to understand what carbon credits are, what, what they provide, I think, to like the whole climate change sort of initiative. And, yeah, where regent fits in the broader blockchain ecosystem. Awesome. Yeah, it's great to be here. Sebastian and Brian, and listeners. always, I've been a long time. I mean, friends, first and foremost, it's been awesome interacting with you guys out in the larger ecosystem for some years now. But also, Epicenter was one of my first sources of information as I started drinking through the crypto fire hose, you know, as we started building Regen. So just super grateful for the in-depth interviews and the space that you provide, just the whole spectrum.

So it's an honor to be here and get to do a deep dive into region network. Cool, fantastic. Yeah. I mean, we've, I think both Sevastya and us, right, we've been aware of region for quite a long time. You know, also of course, one, right? We've been running validators for a long time. We've been supporting in different ways. Also invested in region, right? So it's kind of, and it's been, I remember in 2019, I think, was it? You know, there was the Cosmos Hackathon in Berlin, right? Where, uh, you know, there was the Cosmos Hackathon in Berlin, right? Where, uh, I guess met in person. Maybe let's sort of step a little bit back. Tell us a bit about your journey and how did you end up working on region network?

Yeah, well, it's been a journey for sure. Yeah, my background wasn't in computer science or blockchain per se when we decided to really go all in on region network. So my background before digging in sort of full time into the Web 3 space was actually in regenerative agriculture and permaculture and working on supply chains. And so I think Sebastian the first time you and I met was at like a supply blockchain supply chain conference or something, which was very random way back. Yeah, I think that was back in the days of stratum when we were trying to figure out what the hell

we were going to do with this technology and supply chain traceability was one of those things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my background was in building transparent direct supply chains pre-block chain, right? And so I was working to create direct trade, fair trade, organic sourcing solutions for companies that wanted to be able to have positive climate impact, be shifting to agricultural systems that actually were sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere, wanted to have premium products. And so my background was really working at that intersection, which is a lot of different stakeholders.

A lot of the issues that arise in these sort of international supply chain situations, you know, it's multi-stakeholder trust issues. And so sort of taking a step back, I also spent a fair bit of time early in my career working on local alternative currency systems like local exchange trading system, LETs, and other kind of complementary currency systems, sort of pre-Bitcoin white paper. I was working on some of that stuff. So I've been tracking Bitcoin as it emerged and Ethereum as it emerged with a lot of interest

around sort of the experimentation in monetary theory, in financial instrumentation, and then also in these concepts of what does it look like to create the right public infrastructure for groups that don't necessarily trust each other to utilize. And then it's like the last thing I'll say in terms of introduction to myself is I've I've long time been kind of obsessed with how to overcome, I guess what in the web three or blockchain space we refer to as coordination errors where because of the game theory of like Prisoner's Dilemma style games we tend individuals tend to maybe have impacts that they don't want to have on public the like the public sphere like climate.

change. Is this the classic example of this? Like nobody wants to be polluting the atmosphere. Nobody wants to be degrading the health of the ecosystems that we all rely on. But sort of business incentives are to incentivize short-term gain because that's, you know, that's how you secure what you need for your family or, you know, that's how you become wealthy in the system. And so how do we reinvent the economics, the economic relationships to realign short-term profit with long-term ecological health is kind of the, I guess, problem space that we've been working on at Regen Network. So you were working with these problems, right?

You were interested in, yeah, planetary regeneration and a bunch of those related things, coordination problems. Then what was it in, you know, crypto and blockchain that you saw? And, you know, what was kind of this, you know, initial vision that drove you to start region network? Yeah. So the integration of moneyness, right, of value, the internet of value, the internet of money, number one. Number two, the idea of public infrastructure and in our case for public goods, right? So just I was started to be very fascinated with the narrative of public infrastructure.

that started to emerge really around Ethereum. That was sort of like an Ethereum idea. And then the last piece, I would say, is sort of mechanism design. And all of those things converging in the blockchain space, I was a little curmudgeonly at the beginning. I was pretty resistant. You know, I was lucky enough to have sort of social relationships with folks who had been all in and very, very early on in Ethereum

and who had been like, hey, Gregory, you know, you're doing this regenerative enterprise thing. You wrote this book and you've been innovating here. Like, this is really cool. You should be thinking about, you know, launch an ICO or do a Dow or something like that. And at the beginning, I was pretty skeptical for a lot of ways. And actually, it took me starting to engage in a way on my own.

Like, you know, the Overton window, the thought space, the idea of a large community of people engaging, with the experimentation around these topics is really what drew me in. That's really what I was like, okay, you know, this is the time. This is the time to go all in on exploring what it looks like to leverage this new set of distributed ledger technologies. And we've always been biased towards public ledgers, public blockchains, to sort of like innovate in the problem space that I've been working on for many, many years.

So I have to say, it wasn't until really running into the, the cosmos ecosystem that I felt like there was a match between the ethos and philosophy from my perspective around what blockchain technology actually needs to be able to do for people to match sort of the reality of social organization, the reality of ecological, sort of the ecological use case. And so a lot of my skepticism around the approach that I was seeing in Ethereum started to, you know, I started to get really excited when I started to in my, you know, and at this point I'd already decided, like, we're all in, as a team, we had started working and researching and innovating and imagining what does it look like to have a public blockchain

dedicated to ecological data, claims, and assets. We were already there. We were already saying, okay, we want a public ledger to catalyze planetary regeneration and create tools to fight climate change with market mechanisms. So we were already all in on that. And then we were going through a pretty deep dive process around vetting the different approaches. At that time, there weren't a lot of them, you know, but at that time, tendermint consensus did exist. And we sort of ran across this idea of sort of modular application-specific blockchains and the ability to match a state machine or consensus to a particular community and particular set of needs. And, you know, immediately that resonated with us. And we started really sort of like innovating and engaging

with that as the approach that we thought was best suited to sort of the larger domain of climate and ecological health. What was it about the cosmos architecture that you resonated so much with you? Application and community. Unity-specific blockchains, number one. So this concept of interoperability with sovereignty, which at that time hadn't been achieved technologically, but that's what everybody was working on. And that's why you have to make tradeoffs in tech.

