🌍 This Week in Web3forGood
💚 Spotlight: The Landbanking Group
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Big week for policy. On Wednesday, the US House passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) with overwhelming bipartisan support. Next up, the bill heads to the Senate. The Biden administration has said it will not veto the bill. After years of ambiguity… finally, we’re getting somewhere with comprehensive regulation! The Global Blockchain Business Council made a great infographic explaining what exactly FIT21 does and does not do. A reminder that lack of regulation has thus far been one of the biggest obstacles to the adoption of blockchain technology for social good use cases.
The other big story: the SEC has just approved all Spot Ethereum ETFs. As we’re putting this newsletter together for the week, the news is *just* officially breaking, but it’s news that’s been eagerly anticipated all week. We have the TLDR on ETH ETFs, below.
This week, we have an extra special feature on Climate Collective member The Landbanking Group, an incredible organization that is doing the work to establish Nature Equity as a new asset class. More here (and below).
Shoutout to Celo for including us and 88 other projects in RetroPGF0 💛. We’ll be following along with the results announcement at Celo Gather *today.*
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
💚 Climate Collective Member Spotlight: The Landbanking Group
📣 Latest News
🔍 TLDR: Ethereum ETF
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🔈 Podcasts
🚀 Opportunities & Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And one more thing
💚 Climate Collective Member Spotlight: The Landbanking Group
“Our ultimate ambition is that every land steward on earth has a Natural Capital Account allowing them to be rewarded for good land stewardship, and that Nature Equity gets established as a new asset class supporting free-flowing investment into nature from corporations, investors, insurers, governments, and philanthropies. For this purpose, we are not only building our solution but also promoting the concept of Nature Equity. Our goal is to rally all market participants to collaboratively develop Nature Equity as the key asset class for catalyzing a nature-centric economy.” - The Landbanking Group
About The Landbanking Group
The Landbanking Group (TLG) is on a mission to revolutionize the way we perceive and invest in nature. With a keen understanding of the urgent need for action to combat ecosystem degradation and climate change, the organization proposes a groundbreaking solution: treating nature as an asset rather than a cost. Their vision is to create a market infrastructure that promotes the regeneration and conservation of vital natural resources, ensuring both human survival and economic sustainability. At the heart of TLG’s approach lies Nature Equity, a new asset class designed to scale investments in nature protection and restoration.
Through Nature Equity, TLG establishes fair agreements between the guardians of land (providers) and businesses (purchasers), focusing on the measurement of ecosystem preservation and regeneration, independent of land rights or ownership deeds.
TLG’s flagship product, Landler.io, is the world’s first end-to-end platform for Nature Equity, utilizing earth observation, in-situ data, machine learning, and decentralized ledger technology to assess the health of land and give it a “natural capital account”. That account serves as an underlying for the issuance of Nature Equity contracts. These unique, immutable, and tradeable contracts qualify as balance-sheet grade assets and are attractive for agri-food, energy, resource, or infrastructure companies, and increasingly for insurance providers and financial institutions.
Collaboration with Communities and Stakeholders
In pursuit of their mission, TLG works directly with stakeholders across the natural capital space. The team actively engages with land stewards on the ground, gathering feedback through various channels such as farm visits, user tests, agri-food fairs, and global conferences. The company knows that the land stewards they work with globally work on more than yields and harvests; they contribute to the life support system of this planet, and as such, deserve a fair reward. TLG’s approach, therefore, aims to benefit land stewards directly, as they get paid for the natural capital improvements they create and maintain.
To verify the success of their projects on the ground, TLG partners with measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) organizations like the Crowther Lab and Lobelia Earth to inform their scientific models. Additionally, the team benefits from the expertise of advisors spanning scientific, commercial, governance, technology, and financial sectors, including those from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and from both Oxford and Stanford universities. Members of the TLG team span multiple disciplines representing 24 different academic backgrounds — diversity and breadth of expertise is core to the team’s DNA.
Current Real World Impact
TLG’s Landler platform empowers farmers to transition to regenerative practices, contributing to biodiversity and climate resilience while being fairly compensated. TLG farm partners are paid for their contribution to nature preservation and climate mitigation as capital providers on top of the price of their milk and other produce.
One such farm is Carpe Diem, a leading producer of organic grapes and raisins in South Africa, accounting for a quarter of the country’s supply. Committed to regenerative farming practices, they eliminated agrichemicals and replaced synthetic fertilizers with compost before 2018. In 2023, Carpe Diem took their environmental impact tracking a step further by utilizing Landler.io, the Landbanking’s end-to-end platform. This platform leverages remote sensing- based radar measurements to monitor surface soil moisture twice per week going back to 2018.
