Cosmos #AMA featuring Regen Network | Transcription for July 23, 2020
Part I: Introduction
[Adriana] Hello cosmonauts. Welcome to a new episode of our Cosmos AMAs.
Cosmos AMAs is a series of discussions held with participants within the Cosmos ecosystem in which we approach different teams and try to get familiar with the work they are doing, their project, and the vision they have for Cosmos.
Today we’ll be talking with the Regen Network team about how their vision came to life, their Cosmos history, the Regen project, their work in ecological regeneration, their new role as gatekeepers of the Cosmos SDK and more.
For that, we have invited Gregory Landua, Chief Regeneration Officer, and Cory Levinson, Technical Product Manager, Blockchain & Open Agriculture to walk us through Regen’s story and their work in the Cosmos ecosystem.
To award participants of this AMA, meaning members who will be engaging with the team in asking questions, the Regen team will be giving away 500$ in Atoms to both Twitter and telegram participants, so stay tuned and prepare your questions!
We will be muting this chat during the first part of the AMA but will be opened up for questions, so make sure you are sending yours!
This being said, I guess we can get started.😎
Hello Gregory and Cory and welcome! We are happy to have you with us.
So happy to have Regen with us.
[Gregory] Very grateful to be here. Let’s rock this! I will start by saying how grateful I am to be a part of this fantastic community.
[Cory] Hello!!
{Adriana] Gregory and Cory tell us how your blockchain story first began and how you have come across Cosmos.
[Gregory] Our founding team comes from the ecology and agriculture space, but we have been connected into the crypto space by interest and luck since 2015 or so. As we say the ecosystem grow we had some really vibrant and exciting conversations about the potential role of distributed and decentralized technology to help provide social coordination mechanism and account for public goods. The use of the Tendermint consensus algo has been in our technical roadmap since day one and the publishing of our first version of our whitepaper in 2017. We got to meet and hang out with the cosmos team in Devcon in Cancun back in 2017, and tracked and eventually adopted the SDK as our development framework as it matured. We’ve been long time members of the community and ecosystem and are very proud and excited of how far this community has come over the years.
[Cory] I’ve joined the team a bit later than Gregory 😉 Starting with Regen Network in February of this year. Prior to that I was in Berlin freelancing on a number of different projects in the cryptocurrency & p2p space. Having spent time with Secure Scuttlebutt, Clovers Network, and Radicle. I had been close to some folks in Cosmos for a while in Berlin, but my primary interest in Regen Network was actually to get more involved in a project with a closer connection to earth systems.
[Adriana] Now that we understand how you got into this industry, I am also very excited to learn more about how the Regen vision came to life. If I recall correctly, Regen just celebrated 2 years from the company’s foundation, so I guess the road to here was quite an adventure.
[Gregory] It’s been a wild ride! We were working full time on this even further back than our incorporation as a company and a foundation. We’ve always had the attitude that we should roll our sleeves up and tackle the hard problems presenting themselves, so the entire time has been a really powerful learning experience about how to balance engineering, science, product development and community management.
[Adriana] I know how a wild ride feels like 🙂
Moving on the Regen project, you please describe in a few sentences what Regen currently does and what project’s ultimate goal is?
[Cory] We develop full-stack decentralized technology solutions for valuing environmental positive externalities and ecological public goods. We work on layer 1 as the maintainers of the cosmos SDK now after our roadmap for features generated by our relationship to this use case and our users highlighted some upgrades to the SDK that was more broadly felt to represent the needs of the community. We also do cutting edge science work around verification of ecological state using satellite technology and work to bridge the open source communities of cosmos with our open-source software and hardware communities in the agriculture and ecology space. Lastly, we have an amazing team laser-focused on product development to serve as a “reseach & development” group for different kinds of applications to be built ontop of Regen. Right now, that group has just wrapped up developing our own Ecosystem Service Credit for regenerative grazing practices, working with a Farm in Australia.
[Gregory] In short: We are working to build a domain specific solution for ecological claims and assets that is natively decentralized. The worlds first eco-fin-tech platform!
[Adriana] If we were to envision a Regen roadmap, where would you position the team’s current progress in relation to this? What was already accomplished and what remains to be done?
