Platform for Ecological Regeneration — with Gregory Landua

Podcast Notes

Today’s we’re joined by Gregory Landua, co-founder and CEO of Regen Network. Regen Network is leading the way towards tracking and funding ecological regeneration and carbon sequestration in ecosystems by leveraging remote sensing, machine learning and blockchain technology.

Regen Network adopts a very interesting approach to solving the large scale coordination needed for this to happen: land stewards and funders subscribe to customizable smart contracts, and the impacts of the regenerative practices is objectivized through community independent and data based verification. This eventually enables rewards for verified positive changes.

Gregory Landua has a long history in the regeneration community, not the least by being a tropical agroforestry farm owner and manager, assisting farms and communities in a variety of climate zones as a permaculture designer and — according to his words — Regen Network was indeed called into existence by the growing maturity of the regenerative agriculture ecosystem.

Tune into this conversation to learn more about auditing carbon claims, the role of information parity, proof of stake vs. proof of work, the issue with ‘moneyness’, and how Regen Network represents an important case study for the realization of polycentric, blockchain based approaches to ecosystem mobilization.

To find out more about Greg’s work:

• Website: https://www.regen.network/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-landua-4953b29/
• Papers written by Gregory:
  https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/WhitePaper.pdf
  https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Economics.pdf
  http://www.terra-genesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Levels-of-Regenerative-Agriculture-1.pdf
• Join the Regen Network Discord channel: https://discord.gg/HedKw7etJt

Other references and mentions:

• Ep. 10 Indy Johar — Redrawing the Human Development thesis for the 21st Century: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/redrawing-the-human-development-thesis-for-the-21st-century-with-indy-johar-5d45d2770170
• RadicalxChange: https://www.radicalxchange.org/
• S2 Ep. 13 Nora Bateson — Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/trans-contextual-organizing-shifting-perceptions-with-nora-bateson-5a2f233b9d23
• S2 Ep. 5 Dave Snowden — Building Scalable Organizations that can Deal with Uncertainty: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/with-dave-snowden-88ef04b7fadb
• Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, 2016: https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-China-Cosmotechnics/dp/0995455007

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 7 April 2021.

Key Insights

1. Pre-competitive information parity is essential in order to do accounting around public goods or commons and this is what Regen Network is contributing towards, by radically democratizing access to information about “ecological state”. In their approach, blockchain contributes to this by providing a censorship-proof public ledger, in which the important information is equally accessible to all parties. But beyond information parity, Gregory highlights the importance of influencing “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, beyond just human needs”. Finally, there is important work to be done around digesting raw data and turning it into knowledge, and then turning that knowledge into understanding and then wisdom and that flow needs to be well designed. Essentially, it’s about fixing our broken collective sense-making.

•  Listen to Gregory talk about how Regen Network contributes to information parity around min 5:37.

2. Gregory alludes to the idea that there is an ongoing reinvention of what the commons are and what they mean, towards being “nested into global commons, 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”. He sees a deep complementarity between the global and the local and place-based (through cosmo-local dynamics), as well as between the transactional and non-transactional. What Regen Network does is summon people to come together to discuss and formalize agreements about ecological state that — as Simone also stressed in the episode — is an existential demand. Regen Tokens, which enables to transact around verified ecological state are both going to be investable and one part (30–35%) set aside and stewarded by Regen Foundation in order to endow land stewards, science groups, indigenous people, and even landscapes.

•  Listen to the discussion around place-based and global, as well as transactional and non-transactional, dynamics from around min 16:39.

3. Simone and Gregory have a passionate debate on the Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work dichotomy and Gregory makes it clear that Regen Network chose to run its smart contract infrastructure on a sovereign PoS blockchain contented to the Cosmos SDK because of the maturity of the ecosystem around PoS vs — for example — the lack of maturity of the Holochain community (at least at the time of launch). The conversation then continues into exploring the possible interplay between Bitcoin’s PoW blockchain and others and explores a potential intrinsic value and differences between PoW and PoS over the long term.

•  Listen to the discussion on Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work from min 46:49.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.