We're back! SJ Edition 2

• 🔥 The New Stuff: We’ve got to address Yuga Labs’ metaverse lot-drop

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: Words. Definitions. Getting simple and concise in regen is 🔥

• 🧠 The Deep Stuff: Bringing back instruments from the 💀 to fund public goods

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: Celo (+more) x regen in the Barichara region

• 📜 The Long Stuff: Alpha from Balaji on how to start a new state: It’s regen totems #1

• 🏫 The Jobs Stuff: Openings at Yuga temporarily on-hold while HR kicks back in Bora Bora with the founders. Out of Office set to expire in 2040 😉

In $ETH, $200m (huge!) was spent on gas fees during the Otherdeed mint. $300m in revenue for Yuga Labs, but for a supposedly decentralised NFT space, a huge amount of $ETH is now concentrated in one company and just four collections (BAYC, MAYC, BAKC & Otherdeeds). 😳

Over on $BTC, devs and investors are fretting about BIP119. Jeremy Rubin’s proposal #119 has upset some people, who see it as rushed, and potentially limiting $BTC's utility in the future.

But, it’s not all crisis in Bitcoin, and NFT Empire/Mordor stuff this week. There’s good stuff too, like the Optimism launch/airdrop news and the growing buzz around DAOs and regen communities that create pathways for people into Web3. The likes of Civics Unplugged, and Dream Dao (who are training and funding regen-minded GenZ to build and lead in Web3), not to mention the awesome Invisible College, are fulfilling an important coordination function:

• Web3 needs to be demystified (crypto can be scary!)

• People from diverse backgrounds need to be onboarded

• That way DAOs can be inclusive, and led from a broad base

• Web2 education is expensive (student loans ffs)

• But the pathway to entering, building and guiding Web3 doesn’t have to be

• Bonus: onboarding increases the probability that the benefits of early entry into the third age of the internet are far more equally distributed, than they were in the second.

Definitions are important. Words are importanter.

And now Kevin Owocki, in Ch.11 of the GreenPill podcast (13m30s), has given us a possible working definition of ‘regenerative cryptoeconomics’ that just might matter.

We both really liked it when we heard it. Here it is:

“An economic system that satisfies human needs, creates positive externalities (and is generally net positive), and creates balance and finds equilibrium.”

Needs some refining? Maybe, but it feels close.

In 1988, Ronnie Horesh proposed the idea of incentive instruments that reward people when they achieve socially useful outcomes, like rebuilding public infrastructure, or providing welfare services. He called these Social Policy Bonds (SPBs), and they were received with great interest.

Yet despite the simplicity of their design and the richness of potential outcomes, SPBs have not proved popular with governments.

Then came Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), which are like SPBs but cannot be traded. Governments like them more as they are easier to define and manage. Neat and tidy in their bond-box.

But trading bonds can be effective. And tradable social bonds can become Schelling Points for parties that believe their contribution has a clear ROI. In other words, markets for such bonds become places where parties can both satisfy their self-interest and feed a public good. Win-win.

I guess you know where this is going. Yes, Web3 tech is providing a trusted framework for brilliant but inactive ideas of yesteryear, like SIBs and SPBs, to be reborn. Sky Minert's fantastic talk, 'How DAOs Can Use KPI Based Community Incentive Tools', at Schelling Point Amsterdam was such a moment. Here’s our summary:

• Mining is everywhere: Mining in generic terms = paying people to do things. Reward the 'completion' not the 'doing'… But Mine smart!

• Smart contracts allow programmable incentives.

• There are tools to help: DXDao created Carrot, a platform allowing easy management of programmable incentives.

• Incentive markets: The incentive is converted to $carrot tokens and these are liquid and tradable.

• Bet on yourself: If someone knows they can meet the KPIs then they could buy more of the tokens to increase their share of the reward.

• New use cases!: The system is provable, transparent, liquid and auto-settling. Its motivating!

• Contributions rewarded: Community-driven programmable incentives can provide the framework to instigate and reward contributions to a DAO or a cause.