[Cory] It was around March of this year when we started focusing more specifically on the Cosmos SDK, as we took on a new maintenance contract with the ICF for that project. Obviously that was a big shift in priorities for us. On the blockchain side we had hoped to have our mainnet out for Regen earlier this summer, but with the Cosmos Hub looking to upgrade to Stargate and enable IBC this year, we have prioritized focusing most of our engineering resources all on getting the 0.40 release of the SDK out the door. As a result, Regen Ledger’s own mainnet has been pushed back towards the end of this year, or early next year.
Other big items in our roadmap for this year are mostly on track, namely we have a credit class (our Regen CarbonPlus Credit) that has been finalized and we’re currently connecting with interested buyers, and starting to ramp up our sales efforts.
[Adriana] As recently Regen has taken up the lead role in Cosmos SDK development, I saw that you have set up a call for the community to join. Can you tell us more about this initiative?
[Gregory] This will be a call to convene users of the cosmos SDK. It is focused on engineering teams to review the roadmap, review ARDs related to upgrades and changes, discuss features and needs and answer questions. The call will start with a brief presentation about the progress on the SDK each month, then be opened up to participants to engage with dialog.
[Adriana] That sounds great. For those who want to join, first call is on Jul 29, 2020 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada).
Personally I am very interested to understand how the entire process works. Can you walk me through a user experience? In this case, the user is both a farmer that wants to get paid for its positive environmental impact and also a buyer of those carbon and biodiversity credits? How does that relationship look like right now?
[Cory] There are two timeilnes that we’re operating on with this. Even today, if you are a project developer or a farmer who operates a ranch with cattle, you could reach out to us today to start a partnership where you adhere to our recommended practices for regenerative grazing.
Our science team, which is currently prototyping a remote-sensing based methodology for correlating this with SOC (Soil Organic Carbon) stock, would leverage tools like QGIS combined with our inhouse methodologies to assess the impact of your work and get estimations for the amount of credits that would be able to be issued.
Simultaneously, our sales team would treat these new credits as inventory in their sales calls for credits, and connect them with your project or others who had signed up for our CarbonPlus Credit.
All of this process is quite centralized today. As mentioned earlier, our product team is really focusing as a “research & development” shop for applications that can plug into our decentralized ecosystem tomorrow. So the longer term vision involves you as a farmer being able to browse all sorts of credits & methodologies on Regen Network’s platform, and select the one that matches your needs.
It’s worth noting that while we’re developing this first credt + methodology in house, long term we want to be enabling 3rd parties (or existing credit issuers) to issue their credits & track the ecological state all on Regen Network, as we shift focus more to a platform play.
[Adriana] I am extremely interested to find more about the Regen’s partners. Can you extend some more details on this?
For example, community is very interested to find out for example how many farms have been added to the Regen’s program so far and in the same time how many entities are interested/signed partnerships with in terms of buying these carbon credits?
[Gregory] To start folks can have a look over our partner's page here: https://www.regen.network/team.html#partners we have different types of partners. WE are actually working on upgrading this page to represent these different types of partners. Some partners are science and verification partners like Savory Institute https://savory.global/ and their Ecological Outcome Verification system. These are partners who have technology or methodologies that will be key for new credit issuance. Some partners are technology partners building open source software for farmers and scientific applications like OpenTEAM https://openteam.community/. We have over 40 MOUs and other partnership agreements to date including companies, NGOs, tech partners, farmers, ranchers and others.
In addition to these partnerships we also have over 135 farmers signed up on our platform representing 5.3 million acres of land around the world. This represents the “supply side” of the marketplace.
on the “demand” side of the market place we are working to create our sales pipeline and focusing on corporate buyers at the moment. We are currently over enrolled with our first “vintage” of credits coming from the CarbonPlus grasslands credit that is being issued from Australia and working to expand the supply side with our farmer and rancher community.
[Adriana] Speaking about ecological health, how exactly is that measured by Regen? How do you select the projects that qualify for this initiative?
[Gregory] When holistically managed, cattle can actually help reverse climate change! That’s the foundation of our CarbonPlus grassland credit class.
This is a fantastic question. It is really very dependent on the context. Each ecosystem and each outcome has a different way of measuring and verifying ecological health. Soil Health or soil carbon is different from rainforest biodiversity for instance. In general what is important from our perspective is that we lower the cost of creating and using new verification methodologies. Now that I have made that point, let me answer more specifics about the science of ecological state verification and how that relates to our use of the blockchain. Here is a good example of how we use remote sensing to support soil organic carbon and the generation of carbon credits from the scientific side: https://medium.com/regen-network/scaling-the-soil-carbon-credit-market-with-remote-sensing-fbd3da2c1602.