And so the tradeoffs that were made in tendermit consensus were around trying to create sort of a fast finality consensus mechanism that could be compatible with interoperability across an internet of blockchains, right? And that's, I think, really important, especially for the ecological and climate use cases because we're dealing with public goods, we're dealing with a mix of grassroots

and sort of institutional actors, and you really need to be able to build something that doesn't force people into one chain to rule them all and one sort of like standard operating system because that's just not how human, work, especially in these complex sort of like multipolar issues like climate change. Like people really need to be able to encode their own governance logic and their own standards, but you have to be able to interoperate and kind of compile that because it is a global problem,

but it requires local action. And so, you know, trying to force everybody to use the same technological solution and have the same security assumptions and same governance assumptions, when you're working across sort of like stakeholders, scientists, land stewards, governmental agencies, corporations to sort of try to generate, you know, that's not what you want to be arguing about. You know, that's not what you want to be fighting for. You want to give people the set of tools that can be assembled that you can sort of create a larger sort of outcome, climate action, for instance, without forcing people to all adopt a single blockchain that, you know, in the Ethereum back in the day,

in the Ethereum case that also is being used for crypto kitties. I mean, come on, it wasn't really, I think, a viable option at that point. So, you know, on the other hand, Cosmos always provided this really dynamic and attractive option to really be able to, again, have sovereignty over the use case. And so, as you were mentioning, you know, Brian, when we first met in person, it was at the interchained conversations, which was really the first time that the Cosmos community came together, you know, in person back in 2019, early 2019, or sort of early summer of 2019. And at that time, the work that we did trying to source, what does a layer one blockchain

need to look like, feel like, what are the features that need to be baked into it if we're considering the set of stakeholders that we have, which isn't, you know, our use case and our stakeholders are not simply sort of like pseudonymous, crypto, speculation, right? We're talking about sort of baking in applied cryptography to create an auditable claims trail around assets or supply chains, these sorts of things. We're talking about the governance of whether it's data standards or methodological standards, but we're integrating that into sort of a money stack where people are able to mint digital representations of real-world assets like carbon credits. The use case that that

That use case requires some very specific things from a layer one blockchain, right? It requires the ability to have flexible key management solutions where an actor might be able to sign, might not be required to have full custodial command over a public-private key set because they may not be able to. You sort of need to cross-integrate with more of a web to audience, but you need cryptographic security, for instance, around, certifying or creating an attestation around lab results or scientific samples. So you need to be able to grant sort of attestation permission that is really robust, but people don't necessarily need to be managing the full capability of a public-private key set in the classical like your money, your keys sense, right? But you do need to guarantee that attestation in a similar

sort of way. So starting the modularity, the ability for us to modify the layer, or one blockchain to meet the specific use cases of sort of ecological accounting was really attractive to us, especially because folks may or may not know, but we're, you know, we're pretty deep. We have quite a deep bench in terms of engineering capability at R&D Inc. Region Network Development, Incorporated the company I'm CEO of that develops Regen Ledger, the public blockchain securing region network, but also we're the tech lead and maintainer now of the Cosmos SDK. And that was essentially because we had started digging in and

contributing to that code base because we needed a layer one solution that fit our use case. And we just gradually became sort of the lead contributor, all kudos to Aaron Krellas, who at some point you guys should have on to just talk about sort of Cosmos SDK and the roadmap to, you know, where things are evolving in there. But that's that really sort of like sovereign control over a layer one to specifically build the bespoke logic and governance apparatus for a specific use case and a specific community, there really isn't another solution and community and ecosystem that's as supportive and as focused on that specific sort of use case, really. Yeah, I think this is one of the most powerful things about the Cosmos SDK and that technology

stack that I think a lot of people don't realize is this ability to create sovereign chains is what, you know, we were talking earlier about back in the day when, you know, I was doing more like enterprise stuff, you know, the demand for sovereign blockchains where certain types of use cases that really can't live on public blockchains, or at least today are difficult to host on public blockchains, those use cases are just ripe for technologies like Cosmos. And, you know, in my, in my, like, day-to-day evangelism, like, I, I spent a lot of time, you know, speaking with folks in more like traditional industries like banking and finance and insurance. And, you know, explaining to them that this technology, when used, when used by a single stakeholder, can act as a way to bootstrap a blockchain use case as a set. centralized, like in a centralized way, one where stakeholders can be vetted and controlled.

As attitudes change, as perhaps regulations change, as use cases evolve and adapt, you can then start bringing in extra stakeholders connecting to IBC. It's almost like the companies that were that were building intranets back in the 90s. Well, one day they just like plug into the router and they were connected to DCIP and they were connected to the rest of the internet. So I find like the Cosmos SDK is just perfect for that. And I think not enough people realize this kind of superpower. You know, I think I'd like to spend some time here talking about carbon credits because like we all hear about carbon credits and like, but I don't have a good understanding of what a carbon credit actually is, who issues them, what they represent.

If they have any meaningful impact on climate change, is there like one carbon credit? credit or many carbon credits? Are they fungible? I've got so many questions here. And I think you could probably enlighten us a little bit on what these things actually are. Yeah, I'll do my best. Carbon accounting is complex and even complicated. So I'll sort of try to start at a pattern level and then we can get down into sort of like concrete ways that, you know, that sort of like using a public blockchain is pretty transformative in climate accounting and climate finance broadly in carbon markets specifically. So at a high level, carbon markets, I think our last year were maybe 400 billion or so dollar

market cap. Only a little more than $1 billion is traded, was traded last year centered around the voluntary carbon markets, which is the space that region, is first focused on in terms of our go-to-market strategy. Still not small, but so it can distinguish between sort of the compliance markets and the voluntary carbon markets. Generally speaking, carbon credits are a commodity. So what does that mean? That means that they're used for something, right?