• Mechanisms are flexible

• But, design it carefully: The pay-out conditions need to be provable via a trusted source and un-game-able.

• Schelling Points can be financially backed: Programmable incentives could back an existing Schelling Point or create a new one.

• So many possibilities spring to mind!

We love the idea of KPI based community incentives and hope Sky's talk sparked some ideas of your own.

We’ve all seen the TikToks and Twitter posts of incredible people spending decades replenishing depleted natural environments. Taking cut forests, and plains turned to deserts, and restoring them over 20-30 years of painstaking replanting; dream-like before and afters, like this from Brazil.

Restoring ecosystems and bioregions is tough. Land ownership, communal access, resource rights, and ongoing protection of environmental assets are just some of the challenges. Then there’s funding, and getting the heavy-lifting restorative work actually done on the biosphere, which can be human capital intensive.

So, when a new effort begins in a new region, after years (no doubt) of preparatory community-building, it’s exciting. And when this effort involves Celo, and EcoStake, it’s even more so (especially for us!), even if the project is initially small-scale. The beginning of these projects usually attracts no fan-fare: watching saplings grow is the definition of a patient attention span, which most of us lack. But its these beginnings that give us those inspirational ‘how it started vs how it’s going’ moments.

Such efforts powered by crypto - like Barichara Fund and Earth Regenerators taking a stake, and hodling tokens from the Regen Foundation - makes it all the more promising. Congrats to Joe Brewer and the Barichara Ecoversity for getting started here, and we’re excited to see how crypto-based value-creation solutions might learn from this effort and scale in the future.

Regen Totems #1 // Cloud Communities & Balaji Srinivasan

The world of crypto moves at light speed. New coins. New Layers: 1, 2, and now even layer ‘0’. New memes. Protocols built one day, and redundant the next. Constant iteration and invalidation. It's a hyper-stream of ‘the new’.

Yet some ideas stand the test of time and call us back to them over many years. One of these – our first regen totem - is Balaji Srinivasan’s ‘cloud cities.'

The whole concept is rooted in the problem of how to create new communities and forms of communal organisation. Balaji shows that most of these projects begin territorially – in a physical space - and that is often their downfall. He suggests instead that people find common ground in their digital identities, which can in many ways be more synchronous, harmonious, and blind to traditional divisions (such as ethnicity, gender, class, etc.). These new cloud communities can coordinate around the creation of common objectives. A group of the right size and activity level can provide services, experiences and goods to each other; the community itself becomes the public good. Then value can be created and represented through a form of financialisation (perhaps through tokens), which can serve as equal access to decision-making.

At the appropriate moment, these groups can ‘become’ in real life. When they do, they can form a kind of emergent state, and even perhaps become territorial.

The difference between this networked/cloud community, and a new territorial entity (like an ascensionist or breakaway state), is the order of play: the digital network, not the land, state, or national identity, comes first.

What could be bigger than creating a new state? What’s more ambitious than imagining a new form of communal organisation?

The trajectory of the development of the idea of cloud cities starts at least in 2017 (but maybe as early as 2013). Perhaps the best example we have are talks given in 2017 which set the groundwork for the idea, a piece from 2020, and then the best intellectual expression to date, in April 2021. This last piece says quite clearly: this is how we create a new country; the kind we want to be in, live in, build, shape, and guide.

The influence of Balaji’s thought here to crypto communities – especially those that envision their selves in the metaverse – can’t be understated. This totem remains one of the most discussed pieces in the cryptoverse even now, and responses up to just a few months ago could be found across the blogosphere.

The idea of a networked digital common ground is one of the principles of regen thinking (and essentially, a Schelling Point). Get under the hood of this one and let us know what you think, and maybe start with this April 2021 piece from Balaji.

• General Application - Optimism - Remote

• Head of Strategy and Operation - Celo Foundation - Remote

• Europe Ecosystem Lead - Celo Foundation - Remote

• Social Media Manager - Valora - Remote

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