These monitoring and verification protocols will interact with the blockchain through our credit module, which allows a user to program the verification demands for credit issuance. For instance a credit may demand use of a registered remote sensing algorithm, hashing a link to off-chain supporting data, and a third party digital signature confirming the precision and accuracy of the claims. One of the most important concepts to understand in our approach to verification is that we want to make it easy to quantify both the ecosystem credits as well as the UNCERTAINTY related to the claim. Our oracle strategy is what we refer to as intersubjective verification. That is the more independent sources verify the accuracy of a claim, the less uncertainty associated with the claim, and therefore the lower the risk associated with the valuation of the credit being issued. This allows the market to value BOTH the public good itself (like carbon sequestration into soil, leading to flooding reduction and climate change mitigation) as well as accuracy of claims in the price of the credit in question.
[Adriana] And what if I am an investor who cares about the environment and wants to buy those carbon and biodiversity credits? How does my process look like?
[Gregory] We are considering creating a pre-purchase platform like a Kickstarter page where people can pre-pay for credits they would like to support. For now, you can contact our team to purchase our next vintage of carbon plus grassland credits!
[Adriana] Going back to the current roadmap, Regen has completed its third testnet- Kontraua, back in May, and now is heading towards the last one. Do you have any dates or information you would like to share with the community regarding this last testnet?
[Gregory] First I’d like to shout out to the amazing Regen Network validators. Our lead validators Chorus One, Vitwit and Chainflow have been fantastic.
We are currently working on the Stargate upgrade to the cosmos SDK which is accompanying the stargate Cosmos Hub Upgrade. The cosmos SDK is undergoing a major overhaul now. Regen Ledger, our native blockchain will launch with all of these features and be IBC ready from launch. Therefore we are postponing our own testnets until after we have worked with the entire cosmos ecosystem to ensure the core software that all zones and the hub depend on is stable and functions to the promises outlined in the cosmos whitepaper. So…we will be running testnets focused on the ecosystem first, and our own ledger second. We hope to coordinate with other cosmos SDK users for the first ecosystem wide testnet program, which will then lead to a specific regen ledger testnet focused strictly on our native and domain specific functionality. We expect Stargate testnets to start up in Late August, although perhaps sooner, and we expect our own testnet to follow.
[Adriana] Speaking about community contribution, I would like to know more about Regen’s new role as the maintainer of the #CosmosSDK, and how you are currently focussing on the #Stargate upgrade. What can you tell us about this new contribution?
[Cory] The Cosmos SDK contract came about after several big pieces of work we had been doing for the cosmos ecosystem last fall, and into the beginning of this year. The biggest piece that was publicly released was around adding the capability for non-destrictive upgrades to Cosmos SDK based chains.
Stargate is a big upgrade that has a lot of different components to it. Probably one of the features most talked about is IBC, and the introduction of that as a new module in the Cosmos SDK, but we have actually been less involved in the IBC work directly. One of the less talked about pieces is how we are migrating the encoding of the Cosmos SDK to use protocol buffers instead of the custom Amino encoding.
Our goal with migrating to protobufs in stargate has to do with a greatly improved UX and performance. If you want to read more details about this work, Gavin from Figment wrote a great blog post about that here
[Adriana] Now with these new responsibilities in place, I guess the increase of the team is imminent. I remember the team has posted some announcements for these new roles. Do you still have these positions open? And if so, what are those and where can people apply?
[Gregory] We are in the process of finalizing our last hire for our open engineering positions. We are grateful to have onboard two amazing senior engineers, and are in the process with the third.
[Cory] That being said- if you’re interested in joining the team you can always send us a resume by submitting an application on our jobs page here 🙂
[Gregory] Here are some of the details from the ICF grant we received to do this work for the community:
[Adriana] I guess this is also a relevant blog post to link to in relation to this.
[Gregory] We were surprised and excited to have a cosmos SDK based domain-specific blockchain listed here as one of the top ten most anticipated blockchain launched. I think this is large part due to the amazing community of validators we have built! According to @ICO_Analytics, Regen Network is among the 10 most anticipated #POS networks based on the number of independent staking providers ready to support the launch of staking:
[Adriana] Amazing! Thank you Regen team!🌱
Let’s get some questions from Twitter from our community
Part II: Twitter Q&A
[Cory] This Week in Regen network, Published by Regen community member and Tendermint team member Adriana, is translated into many languages already. As we mature our documentation for developers it will also be translated into Spanish and Mandarin at least, and we have community members across the globe participating in development including India. One of the strengths of being part of the cosmos ecosystem is the international distribution of development teams, validators and community. We are lucky to be a part of that international community.
[Cory] We are creating a system in which both farmer data about land health and farmer practices, as well as positive externalities from good stewardship can be valued. This adds two new income streams to a farmers business model: information, and valuation of positive ecological externalities that can be achieved through good farming.
[Cory] Regen Network will make it possible for both private algorithms and data sets as well as public algorithms and data sets to be used for verification. We want to ensure public access to important aglow and data sets for ecological state verification o that a thriving P2P community can engage with valuing ecological health on their own terms.
[Cory] Regen Network is working on ecological degradation and climate change. We understand the nature of this problem is a tragedy of the commons as well as a tragedy of the market. Creating a public ledger system to register claims, credits and facilitate P2P transactions Allows us to place the proper value on ecological health and therefore transform the vicious cycle of the prisoners Delia, to engage in a virtuous cycle.
Regen Network is working on ecological degradation and climate change. We understand the nature of this problem is a tragedy of the commons as well as a tragedy of the market. Creating a public ledger system to register claims, credits and facilitate P2P transactions Allows us to place the proper value on ecological health and therefore transform the vicious cycle of the prisoners Delia, to engage in a virtuous cycle.
Some of the pieces that I think can be tackled immediately in the ecosystem services space are:
- double counting of carbon credits ( blockchain actively solves this problem)
- exposing ecosystem service credits to a broader marketplace for buyers, and allowing them to be traded on secondary markets
- reduced cost of auditing (making auditing of ecosystem service credits machine readable)
[Will] Risk mitigation is one of the main drivers of environmental markets. Other drivers include compliance with international treaties, good corporate citizenship, and a strong and growing intrinsic sense of the value of a thriving and healthy ecosystem. Regen network unlocks all of these market drivers for natural capital assets and services that are provided as public goods and makes them accessible to the market.
[Cory] Regen Network has two phases in our ecological oracle strategy. This first phase is the use of the distributed ledger to record timetable records of who said what about where, when. This allows for the counterparties valuing and trading a credit to audit the claims associated with the credit at a much lower cost than the current paper and PDF-based system sin soloed databases. The second phase is a more robust decentralized oracle system in which audits and verifications can be automated while continuing to be decentralized. Key to both phases is a simple strategy of “intersubjective verification”. This is the idea that multiple “attestations” or pieces of evidence form unrelated sources increases the certainty associated with a claim. This strategy allows the market to price in uncertainty related to claims instead of pretending that claims are somehow magically objectively true.
[Will] SARSCOVID19 is a really intense situation and our hearts go out to all the communities and individuals who have been heavily affected. WE have done what we can to support international working groups dedicated to privacy-preserving science on this front. It has been quite a journey. We are a distributed team so we are lucky to not have our work effected too much by sheltering at home. Covid19 is also accelerating a move towards the digital economy, and highlighting the importance of environmental issues, which are closely linked to the pandemic occurrence.
[Will] Currently, our focus has been on migrating the underlying encoding of the Cosmos SDK from Amino to Protocol Buffers, as part of a larger upgrade of the Cosmos SDK in preparation for the upcoming Stargate release. Once Stargate is out the door, we will turn our attention back to wrapping up a few modules that we started last year which should add significant UX improvements to the Cosmos ecosystem.
One is a group module, which enables on-chain multi-sig accounts and more complex group governance accounts with custom threshold voting schemes.
And a new module for fee delegation, which allows an account to grant a certain amount of tokens to another account for the use of paying gas fees on behalf of that account.
[Adriana] Great answers everyone! Let’s open up the floor for the live questions!
Part III: Open Floor Q&A
[Adriana] Wowww everyone!!! These are a lot of questions! Let’s get some of them answered!
[Emi] What role does XRN play within the Regen Network ecosystem? What are its main use cases? Which of all the use cases do you consider the most important?
[Will] The XRN is a Proof-of-Stake token with economics modeled closely off of Cosmos’ ATOM. The XRN can be delegated on network validators, can be used to pay network fees, and also can be used as a currency in ecological contracts (although we will list other currencies as well). Read more in our economics technical paper.
[Dr John] How does BLOCKCHAIN OF ECOLOGICAL HEALTH works, which consensus mechanism used. Is it PoS, PoW,sharding etc
Can you explain more about REGION NETWORK blockchain TECHNOLOGY?
[Cory] We are building a POS network ontop of the Cosmos SDK. At this point our goal is to be IBC compatible and connect to the Cosmos Hub, and it is still be explored whether or not we take a “hub of hubs” approach, or if the Regen Network zone operates as the main single chain for all use cases around ecological health. POS gives us this possiblity which is great. You could theoretically have different sets of stakeholders in ecological health coordinate running their own zones to connect to Regen, or these actors could all store their data and issue credits directly on Regen Ledger themselves.
[SHANKS] What is the role of Regen (XRN) Token to the Regen Ledger? Can you explain XRN Token economics, allocations and governance?
[Will] Allocations can be found beginning on page 32 of our whitepaper.
For governance, we’re working with a modified Proof-of-Stake model. 42% of our token pool is being sold via SAFTs in our token sale, granting traditional PoS governance rights. One-third of the supply is being set aside for Community Staking DAOs, a novel governance mechanism we’re pioneering to get tokens to community members that wouldn’t otherwise have access to tokens. You can read more about this model here: https://medium.com/regen-network/community-stake-governance-model-b949bcb1eca3
[St. Xavier] From a technical and commercial perspective, how do traditional companies integrate into the blockchain? What are your plans for traditional companies that continue to have their own systems?
[Cory] One of the biggest barriers to entry for blockchain has to do with the onboarding around private key management, and paying of transaction fees. Both of these are components that we are working on UX solutions for, and not just for Regen Ledger. Last year we actually got a grant from the ICF to develop a Fee Management module and this, together with a set of work we’ve done on Subkeys for the Cosmos SDK, should make it significantly easier for different traditional companies to send data to cosmos blockchains.
[Hasan Mahmud] REGEN NETWORK ambitions are huge. REGEN NETWORK wants to participate in many fields of the future. Is there any technology or solid basis for you to fulfill REGEN NETWORK mission in so many fields?
[Will] We’re firm believers in the potential of decentralized networks to change the world! Regen Network is composed of a few different legal entities — Regen Network Development, Inc. (our for-profit) and Regen Foundation (our non-profit). But the reason that we have “Network” in our name, is because all of you, and the countless farmers, ranchers, land stewards, scientists, researchers, developers, etc work on planetary regeneration. In focusing on open-source and decentralized tools, we want to be build the infrastructure that enables a broad movement to enact planetary regeneration. We’re all in this together!
[Will] We actually have a farmer signup page over here:
[Cory] The easiest places for the community to get involved is by joining our DVD telegram channel.
For Regen Ledger, we’ve been starting a formalized RFC process which we will be using for discussing larger architectural decisions that require a bit more structure. You can see our first RFC here:
Our first RFC was focusing on ecosystem service credits, and how those are stored on chain. Our next will be on ecological health, and how we store that data on Regen Ledger.
[Sachin] Firstly Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA & glad to join… I really appreciate it and thanks to the team and congratz all for the project and the efforts made until here on this project🔥
[Will] Before founding Regen Network, our cofounders Gregory and Christian started a regenerative supply consultancy a decade back called Terra Genesis International. Our team has been deeply passionate and engaged in the regenerative agriculture movement for many years. We founded Regen Network in 2017 in response to the question, “how can we leverage cryptocurrency, decentralized governance, and remote sensing for planetary regeneration?”
[VyachCrypto] Why among all the available blockchains, Regen Network chose the Cosmos SDK blockchain? What makes the Cosmos SDK unique for you?
[Cory] For us we’re interested in Cosmos SDK’s proof of stake model, and are bought into that vision. Cosmos and Tendermint is one of the oldest & mature POS consensus engines in the ecosystem, which made the decision quite easy for us.
[Adriana] Thank you, Gregory, Cory and Will for joining our #CosmosAMA and sharing Regen’s current development plans and updates.
For winners of the AMA [both Twitter and Telegram], the Regen team will connect with you directly to share details on how those prizes will be distributed ( in the next 7 days). So keep an eye on your Dms!
For clarification: everyone who had their question selected and answered here (from twitter and telegram) in an AMA winner!
Thanks to our community for participating in the AMA and see you all next time!
The chat is now opened!
Want to get involved?
Join the Regen Network Telegram channel here:
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