This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkila.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript that has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello, everyone. We are back at the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. Today with me there is my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everyone.

Simone Cicero:
And I also have with me today, Gregory Landua.

Gregory Landua:
Hey, everyone. Great to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Basically, Greg, if I can call you like that you are now the CEO. Right? It’s one week, you’re back at the CEO seat, am I right?

Gregory Landua:
Yeah, that’s right. Just a couple weeks back in the — I shifted roles from Chief Regeneration Officer Back to Chief Executive Officer of R&D Incorporated, which is one of the businesses involved in building Regen Network.

Simone Cicero:
Fantastic. So, then maybe you can just go ahead a little bit and give us a quick overview, let’s say of the basic aspects of Regen Network.

Gregory Landua:
Sure. Well, Regen Network is, I suppose, first and foremost, community dedicated to ecological and eventually planetary regeneration. And we’re built around a public ledger of ecological health, which is a public proof of stake blockchain called Regen Ledger, and are sort of an ecosystem of different organizations who are governing that public ledger, that protocol and building out the applications that use that public ledger in order to verify ecological state and do things like produce carbon credits is the most sort of, in terms of our — Most usual interaction with some marketplace right now is in serving the voluntary market for carbon credits, sort of high-quality carbon credits, and improving transparency in that marketplace. But as listeners may note, I didn’t start by saying Regen Network is a voluntary carbon business. That is sort of the easiest way to conceptualize how we’re interacting with the marketplace. But we really are quite committed to a little bit more transformative action taking place.

Simone Cicero:
Right. Basically, this is exactly what we want to investigate. So, what is the new thing here? So, when we were doing the quick conversation at the start, I told you I want to investigate, I want to understand really, what is the blockchain, the DLT technologies, and their different way to manage or trust and the information liability, and market optimization, pricing. What are they really bringing in terms of new enablers that they brought up so that you could think about Regen Network?

Gregory Landua:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there’s a couple of different attributes of blockchain, specifically, and perhaps DLT more broadly that are, I think, prerequisites for the kind of in sort of market engagement that we’re working on. So, just zooming out to use some sort of dry and boring economics speech here, essentially, we’re working to internalize previously externalized costs in the economy, and/or fund public goods, depending on which lens you’d like to use in any particular instance. So, funding public goods, and what do I mean by that? It’s a public good at this stage to stabilize the climate. Right? And working to stabilize the climate is something that’s quite hard to turn into a private good, meaning: I can’t exclude people from a healthy climate, everyone will benefit from that. I can’t exclude people from a healthy environment, everyone will benefit from that. These are notoriously challenging for, I guess, especially neoliberal economists to think about. And we’re working on the sort of market commons state interface in this problem of public goods. So, that’s sort of like an abstract economic explanation of the domain that we’re in. And what do blockchains — I mean, I think your question here is, what specifically about a blockchain or a distributed ledger is beneficial in that domain.

So, I would answer that in the following way: in order to do accounting around a public good or commons, for instance, you need to be able to have pre-competitive information parity. Actors need access to the same knowledge, the way that I guess, in quotes capitalism, or our current economy works is that there’s every incentive if you have access to information that other members of society don’t have access to take advantage of that to the fullest. And we see that happening in the way that — in sort of like disinformation, misinformation, campaigns on social media. We see that in the way that climate change, as it is right now is an artifact of the science that was funded by the petroleum industry back in the 70s that told us all about everything we needed to know about atmospheric carbon’s effect on — and the greenhouse effect. All of this stuff was well-known, but the information was not available to the democratic decision-making mechanisms in society. And petroleum companies made the decision to optimize their short-term gains and keep that information to themselves.

So, clearly, people having access to ecological state information, the basic information of how our biosphere is, is health-wise. Our belief is that that needs to be radically democratized and accessible and that the only real way to do that is not to have sort of privately funded institutional science at the backbone. That’s how we got into this mess. That model of societal sense-making is broken. There’s too much perverse incentive in that system. So, we need to redesign the game itself, the mechanisms and the incentives around information sharing as the base layer of market signals, commons, management, policy, all of that needs to be reinvented. And blockchain has attributes that are transformative in that environment. One is you have a censorship-proof public ledger in which the important information is equally accessible to all parties, at least — There’s some hand waving taking place there and there’s a lot of details to dive into about what that actually means. The other is the ability to program incentives and to govern algorithms. And this is actually where I think blockchain really shines.

I think the ubiquitous access in public sort of a commons approach to information access is very important. But even more important, in my mind is the ability of users to govern the algorithms that govern them. And what do I mean by that? I mean, we can create censure and incentives, the carrot and the stick around economic relationships and program that in, in a transparent way to a state machine or a blockchain and that can allow everyone who opts in to those contracts or relationships, to also tweak and change and govern and upgrade the carrots and the sticks that are transparently influencing the behavior in order to ensure that it’s connected to the health of the commons that everybody is relying on for our basic needs as humans and beyond just human needs. Not just anthropocentric needs, the needs of the planet as a whole system. So, I’m going to pause there and let you guide me a little more. That was probably quite a mindful.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. I will say my reflection is and I think you can tag on to that is that I am taking a little bit the position of the layman person here because the distributed ledger is something that is sometimes not very easily accessible. So, what I was thinking about when you spoke is if things are transparent, are they accessible? And like how do people benefit from information that might be very complex? And how do you approach that?

Gregory Landua:
That’s a good question. That’s a fantastic question. I mean, our thesis and it’s going to take some time to get there, but our thesis is that carbon markets, for instance, to just use a very concrete example where we’re working right now and having some success. Carbon markets, the price for any stakeholder in the world to audit a carbon claim should be as close to zero as possible. So, exactly as you’re saying, everyone — in order for information parody to be real, you do need to — it can’t just be sort of transparency of the esoteric mathematical models, data sets, etc, that are behind, for instance, a carbon claim because most people can’t make any sense of that. That’s where — and there’s a lot of work to do. But having — and it’s sort of a foundation, that stuff does need to be — that data that underpins a claim so that we can make sense of it does need to be appropriately managed so that it’s accessible by multiple parties so that there’s a little bit of an intersubjective verification or sense-making that takes place.

And that whole little process of sort of digesting raw data, and turning it into knowledge, and then turning that knowledge into understanding and then wisdom, right, that sort of flow needs to be well designed and have the right mechanisms for inclusion and access and engagement at every level, so that the wisdom that pops out, that is maybe the meme on the internet. And there’s all sorts of really horrible memes out there, like because of this, right? There’s all these meme — like cows are bad for the climate. It’s a great example. Controversial statement, that’s a horrible meme and completely inaccurate. But there is not parity of information, in order to make a judgement about how that understanding was created. And so it ends up creating the strange polarized sort of dynamics.

Simone Cicero:
I have so many questions, I have so many reflections. Just one is: why a platform for this process? And also, this process is going to happen, because what I like about the problem — let’s say the space that you guys have been targeting — is that no matter what, we need to take the carbon out of the atmosphere. So, it’s there, it’s a problem that is there. It’s imminent. You cannot just close your eyes, it doesn’t disappear. It’s not about what you wear or what you eat. It’s really about our survival. And I think it’s interesting to know what you think about your role in midwifing these into the world. So, for example, if I remember where you got this major agreement with Microsoft, am I right?

Gregory Landua:
Yeah. Well, we sold our first set of pilot carbon credits that were sort of built from first principles of direct measurement of the soil and the ecosystem health in a pilot project that we did in New South Wales, Australia. We sold those to Microsoft as part of their commitment to offsetting all of their carbon emissions.

Simone Cicero:
Right, which is essentially what I mean when I mean it’s like probably the most advanced expression of capitalism at the moment. So, we’re talking about different systems of value creation that are emerging on top of what we have in society. So, what is — and you’re building in this platform for this to happen which is, I don’t think it’s just about the data, the transparency, and the information, but it’s also about the other primitives that you are developing such as these contracts, for example, that you — and the way that the ecosystem can create new contracts to account for the real work that gets done on the field in really regenerating our soils. And so if you can speak about that a little bit, what do you do as a platform, what do you see as beyond the information and the transparency.

Gregory Landua:
So, just — I’m in heated agreement about the existential nature of the problem. It’s a beautiful opportunity for humans to galvanize in order to solve a concrete real existential problem through social coordination and ecological stewardship. So, our platform is — our aim is to empower the kind of social coordination that’s necessary to monitor, monitor, and verify ecological state and to create agreements between parties about stewardship of ecological state. The current market conditions and this sort of advanced late-stage capitalism that we’re in means that there’s a really, really robust market for voluntary carbon offsetting. That is the most simple way to think about because there’s this active vibrant market, it’s maybe easier for people to conceptualize what I’m talking about, where there’s a set of stakeholders, there’s Microsoft, on one side, there’s a Land Steward on the other, there’s a monitor and a verifier. And those people are coming together to make a contract about — to determine did change happen, and what is the value of that change? And how do we monitor that change in an ongoing way? What are the risks, liabilities, and agreements around it?

And what we’re trying to do is make it so that that process of multiple stakeholders who may be adversarial, coming together to place the appropriate value on something that benefits all of them, namely, ecological health, and to do so in the most seamless, most efficient, and highest quality way. And that’s what Regen Network as a community, that’s what we’re trying to build together. So, it’s supporting iteration around that, supporting different — I would like to see more qualitative agreements. What if we were making agreements about beauty and not just carbon quantification? That’s fantastic. That’s important, right? That’s important work. At a pattern level, though, I don’t see it as too terribly different from people making an agreement about a quantified statement of carbon sequestration in the soil, right. The same process of a group of humans coming together and formalizing an agreement about ecological state that, as you noted, is an existential demand. We have to do this as a species, right. So, what we’re trying to do is, is build the tools and access to the tools and governance of those tools, and build a very strong, vibrant community around that as sort of like a foundation for the next economy. That’s emerging right now. And hopefully, by doing so I believe that is the art of midwifing this new regenerative economy that’s being born.

Simone Cicero:
Right. And in the concept of a platform, the reason let’s say, inside this concept, there is the idea of scale. So, that’s at least a part of the picture. So, I was thinking about how to make it not transactional, or how to make it, if you want, place-based this process. So how we can make this process happening in a place-based way. You know, I was talking with this friend last week, and we were talking about a kind of organizational development project for a network of farmers that are farming wheat, here in Italy. And he kind of, as a reaction to my reflection on developing the organizational side and the new possibilities, he was having a reaction like to say, “Yes, but I live here. These are my reasons, so I cannot accelerate it because I’m living in the place.” Maybe it’s something that our human generation cannot really perceive anymore. So, my question will be, how do you scale that? For example, can I invest into Regen Network, myself here, or someone else in another place? What is the attraction for us to invest in to Regen Network? And the other point will be, how do you build the capabilities for this to happen in the place? Because this is about the place. What do you think about that?

Gregory Landua:
Yeah. No, I think you’re hitting the nail right on the head. So, just practically speaking, at this moment in time, you cannot invest in Regen Network. But in the very near future, now that our main net is live and everything else, Regen tokens will be freely accessible, essentially, to anyone on the globe, to be able to sort of buy-in and become a stakeholder. Or alternative to buying in, and I think this is a huge importance, we also understand that by making governance only accessible through sort of a transactional purchase, we may, in fact, or likely will or definitely will alienate the various stakeholders who most need to have a stake at the table in order to ensure that this roots firmly into place, as you’re noting. And so about 30% of the 30 million tokens of the 100 million initial token supply, which represents — each token represents one vote in the governance of this public protocol is set aside and stewarded by Regen Foundation in order to endow land stewards, science groups, indigenous people, even landscapes. We’re talking with landscapes that have gotten rights — have followed the rights of nature-based creation of corporate persons to engage with the current legal social matrix of the world.

So, mountains, rivers, lakes, these places and the people who steward the places and the people who help make sense of, so that a larger community can sort of understand what’s happening somewhere, are all included in our sort of stakeholder map in a very tangible way. Meaning, these people are invited, and we are putting significant money and time into building — into sort of crossing the digital divide so that people can have a meaningful option at a local level to govern the global ecological ledger. Clearly, we have to have a unified planetary accounting system. Clearly, we also need a place-based watershed scale by regional-scale governance of ecosystems and engagement of stakeholders. I think sort of the cosmo-local dynamic there, the global-local planetary watershed nested relationship, I don’t even really see a dichotomy there. I see a deep complementarity. So, yeah, I’ll pause there and see where you’d like to guide me.

Simone Cicero:
I want to drop a little bit of spice in the conversation, let’s say. You said, for example, the first thing you said now we clearly need a global accounting system. If I challenged that, wouldn’t this work with the opposite perspective of multiple polar antagonistic, localities economies?

Gregory Landua:
I mean, what we’re building is a polycentric, multi-local grassroots approach to a global accounting system. I mean, that’s what we’re doing. But they have to — you can’t achieve — Jason Snyder and I were sort of talking about this. I was trying to push on this like, I think this false, this strange, false dichotomy that stems I think it’s a meme in the like, in the localist movement, or and in the commons movement around. There’s no dichotomy there, I don’t think, that it’s nested and not in opposition. They’re different scales, but they have to — A tree is both rooted in place and doing exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen with a pool, a global pool of atmosphere that is swirling around the globe in wind, right? So, this is very opposite if we look at, or this is very obvious if we look out the window, it’s maybe more counterintuitive, if we’re thinking about institution design.

Simone Cicero:
Right. I totally wanted to confirm that, for example, we had this conversation with Indy Johar a few months ago, when he pointed out even the intrinsic nature that the commons have to be premised on the existence of an in-group and an out-group and instead, DLT, for example, technologies, he was pointing out that they were pushing contracting from one-to-one to end-to-end, and to some extent, remove the information symmetries that you were talking about. And in this way, essentially, remove this idea of an out-group, and in-group, because if we are all part of the same system, let’s say, this global accounting, so I think you’re right, it’s going to open up several layers and it’s interesting the work you’re doing, because you’re really connecting those layers. I think this is the key point that emerges. So, with these land stewards, for example, and these contracts, and the fact that you actually own the infrastructure in a distributed way, I think you are creating this global thing, by connecting these local capabilities. So, I think the pattern is very interesting. And the question again, will be on the capability. So, it’s right, we have the marketplace, but then do we have the farmers? That’s the point that maybe you can explore a little bit more. What are your thoughts in terms of creating the capabilities that we use the platform?

Gregory Landua:
Well, farmers seem to be very into it. We have put zero effort into attracting farmers to our platform, and have a lot of farmers signaling interest or enrolling and engaging in the process to bring their soil carbon or biodiversity or water quality to market. And part of that is because we didn’t — we haven’t — I mean, listeners who are familiar with my work will know this, and people who aren’t won’t, but my background is working in agroecology, permaculture, agroforestry for more than a decade before Regen Network was started. So, I’m not a sort of breathless techno-utopian Silicon Valley bro, really, in my background in any way. I’m working with smallholder farmers in cocoa and coffee and other systems for my whole adult life, really.

So, what that means is we have a lot of strong relationships with the Land Steward community globally. And what that means is that this could be considered — Regen Network could be considered as an attempt from that community, which I would identify with, to create the right infrastructure for agreements between that community and the rest of the world. I think that’s probably a pretty accurate way to think about the origin story of Regen Network and the bias and sort of like design boundaries that we have had going into these questions about how to use technology, how to engage with governance. And just to circle back to this comment about what Johar had talked about in terms of in-group out-group dynamics, I think it’s going to be nested, overlapping, and complex. That’s the nature of like a polyvalent, or polycentric approach to governance. I believe it’s just an accurate representation of both how the world works, just from a living systems perspective, and therefore, what design needs to look like.

It’s interesting, I do think there is a reinvention of what the commons are and what they mean, to be not just like a set of families that share governance over a pasture. But also that being nested into a global commons, a bioregional commons, and different types of membership and different types of governance and sort of a distinction of rights and responsibilities that’s much more granular. And I think, to just sort of anchor a place where I think there’s a lot of interesting innovation taking place around this, that I have been inspired by, as Glenn Weil and the radical exchange community, I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle and in the discourse around how they’re thinking about the relationship between, for instance, private property, individuals, commons, and markets, which I think is counterintuitive at this stage that where most of the discourse has been dominated for many years by sort of classical or neoliberal economics, or this like strange polar opposite, it appears to be polar opposite sort of socialist, communist, the left versus the right. And I don’t think that’s at all useful framing for things, basically. Yeah.

Simone Cicero:
Right. No. So, essentially, I think it’s really interesting when you said it’s like, the ecosystem brought you into existence because the players in the ecosystem needed technology, if I got it well. And this idea that we can connect the technological side with the actual ecosystemic side of the relationships in this sovereign way, by essentially bringing the technology into existence as an expression of the maturity of the ecosystem. I think it’s really a testament to how low the transaction costs into this economy, it is now. And anyways, I think Stina, you wanted to ask about some dynamics that may play out in this transition?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. So, I think I wanted to tag on to these transaction costs that you’re talking about. So, transaction costs are going down. So, that means that also the cost of bureaucracy and the cost of organizing is going down, right. And this is something that you’re really playing in, in that space. So, what I’m curious to know is what happens then to existing dominant structures and players? And how do you relate with them? So, I’m thinking there have been like global institutions that have been trying to wrap their heads around those challenges, let’s say not very successfully, so far. And then there are of course, on the other spectrum, also maybe dominant, agro-industry players who may be — I don’t know if they are in the way of what you’re trying to do. And I am just very curious to know how you relate to both those existing like, let’s say global giants in the space that you’re trying to — I don’t know if disrupt is the right term, but I’m sure you understand what I mean, and can pick it up from here.

Gregory Landua:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, they will evolve or they will die. Not to put too fine a point on it. And it’s not just because — it’s not like we will do this, this is the emergent phenomenon. As you noted, transaction costs are going down, at least right now. I mean, there could be disruption to that trend. But organizing is becoming easier. It’s also demanded of us that we transform our organizational capacity to face existential problems and that we have place-based local regenerative outcomes that aggregated a planetary scale, these are things — it’s not like, Regen Net — That’s the context that we’re emerging as a living system response to what’s happening, as a community response to what’s happening. Either institutions will be capable of transforming and adapting and engaging with that reality and becoming useful. I think that this is the thing, you know, Charles Darwin and sort of the interpretation of social Darwinism is always survival of the fittest. But that’s not really what Darwin said. If you go read Darwin, he’s talking about survival of the fit. Meaning, how well does an organism weave itself into deeply mutual relationships with the ecosystem? Right.

And so resilience is a function of how useful you are to the health of the hole, and the specific members that make up the hole. And so institutions, I think that the imperative in the 21st century for institutions to be relevant is out cooperate the competition. That’s our North Star, that is our motto at Regen Network, out cooperate the competition. If institutions, transnational corporations cannot meaningfully produce public goods and minimize their externalized costs, they will become irrelevant, because they have to become irrelevant because that’s the reality. It’s the existential empirical reality that we’re all in. And if they continue to be inefficient, and ineffective at that, and even put people’s lives and the planet at risk, they’ll be taken out of the system, or they’ll destroy the system. And because it’s that clear and clear cut, in my opinion, I think it will go well. It has to go well.

Simone Cicero:
But maybe a question is, then how you address it with currency by trans-nationalizing it instead of bounding it with context?

Gregory Landua:
Well, I don’t think it’s either-or. Again, I mean, I would just invite us to sort of revisit this — I think embedded in this question is sort of a way of thinking about moneyness. And transactional versus non-transactional relationships. And I think by designing and giving governance over the redesign of the transactional sort of matrix and incentives structure in one way you can conceptualize Regen Network as a decentral bank. Meaning, we have a central, sort of, in quotes currency. But what that currency is, it’s not really a currency. It’s a digital object that gives governance rights. So, maybe it’s more like a taxi medallion in New York City that gives you the rights to do work on the network, it gives you the rights to do work, to write to the public ledger. That’s what the token gives you rights to.

Not only does it give you the rights like a toll token to go across a bridge, but it also gives you the rights to govern the bridge or to govern the ecosystem of taxi drivers, or whatever it is. So, it’s this dual-purpose, governance, and utility of public infrastructure. Those are the rights of the Regen token, right. That’s what it does, it’s utility. So, it allows us to decide where we want to create transactional incentives, where we want to tax ourselves or incentivize ourselves, subsidize ourselves, and where we want to create space, that’s non-transactional. So, it actually gives agency, I believe in a way that is maybe more akin to the way that — Money hasn’t always just been money.

You know, if we look back in time, to, for instance, the histories of this that I’m most familiar with are moneyness expressing itself in sort of Native American culture. You have things like wampum, which became the money of the eastern seaboard of what has now become the United States. It was the money for a long time. Even during the colonial period, people would buy land or services, or goods with Shell beads, right, with wampum. But wampum was also what created the history of people’s relationship to the earth, the agreements between people and the earth, the agreements between people and other people in the form of the social contract of like a treaty. So, a wampum belt was like a history of the lineage. It also could be generated as a treaty between people. It was also used to sort of — those belts were sort of metabolized and traded as currency.

So, there’s a clear example of the multivalent nature that currency can have. And I believe that’s some of the design inspiration we’ve taken for thinking about the Regen token itself as the governance token, the token that allows you to create these digital treaties that express a relationship with place, that parties who benefit from that are being creating social contracts around. So, I don’t know if that’s directly to your point.

Simone Cicero:
Really on point because sometimes when I also host conversations on complexity thinking and I recently had, for example, my friend Nora that joined us, Nora Bateson, and we had Dave Snowden as well, and others. So, the point is, often and especially I think with certain approaches to complexity is always about — then there is a bottom line where we have to organize. So, we cannot, not rely on technology, even if it’s a kind of rational, mechanistic approach to solving the problem. What do you think about that? To add some bits, maybe it’s much more about a question of culture. What do we want to build in the end is this culture of place-based-ness of presence in the community, in the landscape, something that for some reasons, we lost recently through technology. So, I think we are coming back, for example, to the reflections of Yuk Hui when he talks about cosmo techniques, so developing a place-based thesis to using technology to really change how we organize and transcend the coup de sac, let’s say that we seem to be in post-modernity and capitalism.

Gregory Landua:
Well, look, technology, there’s sort of a double helix sort of co-emergent relationship, obviously, between culture and technology. But I think technology is most — It’s an ouroboros or whatever, the serpent is eating its tail. But it’s not technology is not just, I think many technologists would say technology is transforming culture. And I would say, I think it’s maybe more accurate to think about technology as an artifact of culture. Technology is emerging out of the culture. And so if you have a culture that is fleeing from itself, if you have a culture that is steeped in trauma and violence, and running as fast as it can to some painless nowhere land that doesn’t exist, that technology will have certain attributes. And it will have certain consequences because it’s coming out of a culture that is disembodied and terrified. If you have technology that’s emerging out of a culture of deep respect and responsibility and care, that technology will look very, very different, but they may be trying to approach the same existential conditions, right.

So, if you have technology stemming from a disembodied terror of the planet, that’s trying to think about to create an artifact that helps safeguard humans living on Earth, you get a direct giant — you spend a bunch of money on direct air capture machines. And also, just to be frank you get what we have now, with carbon markets, etc. I believe what’s emerging, the culture, at least, that I partially come from, and this is going to be multivalent, because I’m also — I’m a millennial. I grew up in a fairly lower middle class, middle-class family, I’ve all of that enculturated calcified elements. So, I can’t claim to be sort of like — I’m not claiming to be outside of that, right, I’m embedded in that. And the culture that I’m choosing to try to invoke and devote my agency to growing is one of a place-based responsibility, reciprocity, and care. And I think that that resonates with most of the community that has been attracted to Regen Network, and we’re attempting to regenerate a set of artifacts, technological artifacts.

And to use the technological artifacts that have been created by a different culture, to reinvent them and to use them. For this question of agreements about ecological health. And some of those agreements because this is a global problem will be made with people who are not of our culture. And that’s the nature of this is where the strict localism starts to fall flat, you have to be able to relate to “the other”. We have to be able to create a common understanding of planetary thresholds. And we have to ground action with our neighbors in a single place. There is no dichotomy there. It’s nested. So, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’m speaking exactly to your point again. But hopefully.

Simone Cicero:
Well, right. I mean, there is so much that you covered and I really, I think I would like to give a little final twist to the conversation before we edge towards closing. And I wanted to explore with you a bit more the technological and technical perspective as a counterpart, let’s say. So, I wanted to — if I’m not wrong region network is based on a proof of stake hybrid model. Also, do you also have some kind of additional validation, additional elements of validation from if I’m not wrong, maybe you can explore a little bit on that. And I wanted to check with you, for example, different perspectives like perspective, and for example, the proof of work perspective. Why not those perspectives, and instead, going for a proof of stake hybrid model, like you chose to?

Gregory Landua:
Sure. Yeah. So, we’re a hybrid proof of stake model. From a mechanism and technological perspective, we’re pretty just straight vanilla proof of stake. But we solved some of the issues that we saw with proof of stake to begin with, with our token distribution strategy. So, having sort of 30% — Well, really 35%, which is essentially a Byzantine veto, you can halt the chain with that being sort of strictly distributed to entities with identity that don’t have a transactional relationship with getting those tokens is our first step in sort of transforming some of the ways that we think proof of stake as a model fall short.

I also think there’s a lot of really exciting innovation to do that we plan on engaging our community with. So, I think it’s problematic to think of protocol design as sort of finished. At least in our case, we’re very keen to be evolving the consensus mechanism, and the governance, sort of growing a capability and capacity in our community to tune the governance mechanism of the network to what is needed. Proof of stake is workable, this is one of the reasons why we used it. It’s workable, it’s transparent, it has the right data availability, and Byzantine fault-tolerant guarantees that we think are necessary. It has the right collision resistance or sort of ability to enforce no double-counting that we think was essential. And it’s enormously energy efficient. Our blockchain, operating with nodes on every continent now.

Simone Cicero:
The point that I get from you, is the ecosystem was more mature, basically.

Gregory Landua:
It’s much more mature. First of all, if we’re juxtaposing our choice with the like why not Holochain, yeah.

Simone Cicero:
No, that’s funny because Stina, I was getting crazy. And because Stina told me, I’m lost. And I thought if Stina’s lost, maybe half of our listeners are going to be lost talking about this. And I think the point is clear. You choose to go for proof of stake hybrid on Ethereum blockchain, because — am I right, is it Ethereum blockchain?

Gregory Landua:
No, we’re not in Ethereum blockchain. So, we’re built on the cosmos SDK, the cosmos SDK is the most used public proof of stake blockchain framework. Our engineering team, also is the maintainer for the SDK. So, there’s about 200 blockchains, using the cosmos SDK with a combined market cap right now. Well, there’s been some corrections last few days, but between 80 and $100 billion is secured by the cosmos SDK. So, we have a sovereign proof of stake blockchain that can communicate with other sovereign proof of stake blockchain. So, in that way, it’s very similar to the Holochain approach where you’re not enforcing a global consensus, right. But it’s also practically speaking, there are different — everything is a trade-off. So, we’ve made different trade-offs than the Holochain community. We believe we’ve chosen the right trade-offs for our use case. The Holochain community, I think, is doing interesting things. That technology was just, frankly, nowhere near mature enough to even consider using. I’m very excited to see what the Holochain community is going to do. And I fully think that there can be pretty exciting integrations and complementarity.

Proof of work is almost hardly worth mentioning. I mean, it’s kind of crazy. I mean, look, some amount of proof of work in the larger ecosystem, crypto-economic ecosystem, hopefully, even just like the broader planetary sort of accounting system; some amount of proof of work, I think is actually smart. The level of proof of work that the Bitcoin blockchain uses to sort of create a store of value and make it possible to transfer that value, I think is totally crazy.

Simone Cicero:
So, let me get back on this in a moment. One thing that I wanted to double click on is that when I said Ethereum, because I don’t know what kind of connections my brain was doing. But Ethereum is actually moving from the proof of work let’s say side onto the proof of stake side. So, that’s why I was doing this connection. But essentially, that’s interesting because sometimes we say the Ethereum ecosystem, but then maybe we have to talk about the proof of stake ecosystem, essentially, at least in terms of intentions. And then let me get back to the proof of work thing so I was about to ask you, and then maybe we edge towards the closure of the conversation, but I was about to ask you, essentially, you said some proof of work is acceptable, right. And so I was about to ask you in a provocative way, how much then? And the other question that I wanted to ask you is, once we have the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain, is it worth doing basically every information publication on the blockchain instead of doing it on other places?

Gregory Landua:
So, first, I’ll answer how much is enough. I mean, there’s a blockchain called — a sort of smaller market cap blockchain called Zilliqa, which is quite a cool hybrid of sort of proof of stake, proof of work, which I think can give us an example of the usefulness of having proof of work in the system in a sort of small and lightweight way that does not use very much, really doesn’t use very much extra energy at all, but provides sort of the cryptographic problem-solving randomness and timekeeping. Proof of work does a great job of timekeeping, in a way that proof of stake has trouble with, right, because there’s a consensus and Holochain, like they don’t care about consensus, but that that’s a trade-off, even though in their marketing, they would like us to believe it’s not. It’s a trade-off and it creates a bunch of problems.

So, having a shared time as a standard allows you to have timestamps, which allows you to create sort of proof of provenance around claims, for instance, to ensure that they’re not being counterfeited, right. And so proof of work can be very useful in certain ways. What’s the exact amount of proof of work that’s right at a global scale? I don’t. I think in the long run, there will probably be a proof of work blockchain. It seems to me like a pretty safe bet it will be Bitcoin, and I hope that they make some decisions to make it significantly more efficient. And I don’t think this sort of like hand-wavy, Bitcoin is going to destroy the world because of its energy usage is at all. You know, I mean, I think there’s an efficiency issue and I don’t really hold or love Bitcoin.

Simone Cicero:
That’s interesting that you insist on this efficiency issue. Can you tell me a bit more where do you see the inefficiencies in the Bitcoin blockchain?

Gregory Landua:
It’s inefficient from my perspective. It’s all what you’re optimizing for. If you’re optimizing for the cheapness of energy, right, and your ability to produce — to run computers to do to optimize your hash rate, then placing mining operations in northern China where they use a bunch of coal, and there’s corrupt — sort of a corrupt regime that they can subsidize Bitcoin mining makes a lot of sense. But it’s not greenhouse gas efficient. It’s sort of — it’s efficient in the relationship between the fiat money cost of buying energy, and the price of Bitcoin. That’s what’s being optimized for. But the larger energy efficiency, and sort of like the efficiency of the network’s ability to produce a public good, which is a sort of like a store of value, that is censorship proof and units of account that can be transferred, that is censorship proof, which is its value proposition. If you’re optimizing it for efficiency for the greenhouse gas emissions to provide those things as the value proposition, Bitcoin’s failing.

Simone Cicero:
In general, I think because it’s so expensive, that essentially, once we have discovered the technology, the technology has this huge potential, let’s say to remove a lot of bureaucracy infrastructure from our society. So, now we have the technology and we’re not using it for this. We are using it for other things, just finance basically. So, the point is, for example, when you said it will push you to consume coal, for example, because it’s cheaper. Well, actually, I think solar energy is even cheaper than coal. So, why should we go for coal or maybe people will — depends. What I mean is, it’s immersed in the same let’s say dynamics that cover the whole economy. So, at the end of the day, you’re talking about politics and freedom of speech because you cannot use power for doing mining. Either you prohibit it, otherwise, the blockchain is there. And so I think we’re going to use it.

And this doesn’t mean that, for example, all the smart contracting needs to happen on their blockchain. That’s another point. Because I think it’s a matter of the price that also this transaction management has in terms of tariffs, and so on. But it’s interesting, I think in the long term, it’s really hard not to see the potential of the blockchain, the Bitcoin proof of work blockchain to host most of the world’s information. And if you look at the carbon footprint it has versus the work, the job that can do for humanity, it’s a fairly small carbon footprint. That’s the point at the time that I’m raising. But not as a critique of your choosing this blockchain at the moment. And it’s also interesting to look into what you said about the ecosystem maturity, I think.

Gregory Landua:
Feasibility of using the Bitcoin blockchain to host all the world’s information is limited. But using the Bitcoin blockchain to anchor or Ethereum blockchain, which actually seems like it’s maybe a more likely scenario. Or I mean, really, in the cosmos, the cosmos approach here is that it’s going to be an internet of blockchains. There’s no one chain to rule them all. There won’t be. It’s impossible, and crazy to think that there will be. They’ll each have their — there’ll be a lot of different niches and roles. And there’s a bunch of reasons I could get into why Bitcoin is not going to be the one and nor will Ethereum, but they’ll both play important roles. And I do agree that if you think about the potential of what just the Bitcoin blockchain alone offers to the world in terms of utility, versus its energy usage, it’s probably still net a bargain. And what I said before is true, also, that if you’re thinking the way I am, it’s not optimized.

The value that it’s producing is not optimized the right way. I do think that we’re going to see competitive market forces start to push Bitcoin miners to — and I think you were alluding to this — to be sort of competing and driving renewable energy. I mean, I think that that’s a likely — that is already happening. I also think that by and large, there’s a lot of arguments coming from that side that are maybe a little flimsy. It’s a very interesting polemic right now around the Bitcoin bad, Bitcoin good. I think the answer it’s actually sort of in the middle. Nor do I think Bitcoin is an inevitability. Actually, it could get out-competed, still. So, anyway, it’s complex and interesting. I don’t at all disagree with anything you’re saying about it’s sort of a bargain for the transformative potential it offers to society. I think that’s true.

Simone Cicero:
Right. And it’s interesting also to look into what layer so let’s say of this stock that I was thinking to define a value chain. But maybe it’s more like to be seen as a — I don’t know what to say — but basically a Maslow version of the value chain where the innovation will move and to what extent it’s going to be in contracts, it’s going to be in organizational forms, it’s going to be in, don’t know what kind of financial tools where it’s going to be this innovation happening on top of these foundational layers. By the way, it was like a fairly mind-blowing conversation. I think we really moved the needle in terms of understanding how deep the rabbit hole of organizing in the 21st century is. So, really, thanks so much for the great insights.

Gregory Landua:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Yeah, I’m grateful for the work that you all are doing in the world and excited to have a deep dive down the rabbit hole here.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. When you have the wisdom part of the last part of the conversation that is accessible in a meme then I’m very happily watching that.

Simone Cicero:
That’s going to be our challenge. I think we should take on this challenge, make a meme out of this.

Stina Heikkila:
Definitely.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much. Anything just last-minute you want to add on news to look for or any special things for us to look up?

Gregory Landua:
Stay tuned, we’ll be having sort of a public accessible ability for Regen tokens for people who want to dive in to helping co-create and govern this big experiment with us to unleash social coordination potential for planetary regeneration. And I would certainly invite people who this conversation, enlivened or upset if you had a response that you’re interested in engaging more, either direction, actually, it’s fine, to join us over on our discord. We have a pretty lively community over there, just really welcome voices and engagement. And that’s a good conduit to engage with the different groups of people all over the world. From sort of Amazonian indigenous people to DevOps in India to validators all around the world and really everything in between we who are all coming together to think about this problem set around how do we make it accessible, lower transaction cost around ecological state claims and assets and make it possible for people to sort of govern the commons and interact with the markets in the best way for ecological health.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much again. And to our listeners, catch up soon.