So they're used to offset carbon emissions. So its value is in its utility, right? Just like wheat is useful to bake bread and you have to actually use that wheat to get the bread. Carbon credits are only useful as instruments to retire and count on a carbon balance sheet, essentially. So there's lots of questions people ask. There are two major drivers for carbon as a commodity and the demand for carbon as a commodity. One is broadly speaking sort of the compliance markets, like the Eurozone. The European Union has a compliance carbon market.

Earlier this year, carbon was trading at over $100 per ton, just a little under 100 euros per ton, and that's the current price of emitting carbon in Europe, right? And so what is like, so just talking about compliance carbon markets, what does that mean? that means that sort of the European Union set a boundary of carbon emissions that were acceptable in the economy, and that boundary is going to be ratcheting down over the years, according to adherence with sort of international treaties and science-based climate accounting, to try to bring that sort of like the biggest economy in the world, which is the Eurozone, down into sort of a carbon neutrality, right? So carbon credits are what you use if you go above your carbon allotment essentially. And you use that to balance. And that carbon allotment is shrinking,

you know, at a per annum basis, essentially. And that's called a cap and trade market, where you put a cap and then you can trade. You can buy other people's allotments or you can buy offsets, right? And the carbon, this allotment is like, like the government saying for like each company or like how does that work? They're sectoral and and I'm not an expert just disclaimer. I'm not an expert in the in the Eurozone compliance carbon markets. I mean, I'm generally educated, but I'm not a deep expert. But my understanding is, yeah, there's sort of like per country allotments and per sort

of industrial sector allotments. And then companies are basically trading to access those allotments essentially. Right. So there's a market mechanism to put a value or a price tag on carbon. Okay, stepping back, what's the voluntary carbon market, which is like in North America, there are like the northeast of the United States has a cap and trade system. California has a cap and trade system. But as an economic block, North America or like NAFTA or whatever the economic zone, Canada, United States, there isn't a fully fledged compliance carbon market. There's a lot of voluntary carbon mechanisms. And people might say, oh, well, why is that even valuable? Is this just greenwashing? Does it even matter? There's a couple of things that have happened over the last couple of years to drive, you know,

massive year-over-year increase in these voluntary carbon markets in addition to the compliance markets. And that essentially is a cultural shift in the corporate world to start to include carbon as carbon emissions as a liability on the balance sheet. So what I mean there is leading like insurance companies or reinsurance companies like Swiss Re, leading banking institutions. Recently, the SEC basically just released guidance that they're going to be enforcing carbon accounting for public companies. So these are all signals that are not, these are like,

semi-regulation, but mostly sort of, you know, just like the corporate economic apparatus, these are signals, these are sending signals that carbon emissions have economic risk and that the actuary tables and the bankers are saying, unless you're incorporating the economic risk of carbon emissions into your company's decision-making, we're not going to lend to you. We're not going to insure you. And so what's happened over the last couple of years, and this took 20-plus years of sort of like science and engagement and process, but just in the last like two years, it's really crystallized so that it's becoming increasingly common for boards to be including

adherence to in quotes net zero pledges, which means companies setting a date where they're going to have a completely balanced carbon budget, that's net zero, or science-based goals, which means tracking with international treaties like the Paris Climate Agreement, boards and shareholders are enforcing adherence to those as part of the definition of fiduciary duty. So what that means is that now all of a sudden, executives are being held accountable for carbon emissions. What does that mean? That means that they have to find the cheapest possible way to meet those goals. So that's what's driving this massive. It's like 40% year over year increase in the voluntary carbon markets, which is where region network at the moment is really innovating. It's huge demand spike. There's a shortage

of supply. So carbon credits are a commodity that allows you to balance a carbon. budget. Now, there's, you know, there's a lot of complexity here, you know, there's different types of carbon credits. There's carbon credits that represent avoided emissions, like renewable energy or, or forest conservation, like not chopping things down. So actions that would have resulted emissions that can prove, you can prove that they didn't happen specifically because you, you purchased that, you know, credit and funded that action not being taken. And then there's carbon credits that are carbon removals where you're actually measuring carbon sequestration into soil or from a direct air capture system or something where you're removing atmospheric carbon

and storing it somehow for some period of time. So there's obviously the big challenge with carbon credits is monitoring, verifying and quantifying an invisible gas and the actions of that invisible gas, both emissions and reductions. And so there's a lot of stuff. And so there's a lot of science that goes into that. There's models, there's data collection. And really, what we're up to a region network is building sort of a public accounting science and market infrastructure for that use case, right? So, so that there's transparency around who is saying what, about where, using what data and what methodology and what the end result was, asset issuance of like a carbon credit so that that's all baked in to essentially create a non-fungible asset that represents that

unique sort of carbon reduction or emission reduction to create a carbon credit that can be purchased to offset for a company or a blockchain as just happened with osmosis. So this is one of the things about carbon credits. I think I don't really understand or it seems, I don't know, it seems a bit weird. It's like how does one measure the actual impact of actions taken to offset carbon? And are these things meant to be fungible? And if they are, like, how do you even get to compare, say, I don't know, planting a thousand trees or, you know, whatever, like whatever other action one could take to reduce carbon, like planting or like having green pastures with cows on it, like regenerating the land or something. something like that, which I know is something you're working on.

Like, oh, yeah. How does that work? Great question. Great question. So at a top level, I would argue that no, carbon, not all carbon is created equally. And there's sort of a non-fungible essence. There's like fungibility and non-fungibility. So on one hand, you know, as far as global impact is concerned, pulling

a metric ton and usually carbon markets operate at the ton level right so the ton is the standard unit so pulling out one metric ton of carbon out of the atmosphere has the same effect whether it's soil or a forest or you know reduced emissions or direct air capture it has the same effect to the global climate quandary so it produces the same public good, the same non-excludable public good, which is sort of like a climate stabilization action, or it's a unit of climate stabilization. But it's also non-fungible because each of those different options has a different system for verification and different what are called co-benefits. So co-benefit is to say is things like if you increase soil organic matter

in a farm, that also happens to reduce flood risk. Because when you increase soil organic matter in a farm, it's sort of creating a sponge. You're creating more organic matter, so more water is caught and stored. So that reduces flood risk downstream. It also reduces drought risk. It also creates more nutrient-dense crops. There's all these co-benefits of soil carbon, for instance. Like it does other good things both for the farmer and for society in addition to that like larger benefit to the whole global economy and the whole sort of society as a whole. So there's both fungibility, which is that unit of carbon and there's like a global problem and carbon is carbon is carbon, right? And removing it or emitting it has the same global impact, right? But it's also non-fungible because depending on where that carbon is sequestered or put into living.

systems or non-living systems has different co-benefits or value. And as I said, it's also kind of non-fungible because the approach to verifying that that carbon is somewhere varies. And the certainty level in which these claims are made varies. And so there's sort of two price axes for valuing a cost. carbon credit. On one price axes, you have the certainty around the claim. How sure are you that that unit of carbon is where we say it is, right? And that's, there's both like the cheating side of that where people could be cheating, but there's also just uncertainty baked into the science, right? And so

quantifying that uncertainty and creating conditions where it's really hard to make false claims are two of the really important things that we work on at Region Network and leveraging blockchain, but also leveraging just good old-fashioned science. Like we do a lot of remote sensing. We have a really big community leveraging machine learning and remote sensing and sort of advanced data science to sort of bring to bear on that question. And the other axes of value is how valuable, what are the co-benefits? How valuable is that unit of carbon? Is the only value that it has related to the global market value of that action of mitigating climate risk, or does it have extra co-benefits like mitigating flood risk that an insurance company might want to pay for?

So you get price discovery on these two axes, which means that there isn't necessarily fungibility between all carbon assets. We can go on a sort of deep dive around how we're dealing with fungibility and sort of creating you know, commodification versus non-fungible sort of specific markets and both of those are use cases that we're building for at-region network.

Yeah, I mean, I can sort of, I guess, provide, like, you know, of course, one is actually something that we kind of wanted to do from the start, right? It was like, okay, you know, we're going to proof of stake. And of course, the carbon proofings already, like much, much, much lower than proof of work, but still, like, okay, can you like offset that? And, you know, we worked back then with the region team.

This was like 2019. I think we started working on it, right, to, like, estimate the carbon footprint and then offset this in 2020. We wanted to do your region. You guys weren't ready then. So we ended up using another platform. Well, I mean, I think that's definitely one of the cool things here. And I think in where you're going, right, is that you then can see, okay, there's like

this specific place, right, where it had this specific impact. And so I think it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, let's say in our case, we were surprised actually how cheap it was to offset and how, you know, maybe we offset like, I don't know, three times as much as something, I think, than we actually, it was not much. Of course, other industries have, can be much more of a challenge. But let's get into region and kind of dive into how, you know, how region addresses this. I don't know.

Where do you want to start with region? Well, let's start at the pattern level. So just to give people an understanding, like, what are we building at region? We're building an ecological asset issuance system. We're building an origination system so that people can come and issue carbon credits, and other forms of assets that are not necessarily the classical, just like, you know, we've been talking about carbon credits where you're sort of like setting a carbon goal or baseline and then you have emissions and then you have offsets and you're balancing those in order to sort of

like balance a carbon budget, right? And that's one use case for ecological assets. But there's sort of an emerging explosion of ecological assets and natural capital assets that are similar where you're saying there is this intrinsic value that is essential to our economy that is conservation or regeneration of living systems. And it balances our climate. It creates healthy food. It creates, it mitigates flood risk. It preserves biodiversity that we need for, you know, pharmaceuticals, that we need for climate stability, that we value because of its aesthetic beauty, because it's part of our human legacy. So there's all these reasons why that's sort of an untapped reservoir of economic value that we need to represent.

You know, sort of like we need, pulling out of the carbon tunnel vision, you know, there's sort of a demand at this stage of human evolution that we can appropriately value an old growth tree, not just as the board feet of lumber, but also for its intrinsic value because we've noticed that as a society, when we don't incorporate those economic values, this is sort of harkening back to the beginning introduction that I gave around my motivations here, you know, when we don't appropriately value these common goods, these public goods, in our economic transactions, we tend to deeply regret for many reasons actions that we take because they make short-term economic logic. So there's this overarching piece, which is sort of bringing natural and living

capital in and representing it economically and creating an apparatus that's transparent, as inexpensive as possible, as high integrity as possible for generating these claims and minting assets that represent this living and natural capital. And the carbon markets and specifically voluntary carbon markets are really the go-to-market strategy where we're having the most success. So we produced and minted carbon credits based on regenerative grazing, for instance, as you were mentioning Sebastian back at the beginning of 2020, all of those credits were purchased by Microsoft before they even hit the blockchain, basically. There's a lot of demand for high-quality ecological credits, especially carbon credits. We're sort of innovating to try to provide

liquidity there, minting mechanisms, and robust science to back all of that up, right, in our go-to-market strategy. But there's really a bigger mission here. And that mission is, yeah, serving as an origination system, as a full-stack origination system for a new asset class, for a new form of financial value that is regenerative, that aligns our short-term economic wealth with long-term ecological health and regeneration. So that's kind of like the pattern level. And then the details of how we're building that asset origination system, we've talked about the Cosmos SDK.

So there's a public blockchain that is focused on the data, attestations and claims, and asset minting and tracking all of that in the state machine, making it possible for people to govern different standards. and fully integrating that into an order book decks that then fully integrates into AMM systems. So you have this stack of the asset origination into the market system that's being built that is essentially region network. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I think it makes so much sense, right?

I mean, I think if you think also the voluntary carbon market, I think if, you know, if I had like an easy way of being like, okay, what's my carbon? for brain. First of all, answering that question, right? But then if you could just see that more easily and then be like, oh, let me offset that. I mean, I think a lot of people would do that. Yeah, exactly. And so right now we're building with a group of stakeholders in the cosmos ecosystem, we're building this carbon zero program out, which Chorus, one, was one of the early innovators. We did a lot of work with Chorus in the early days to estimate values.

validator emissions. We also did a bunch of work to estimate proof of work emissions to sort of create these first sort of life cycle carbon analysis tools, which at the beginning, they're Excel spreadsheets, and then they migrated over to GitHub, and then we're building sort of standards bodies around those. So that creates sort of a transparent carbon accounting system. And then, you know, basically we're building tools to be able to quantify emissions and then automate offsetting. And so osmosis recently, offset itself and then pre-purchased a bunch of carbon to do initial protocol-owned liquidity into the carbon market. Now we're going to the Cosmos Hub and working with the Cosmos Hub at a protocol level. So it doesn't need to be necessarily validator by validator, but instead we can do protocol

by protocol or validator by validator or asset by asset. So you could, for instance, be automatically offsetting NFTs or in the future. We've been doing some R&D with F2 pool and other big Bitcoin miners around what it looks like to sort of like have a washing machine where you can bring Bitcoin to region via a bridge like Axelar or Thorchain or something. You know, lock that on region ledger and reissue a new green Bitcoin that's been fully offset. And why is that valuable? Well, that's valuable because it becomes a form of collateral, a form of money that, has reduced its negative externality. So I think there's this competition.

Like if we're doing anything in the crypto space, it's competing to have the best money. So to have the best money, you need to have the most positive goods, the most public benefits with the least negative externality. So just imagine if we can automate taking out environmental externality from money systems, whether it's Bitcoin or Regent or Adams or whatever it is, then all of a sudden those money systems are more competitive, they're more compelling. All of a sudden, they can scale better, they can scale faster. So this is like a core part of why there's really big demand for both the assets and the features to integrate that into D5. All these people who, you know,

criticize Bitcoin for being non-environmentally friendly, well, they can finally sleep tight knowing that we have green Bitcoin. If we want it, right? So that's something that we can, that we're like tracking rapidly towards being able to provide as a service, right? But that's just one example of sort of like using an offsetting module where you can estimate carbon emissions, generate sort of like one side of the ledger, and then issue credits and sort of like bundalows around an asset, rapid asset in those eco credits. You can do that with, you could do that around a whole blockchain. You could do that again around an NFT. You can also do that around sort of like off-chain entities like corporations.

So it's sort of like baking in this sort of like ecological accounting into the economy in a way that's really deeply compatible with institutional sort of like trajectories around ESG and climate accounting. But also what I get very excited about is I think it positions the defy space and crypto space and our cosmos ecosystem as a place where we can, with agility and innovation, we can sort of like outpace the existing financial system and really prove that this is transparent. It generates these public goods.

We're removing the negative externalities of climate impact and creating just a better system for financial exchange to take place. And that gets me really excited. Let's start into, so I think for a long time, I kind of like understood the region vision, but then it's like, okay, where's sort of like the product, right? And I think now you seem to be kind of at the, you know, at the cusp of having, you know, it looks like to me like the first kind of real product, right, which is this nature carbon tonne.

And I think on your website, right, you have this description. Okay, so it's a premium digital carbon basket of nature-based impact projects. And then you also describe it as, you know, IBC compatible, fungible NCT token. And, you know, a bunch of other stuff that was like, what does this mean? There's something about vintage, something about rolling acceptance window, which I was like, I don't quite understand that. So I'd love if you could explain a little bit. Like, how does this NCT token work? Yeah, sure.

Sure. So NCT is a basket of nature-based carbon credits that meet a set of standards, right? And in this case, we're using an off-chain carbon registry called Vera. And so there's an existing market. There's sort of there's liquidity. And there's sort of like an off-chain trust system for these credits. You know, while we're building out our on-chain trust system for credits like the carbon-plus grasslands and the other, and carbon-plus agroforestry and about 40 other different types of eco-credits that are being innovated to be natively on-chain and minted, the first minting is on-to-the-ledger, NCT is really bridging from existing markets. So it's bringing an asset that has off-chain, price discovery, and trading. It's tokenizing it on chain with our partners at TUCAN, bringing it on to region ledger, and minting it as an eco-credit with carbon units, one ton of carbon, with the metadata associated with the project.

Vintage means what year was it produced, right? What year was this carbon credit produced, which associates it with the methodology and all the verification data. So bring that all on chain. So you see what you're getting, anchoring the retirement functionality on region ledger, and then making it possible to move that into what we call a basket, which is basically like saying all of these different credit types with the following standards can be considered fungible amongst each other in order to build liquidity. So basically pooling all of that, and then that gets turned into a bank,

denom in the Cosmos SDK, which enables IBC compatibility, which means that we can then export it from region ledger over to osmosis to create a region NCT trading pair or over to gravity decks or SIF chain or and then it can come back and be retired on region. So you sort of like take it back out of the basket and you retire it and are issued a certificate of retirement. So at the moment, what we have right now is the eco-credit module, which is the representation of these eco-credits and their standards on chain, the ability to issue, the ability to retire, the ability to exchange, and the ability to cancel eco-credits, like carbon credits, and the ability to basket them and turn them into an IBC token according to sort of like arbitrary standards of fungibility,

where you can go in and you can create your own basket, right? And we've created the first NCT basket in collaboration with a sort of an ecosystem of actors. We didn't act independently. This is meant to be an interchained standard, not like a region standard for NCT. So we collaborated with people over in the Ethereum world and validators, the blockchain, carbon offsetting infrastructure working group, Bick-OWG, Tukan, Moss, other folks were all involved in this. So we're just sort of like adopting that so that we have. have an interchain NCT standard and that creates the idea is that can create an enormous amount

of liquidity and, you know, fungibility so that we do have some efficient market mechanisms around this initial interchained carbon assets that's coming to market. And so right now what we have the ability to do is this is sort of like command line issuance and retirement and, you know, trading, right? But coming in mid-May, coming up really soon, there's going to be an upgrade to Region Ledger 4.0, and accompanying that will be a set of interfaces. And that will enable people to just go onto region.network slash marketplace and buy, sell, retire, basket, and move credits over to osmosis and either pool them into liquidity, which if osmosis community votes on, will be incentivized, creating a yield earning carbon

assets, which is pretty exciting, or trade it. So there's like this suite of functionalities has taken us a while to build all this out. Because we've been working on both the science side, how do you generate these standards, how do you dig into high integrity assets? We've also been working on this layer one blockchain that makes all this possible, contributing to the Cosmos SDK.

So it's taken us sort of time to bring all this together. But yeah, this is in May, this is like really the first time that the minimum viable feature set for sort of regenerative assets in Cosmos, spy is going to be coming online. So super excited about it. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like, you know, you kind of want the website. You see this nature carbon tone. It was like, but like, where do I buy it? I do that like interact with that. So like that, that thing that would be

really cool and great to have. Yeah. So right now what we're doing in terms of selling NCT is like we did a governance process with the osmosis community for the osmosis community to basically pre-buy a big chunk of NCT. We're going to do the same thing with Cosmos Hub, if validators are interested. So we're sort of like building community liquidity around it to start with. And then there'll be sort of this public launch where people, where anybody can go. And there's not going to be like a, you know, this isn't about creating, like there's no private sale where you get it cheaper now than later because we're sourcing something with an off chain price. Right.

So people are purchasing it in order to do liquidity or in order to use it for offsetting. But just to emphasize, this is a commodity. This is like a real world commodity. So this isn't like a, hey, get in on a private sale and the price goes up. This is a, we're creating market efficiency. And the price on osmosis, if we start pulling in liquidity, will relate to the price of this asset, which will also exist, also exist on polygon and also exists off chain. So we're trying to create this big market efficiency around this initial interchain carbon asset.

I'm curious, like maybe you can talk a little bit about like that. How do you see this, this market here? Like, do you think, for example, is this something that's going to like increase in price over time because it maybe gets more expensive to offset carbon? Is it, is this, do you think this could become like a major? Do you think there could be a sort of like that NCT itself could become something that's, you know, like a huge amount of different carbon credits or like how do you see that kind of evolve? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think broadly speaking, carbon assets are going to continue to get more

expensive over time because they're going to be more and more scarce and more valuable as a commodity. So that's, you know, number one. NCT specifically, I think is going to get, you know, wide adoption and, you know, will also in, you know, I think this is not financial advice, and it doesn't really have anything to do with us at region. We're just building infrastructure for this to be flowing through. So, you know, I don't really have so much have skin in that game also to disclaim that. I mean, I do own carbon credits, but nowhere near enough to be making much money off of it. The, the NCT itself is, yeah, it's representative of what the current industry considers to be the highest quality nature-based

carbon tons, right? And I think, you know, disclaimer, we're also building a registry system and an asset origination system. And there needs to be a community discussion around region native credits and whether they're going to be bundled into the NCT basket or if they're going to have their own basket. So you'll see a region carbon ton basket. And that's a conversation for the community to have, which is complicated and exciting. And I'm not sure the right answer to that question, honestly. But, you know, again, zooming back out, the larger thesis here, and this has played out over this recent, you know, little tax dip or whatever we've been in a couple, like this week.

You know, carbon assets didn't take a hit, even the on-chain ones, right, because they're coupled with a bigger economic trend. And so there's a really interesting case for the inclusion of carbon assets in as collateral as a part of investment portfolios. There's an increasing number of, you know, traditional finance folks who are going long on carbon, including it into hedge fund strategies. This is a way to bring and have exposure into defy portfolio creation, collateralization. You know, there's a bunch of stable coins who are starting to consider or who are actively acquiring carbon assets. on-chain carbon assets to act as collateral for stable coin issuance. Why?

Because as an asset class, carbon is going to continue through external trends, because either we incorporate carbon into our global economy or our global economy will fail. Like that's the facts of the matter, right? So there's going to be more and more scarcity and more and more demand for carbon sequestration and reduction through these credits. and the inclusion of it as a commodity and sending price signals and pricing carbon. So the price of carbon, I think,

I don't think I'm saying anything that's sort of like unorthodox here. It's broadly considered across the board, economists and finance experts are all assuming that the price of carbon is going to continue to go up basically over the next 30 years. So there's this really interesting inclusion of off-chain trends into on-chain. chain financial assets that I think is pretty exciting when you start to think about assembling

defy portfolios, et cetera. And again, our role at Region Network is really just to be the tokenization and asset sort of origination infrastructure. So if you think of like Tara's role in the giant emerging burgeoning crypto space and specifically Cosmos, it's to originate UST, right? That's really what Tara is doing. ecosystem they build around that is users of UST and smart contracts that integrate UST and all the things. But Tara's purpose is to create a decentralized stable coin that gets as big of adoption as possible.

Well, region, what we're trying to do is be the origination system for interchained carbon and other ecological asset system and get as many of those out and being utilized in, you know, in a myriad of different ways. But our purpose is to provide scientifically rigorous, unique, auditable ecological assets for the interchain economy. That's super cool. Yeah, I'm starting to get this vision here and how it fits into the broader cryptic system. And, like, yeah, the interplay between these assets, these assets that represent things in the real world onto blockchains. I want to ask you a little bit about your work on the Cosmos SDK. I know that Regen contributes to the Cosmos SDK by feeding upstream the work that you've done internally.

But there's these two modules that you've built. You've built this EcoCredits module and the data module. What are these modules for? And I think more broadly, can these modules be generalized? Because I was like really, I was just looking at the documentation earlier. And it seems like these modules could serve a more general purpose. And then, you know, perhaps like that makes it, makes it easier to be, it makes it easier for the data produced by these modules to transit over IBC.

What's the use case for these modules and like what's the plan to maybe generalize them? Yeah, definitely. So the Eco Credit module is the module responsible for minting. ecological assets, right? And so it is sort of a batch-based, somewhere between a fractional NFT, right, where you're issuing a unique sort of, you know, batch of credits and, you know, and sort of like a batch-based fungibility. So batches aren't fungible between each other, but they're fungible within each other. And there's a set of, it's like a token standard for ecological credit. So it has, you know, the units.

It has methodology and class information and issuance information and geolocation, all of the important attributes that you would need for issuing an eco-credit. Is this broadly useful? Yes, if you would like to transact between the base eco-credits instead of turning them into fungible credits through the basketing them, other blockchains could adopt the eco-credit module in order to create their own markets or their own issuance systems. and interoperate with region, right? Could it also serve as a, with just like minor tweaking for other tokenization purposes for the Cosmos ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. It's essentially a system for token issuance on a Cosmos-based blockchain, right?

But note, it isn't natively IBC compatible. We would need to do work. It's totally doable, but we need to invest work in, in making, those eco credits natively IBC sort of compliant, which there's a couple of different technical solutions for that. But at the moment, the easiest technical solution is the basket module, which actually just like turns them from non-fungible eco-credits that have the functionality suite

on region ledger into IBC tokens that can then just move, right? They can just move, they get minted, they can move anywhere, they need to come back home to have the full functionality for retirement, and other uses. Okay. So that's the ECOCredit module. The data module is probably more useful and abstractible for more projects. The data module is a really...

Yeah, it's kind of like a notarization module, right, where you can create attestations. Those estuctions are registered on chain. And I can see like all sorts of use cases for that. Yeah. And it's really, I think, elegantly designed. A lot of thought went into the data module by Aaron and the team. and yeah so it allows you to anchor data it allows you to sign data and it allows you to put data on chain right and those are the three major actions of the data module and what it does is it helps create in our case a graph of ecological data so anchoring is when you're saying okay there's an off-chain data storage like IPFS or something we're anchoring you know this eco credit to that data which is like the the source data from the claim, for instance.

You may not, that could be pretty weighty. That could include, you know, big satellite analysis files. It could be gigabytes. You don't necessarily want to throw that all up on the blockchain. There are other things, the results of analysis, for instance, that you may want to put directly on the blockchain. So the data module allows you to put data directly on chain. Okay.

And it also allows people to sign, you know, both sign for data. so you can create auditing functions. So you can have sort of like known auditing entities. Exactly. They're like notarizing. You know, like, hey, we check this out. The data that's there checks out. So we're putting a reputation on.

So that's going to start. Yeah, here you're really creating like traceability, traceability audit trails. You have the ability to have third parties come and sign that data, creating attestations and so on. I mean, this is like the age-old use case of using. blockchains for like kind of like supply chain traceability or data supply chain traceability, right? Exactly. And in our case, this is all about replicability of scientific claims about ecological

state, right? But that can be abstracted, as you're saying, to, like you could notarize anything. You could, this could be useful for, you know, NFTs because you're sort of like anchoring data that's associated with it. It could be useful for, you know, verifiable credentialing, all sorts of things. And it's like as an abstract module, I think it's highly repurposable and really useful. There's there's sort of this is data module 1.0. We have sort of plans to continue to evolve it. It's also following, you know, web, web 3 C3 semantic web data standards. So it's enabling a really rich semantic approach to data, which I think is we, I mean, we're biased, but we think this is probably both the simplest and the most elegant solution to on and off-chain data storage and graphs

that we've seen. And we spent a long time thinking and innovating and whatnot. And it's quite simple, but it's also super powerful. You talked a little bit about, you know, region 4.0, right? But I would love if you could go into a little bit more detail on, you know, like what lies ahead? Like, what are, you think, the biggest challenges ahead, the biggest milestones. and kind of improvement that are coming. Yeah, so region 4.0 is going to be big.

So it includes the marketplace functionality. It includes, you know, obviously we have the eco-credit module. We have the basket module. Those are both live and being used by a CLI at the moment. There will be interfaces for marketplace, eco-credits, basket. The data module will be going live. So that enables us to start to build, to start to serve our existing community of essentially eco-oracles or people who are making attestations about ecological state.

We call these folks verifiers by and large methodology developers. So these are really big, you know, like this is like the minimum viable expression, exciting, you know, there's interfaces for all of this. And a lot of the work that's been happening off-chain or on test nets is about to go live to the main net. So it's like a big coming out party. Region Ledger 5.0 is still flexible scope. We don't like to commit to things beyond what, you know,

Region Ledger 4.0 is basically done and in testing right now. So it's like we're tracking towards our launch. And so we're solid about those features. We know what those are. Region Ledger 5.0, both there's community process around what people, what features are being requested. So that's important to understand. Then there's our own sort of like commitments that we've made in the white paper

that we're trying to ship. Region ledger 5.0, you know, if we were to think sort of like, or let's say the next major version upgrade of region ledger and like the features that region network is wanting to bring, you know, I think there's going to be a bunch of governance upgrade work where we're bringing asset governance, curation, and standards on chain so that we're essentially creating DAOs around every eco-credit class. So carbon plus grasslands is going to have its own governance body and issuance rules that are on chain and transparent and nested into the larger region ledger governance system, etc. So there's going to be there's 40, currently there's 40 different projects developing eco credits. That represents more than 13 million hectares of land that's going to be an active regeneration and issuing eco credits. It's super exciting. There's also work being done with the Marine Reserve in Costa Rica, the Cocos Island Marine Reserve, which is a national marine reserve. There's smallholder agroforestry.