Since adopting more regenerative farming practices, such as cover crops, Carpe Diem has verified a 40% increase in Water Holding Capacity (WHC) through Landler.io.r WHC capacity can be seen as the “sponginess” of the soil, the ability to hold on to water that is added to the soil. A higher WHC translates to less water leaching, meaning less water is needed for crops as losses are minimized, resulting in an improved input-output ratio.
TLG’s team continues to develop Landler.io, adding more biomes and more biophysical parameters to their capabilities. Additional case studies that show how Landler supports nature-positive land use, can be found here.
Potential Future Impact
TLG’s goal is to bring more than 60,000 land stewards onto the Landler platform by 2026, making them a core stakeholder in our product development and rewarding them for enhancing and preserving natural capital. In doing so TLG hopes to facilitate significant environmental milestones such as sequestering over 800,000 tons of CO2, building up 400,000+ tons of humus, and storing 5+ million liters of water through improved water retention capacity of the soil.
Get Involved
[This feature is part of our ongoing “💚 Climate Collective Member Spotlight” series. Web3ForGood was a Climate Collective Grant Recipient in 2023. We appreciate The Climate Collective’s partnership and support in connecting us with member organizations for this series. All opinions remain our own.]
📣 Latest News
Decentralized Social Network Farcaster Raises $150 Million in a Series A Round
The Giving Block Celebrates Six Years of Crypto Philanthropy
Grassroots Economics Achieves Financial Independence from Grants and Donations
Announcing Cohort #1 of the Green Accountability Technology Accelerator
Announcing Celo Camp Batch 9 Participants Building for MiniPay
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
House passes CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act with limited bipartisan support
Hong Kong orders Worldcoin to cease local operations, calls iris data collection ‘excessive’
Brazil crypto regulatory framework coming by end of year, nation's central bank says
White House Said It Will Not Veto Crypto Bill in Major Industry Win
London Stock Exchange Set to List Crypto ETPs for First Time
Project Updates
🔍TLDR: Ethereum ETFs
We've noticed many readers have questions about terms used often in this newsletter. To help clear things up, we're introducing section, where we’ll explain various terms and ideas in more detail. If there's anything you're curious about, let us know!
Today’s topic: Ethereum ETFs
With the announcement of the Ethereum ETF, we know there are a lot of questions so let’s try to break it down.
Imagine you have a jar of cookies, and each cookie represents a small piece of Ethereum.
Now, an ETF, or Exchange-Traded Fund, is like a box of cookies that you can buy or sell in the stock market, just like you would with shares of a company. An Ethereum ETF is a special kind of box that contains pieces of Ethereum instead of regular cookies. This means when you buy shares of the Ethereum ETF, you're essentially buying a portion of that box, and hence, a portion of Ethereum.
The cool part about an Ethereum ETF is that you don't need to worry about the technical details of owning Ethereum directly. Instead of figuring out how to store it or keep it safe, you just buy shares of the ETF, and the ETF takes care of all that for you. This makes it easier for people who want to invest in Ethereum without dealing with the complexities of handling digital currencies directly.
The fact that the US SEC officially approved all Ethereum ETFs this week is an important development for mainstream adoption of Ethereum as a technology. As Ethereum becomes more recognized by institutions, it will become easier to incoporate its innovative usecases into social impact work.
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🌴 Could onchain climate action hold the key to a sustainable future? CHAR, Toucan’s newest RWA, suggests that it might. (Toucan)
✅ Exiled Russian opposition leader Mark Feygin is launching an anonymous, blockchain-powered referendum on the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin’s victory in Russia’s election. (CoinDesk)
🌱 How Web3 entrepreneurs can support the public good while pursuing profit and growth. (Forbes)
🚀 Obol has launched an innovative public goods funding model. Users of Obol distributed validator (DV) clusters will contribute 1% of their staking rewards to a retroactive funding pool. These funds will reward projects and innovations which add value and drive impact towards Ethereum’s decentralisation. (Obol Network)
🔮 The possibility of liberatory futures is rooted in the courageous practice of imagination. (Crypto Witch Club)
🏭 A state-owned Argentinian energy company has partnered to launch a gas flare-powered Bitcoin mining facility, using stranded gas to mitigate emissions. (Bitcoin Magazine)
💂♂️ UK election on July 4: What would Labour Party win mean for crypto? (Cointelegraph)
🔗 Understanding the different blockchain types. (Paxos)
🔈 Podcasts:
Crypto Altruism Podcast Episode 156 - Kyoto - Leveraging DePIN to build a carbon negative, planet positive blockchain
Green Pill Season 4 - Ep. 16 - Giveth & q/acc with Griff Green
Green Pill Season 4 - Ep. 17 - Plurality Book With Carl, Lillian, Shaurya
Green Pill Season 4 - Ep. 17 - 1% for Public Goods w. Obol
🎉🎉 Congratulations to Maya and Tereza, who will be hosting Season 4 of the ReFi Podcast. Follow the ReFi Podcast Twitter page for updates.
