Suggested by 
Monty Bryant
almost 2 years ago
"The original idea for natural capital backed currencies comes from Charles Eisenstein in his beautiful book Sacred Economics . Here, he observes that whatever backs money, people tend to make more of. When gold backed money, there was an intense incentive to mine gold, because it was, effectively, printing money. In older cultures where cattle backed money, there was a similar overproduction of cattle.
So why not, he proposed, back money with things that we want to see more of – pristine forests, clean rivers, etc.
This is a powerful idea. If, as a society, we were to denominate our economic activity in natural capital backed currencies, any economic growth – any increase in money in circulation, would lead to a growth in preserved natural resources."
Experiments are starting to happen in the emerging Regenerative Finance (ReFi) space such as Celo's stablecoins. In light of the recent LUNA disaster, how we gain more support for nature backed money?
Are you interested in addressing this Unmet Need?
Chief Dot Connector @ Hapi.vc
I totally agree and I love this. I love the document you put together @Tim Connors. One parallel-but-related idea that I've been mulling over for years is to have a financial instrument that pays the keepers of the trees on a monthly basis for maintaining the trees. I put a little rough graph to gather to explain how it could work.
Founder of PeoplePower 🧙🏼♂️✨🌴 • Regenerative Finance (ReFi) • Clean Energy • Blockchain & Web3 • Design and Systems Thinking @ PeoplePower
Love this - I remember getting quite excited by a concept like this a while ago and I tried to invest. It was called TreeCoin - just had a look and is now called TreeCycle (https://treecycle.ch/en/). However, I am now more sceptical of their sustainability credentials - planting monoculture eucalyptus doesn't seem like the way forward to me... Anyway interesting concept but things like bio-diversity and land-use must also be considered...
Partner and Chief Design Officer @ Platform Venture Studio
Nice! I believe this has been happening for a few years, small scale. A couple of startups in the states, and abroad a few experiments. I've read some white papers on how/if this works to encourage less deforestation. Don't have links but searchable online.
Founder, MD @ PivotNorth Capital
love it. thought about this a while back along these lines. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioXMEomp2skIj6VxqEUmmKu4wME0zHFGyrOHHZhnIks/edit?usp=sharing
Founder of PeoplePower 🧙🏼♂️✨🌴 • Regenerative Finance (ReFi) • Clean Energy • Blockchain & Web3 • Design and Systems Thinking @ PeoplePower
Love the idea. There are a few interesting projects in the TreeNFT space so the first step in taking this forward might to map what is already out there and analyse existing approaches. If anyone is looking to take an idea like this forward in the guild would love to be involved :)
CEO @ Dawere International Inc
Hi Tim, did you ever find a founder for this idea? What didn't work?
@ Jhuum
Brilliant. The token economy truly opens new opportunities on scale. Metaphorically trees and seeds have variation in knowledge education and anything that has a basis for monetization. Enter the age of exponential economics.