There's just like this enormous amount of innovation and cool stuff happening in the community. So data module is going to enable a lot of that. And then the upgrades to the Gov module, OTHZ, there's this triumvirate of Gov, OTHZ, and Groups modules that region network development. engineering team has been working on for the whole Cosmos ecosystem, but also is going to be being brought to bear for sort of asset issuance governance right on Region Ledger and the integration of that into the market stack. So that's coming online. A lot of that's going to be available on Region Ledger for some of it's coming just afterwards because of the lag between the 046 upgrade to the Cosmos SDK and our own upgrade process, which we

we don't want to hold up. So there's some exciting things happening in governance, and that governance stuff is also going to be available for the full Cosmos ecosystem. So stay tuned for an explosion in Gov usability, governance usability in the Cosmos ecosystem. It's long needed. It's really important. And we have our specific use case for that.

I was recently just doing a whole sort of Twitter spaces about that. Actually, folks want to listen, you know, jamming with some of the validators and whatnot about these features that are coming online and how they're going to both be useful for our use case, but also in the broader Cosmos ecosystem. So that's a key. And then another really exciting thing that's coming online is Region is innovating a Cosmos SDK orderbook decks. So there's a number of different reasons. We would like to not just have AMM style exchange.

A lot of that has to do with, you know, we're trying to create this sort of scene. seamless ecological asset origination system. So we want people to be able to mint those assets and then put a sell order in and fix a seller of price without having to match liquidity or just sell it and bring the price down, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. So one of the great things about the cosmos SDK and sort of a cosmos approach is we have quite muscular compute. Regent Ledger is quite a muscular state machine.

So we can actually do pretty complex order book and have a complex matching engine, which enables people to sort of like create, you know, sell orders and buy orders and have a matching engine that then can integrate. And this is where things are going to start to get fun, integrate through cosmwasum with osmosis and other dexes. So we both can access AMM liquidity, but also people can just list buy and sell orders to get access to these ecological commodities. So that's one of the next big upgrades that's being worked on now and is going to come in the coming months. What's the timeline on this orderbook decks? The eco-dex, yeah. Well, it's a good question.

We had been focused on that for Region Leisure 5.0. I think, you know, we want to prioritize some of the governance work first. So either it's going to come out with Region Leisure 5.0. and Ledger 5.0, depending on sort of, you know, engineering pieces, like how well does it, how quickly do we march through things and resource things? Yeah. So I'm going to say my engineering team is going to hate me for doing this, but I would say I feel about 90% confidence that the Eco Dex, that the Order Book Dex system will be live before mid-September. Right. So, all right. You heard it here.

All right. 90% confidence. That's it for this. There's another big feature that's coming online that we're working on that I almost forgot in my excitement about the decks, which is huge. And this is where there's like, just transparently, there's like conflicting priorities. Like what do we put our engineering resource, scarce engineering resources? What's demanded? What do we prioritize? The other thing that's being talked about and asked for by the community is what we're calling the offsetting module. And Brian, that's what you were mentioning, where you have a model that generates estimation, for instance, for a validator or for a whole network, that generates sort of an attestation, you know, on chain that then people can sort of claim and then offset and get a digital offset certificate. And so that functionality in automating carbon offsetting in the system is also something that we've scoped and have done some preliminary engineering work on and is in demand. And so like priorities here, right?

So at the beginning, Regional Leisure 4.0 has a simple marketplace in which you can't put, there's not a matching engine and you can't do like complex buy and sell orders, et cetera, right? But just like a simple like almost like NFT marketplace. We just put it up, you set a price. Boom. So the question is, are we going to move first with this offsetting module, which is in demand and people want, or are we going to go with the order book decks? and I'd love feedback if community members are, you know, have strongly opinionated about which of those makes the most sense.

You can kind of only do one at the same time. But we have engineering resources to do both, just not at the same time. So they'll be, you know, and that's kind of why I put the order book decks. Actually, I put the order book decks in September. I think we can ship the offset module before that and still get to the order book system. because there is some scoping and there is momentum on this stuff it's not just sort of like conceptual you know there's like sort of engineering scoping use case and movement on on these things well i can't wait to see people like aping into these assets and you know like going full

degen on the on the regent order book decks it's going to be epic Greg thanks so much for coming on it's been a real pleasure and yeah it was like way way way overdue and And I feel like now I fully understand the whole scope of which you guys are doing. And, yeah, well, you know, we didn't get to talk about everything. I wish we could have went deeper in some of the technical things here. Maybe that's a conversation for the interop. Maybe you can come on my other podcast, which, for those of you listening who don't know about the interop, it's a podcast that I launched recently that dives deeper into some of the technical aspects of the cosmos ecosystem.

So maybe we can have a conversation there. And also the fund that you guys are launching. you know, maybe we can also do a follow-up to talk about the region ecosystem fund, which I think is launching soon. So, yeah, thanks again, and we'll talk again soon. Definitely. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for going on the ride with me.

I always laugh. People are like, give me a region network elevator pitch, and I always inevitably have to take the stairs. Sorry, there's no easy way. Send him a link to this. All right, man. Thanks a man. Absolutely.

It was such a pleasure I've been on. I'm super excited. I think there's like, you know, so much finally, like, you know, coming about. So I think the next year is going to be very cool for region network. And I'm sure at some point we should have a little back on and can like dive into some of the, you know, actually development's happening. Wow. I got a bold vintage. I forgot to think of the sweater, but yeah.

Okay. Now, now I have to show my region network tattoo on my back, right? Nice. Yeah. Regent makes that the best most comfortable blockchain t-shirts, by the way. All organic. Yeah. Those are some nice.

We didn't skimp on the t-shirts. Yeah, it's, I'd love to follow up on the conversation. I would also recommend on interop, maybe also on the epicenter, get Aaron on to talk Cosmos SDK. Super underappreciated, underrated. core part of like what is making cosmos what it is today and um you know he uh i know he'd hop on if you invited him and um totally he's really um been pulling the doing the heavy lifting on making sure that the cosmos SDK serves the whole community and you know and the needs of a region network

so yeah that could be interesting cool yeah all right thanks so much gregory thanks you guys Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen.

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