🚀 Opportunities & Events:
Apply: Protocol Labs is hiring a Head of PR and Communications.
Apply: Wynd Labs is hiring a Content and PR Lead.
Apply: Crypto Council for Innovation is hiring a Communications Intern
Apply: Messari is hiring an Analyst, Protocol Research.
Apply: Arbitrum Foundation is hiring multiple positions.
Apply: Boys Club is hiring a Social Media Project Manager & Video Editor Intern.
Funding: The Filecoin Fund for Cultural Preservation supports projects that use decentralized storage technologies to archive, preserve, and disseminate cultural works.
Vote/Funding: Vote on your favorite candidates to win a Take Off Brussels scholarship scholarship for EthCC and ETHGlobal Brussels. There are 10 scholarships sponsored by Talent Protocol & Celo.
Funding: Optimism Retro Public Goods Funding Round 4 will reward onchain builders who have deployed contracts to the Superchain and contributed to the success of Optimism.
Contest: Have a new funding mechanism / coordination idea? Submit to Potlock’s JokeRace contest to win ETH on Base.
Learn: SheFi empowers professional women to master Web3 in 8 weeks. Applications for Season 11 are now open. Scholarships are available.
Participate: Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved on June 22 and share on X to @HighlyArtistic with the hashtag #MonthlyEarthDay.
Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Attend: This week’s upcoming X spaces focusing on using Web3 for positive impact in the real world (+ recordings), curated by @civilmonkey. 🆕
Attend: Celo Gather is happening TODAY May 24 in Berlin.
Attend: Breadchain Launch Event is happening May 25 in Berlin. 🆕
Attend: Reboot The Earth is happening May 20 - June 20 online.
Attend: The Dark Side Of The Moon - crypto for good use cases is happening May 31 online. *SheFi community exclusive event*
Attend: Reboot The Earth is happening June 3-4 in Addis-Ababa.
Attend: Reboot The Earth is happening June 6-7 in Rabat.
Attend: The Kenya Blockchain and Crypto Conference 2024 is happening June 6-7 in Nairobi.
Attend: Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Everyday Tech is happening June 8 in San Francisco.
Attend: LabWeek Field Building is happening June 10-16 in Healdsburg, CA.
Attend: Women in Digital Assets Forum 2024 is happening June 25 in Stamford, CT.
Attend: Decipher 2024, a retreat for teams actively building on Algorand, is happening June 26-27 in Barcelona.
Attend: Responsible Tech London: A Better Tech Future for Youth is happening June 27 in London. Application required.
Attend: SheFi Summit is happening on July 7 in Brussels.
Attend: EthCC[7] is happening July 8-11 in Brussels.
Attend: FIL Dev Summit @ EthCC is happening July 9 in Brussels.
Attend: Funding the Commons is happening July 24-25 in Tokyo.
Attend: DWeb Camp is happening August 7-11 in Camp Navarro, CA.
Attend: REBOOT: THE NEW REALITY is happening September 4-5 in San Francisco
📡 On Our Radar
$REGEN is a culture coin for optimists, blending degen thrills with regenerative energy. With $REGEN, you’ll be able to farm airdrops, create memes, regenerate the world, and most importantly, have fun while tipping what matters.
A people's bid to acquire TikTok: Project Liberty is organizing a bid to acquire the popular social media platform TikTok in the US, with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform’s design and purpose.
Gnosis Pay is the world’s first on-chain spending account with a Visa® Debit Card linked to a self-custodial blockchain wallet.
Blockless is a DePIN project that aims to enable users to automatically provide computing power to their applications via its network.
VeChain is a world-leading smart contract platform spearheading the real-world adoption of blockchain technology.
The book Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy details how Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators – architects of Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed digital democracy – achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnesses digital tools to strengthen both social unity and diversity.
The Citizen Wallet is an open source crypto wallet that you can preconfigure for your community token and even set up a paymaster to sponsor gas fees. The end result is a wallet ready to use for community members. No need to learn web3.
✨ And one more thing
A great thread on FIT21 from SheFi:
