Regen Network Community Update
Pre main net launch blog, March 2021
Introduction
When a small group of humans, passionate about Regenerative Agriculture and ecological integrity set forth in early 2017 to create a planetary health accounting system to transform our global economy from extractive and degenerative, to regenerative, we were as naive as we were ambitious and passionate. In the 4 years since, we have learned, grown, and built. We have survived and thrived through a crypto bear market, political turmoil, and a global pandemic. Above all, we have remained dedicated to our lofty aim of nothing short of planetary regeneration. We have also become very pragmatic about the systemic, market-based interventions needed to steer our global economy toward a mutualistic and regenerative relationship with biosphere health.
The guiding principles that serve as the foundation for Regen Network’s approach to creating a decentralized and public infrastructure for ecological data, claims, and markets are the following:
- Out cooperate the competition.
- If you find something that needs to be done, do it.
- Uplift and support the agency of stakeholders and network participants.
- Agile development.
- Holistic scientific rigor and replicability.
This blog is an outline of where we have been, and where we are going. It is a letter to our community that will reference the whitepaper and show what things have changed as we have experimented, learned, brought products to markets, shipped code and created cutting edge ecological monitoring methodologies like the CarbonPlus Grasslands which was the methodology behind our large credit sale to Microsoft. This blog will outline the evolution in our approach, show the growth of a community far beyond the bounds of a single company, and outline our suggestions for what comes after mainnet launch. This blog is one-part logistics overview to coordinate the community for the upcoming decentralized main net launch and one-part retrospective reviewing how our approach, technology and focus has evolved. And finally, this blog is one-part invitation to co-create a bold approach to public infrastructure that accounts for and creates contracts, assets and market solutions to our environmental challenges.
This blog also includes:
- A pre-launch timeline and checklist,
- Launch ceremony overview,
- Summary of important whitepaper points and how our approach has evolved.
Please consider this is an update in approach and an overview of the evolution that has taken place as we continue to iterate towards the vision laid out in the whitepaper.
Roadmap to Mainnet
We are quickly marching towards our mainnet launch date. We are still on track for an April 15 launch date.
- Tuesday, March 30: Genesis Candidate Chain Live
- Wednesday, March 31 Mainnet GenTX Submissions Open
- Tuesday, April 6th: Candidate Chain Closes, GenTX window Closes
- Thursday, April 15 1500 UTC Mainnet Launch Time.
April 15 is our target genesis date and mainnet launch. However, there is a review window for the genesis file candidate. If any changes must be made to the genesis file or Regen Ledger software, we will create a new candidate, and run that candidate for 48 hours, followed by a 24 hour pause before mainnet launch. This means that at any time between the launch of the candidate, the community audit ceremony outlined below, and mainnet launch, we may postpone mainnet and each postponement will mean a minimum of 3 day extension of the process.
It takes a village to launch a blockchain!
How to get involved:
Join the Genesis Prelaunch Devnet!
On Tuesday March 30 we will be launching our final internal testnet called the “Prelaunch Devnet”. This network will have an identical genesis file to that of our mainnet, with the exception of GenTx and initial validator-set being restricted to team nodes, and core validators. Validators are encouraged to self delegate and initiate a validator on our Prelaunch Devnet once the chain is running so they can join the network and verify their REGEN balances.
The genesis file can be found in our mainnet repo, and instructions to join the prelaunch devnet will be posted on github once the chain is live.
Of particular note: We will be reusing a previous chain-id for our Prelaunch Devnet, “regen-devnet-5”. This is to make the checking of wallet balances easier for our token holders, who all connected their Keplr browser wallets to a previous devnet in order to submit their wallet addresses to us.
Check your token balance.
Investors and token holders will be able to check balances in one of two ways:
Checking your balance in Keplr. This can be done via the same “Regen Devnet” chain that you connected to when registering your address
Entering your address on our Prelaunch Devnet block explorer. This will be available at prelaunch.regen.aneka.io once the chain is live
In addition to checking your individual token balance, token holders and validators are encouraged to audit our proposed genesis file against the token distribution scheme described later in this blog in the “Token Distribution at Mainnet Launch” section.
This process will serve to give the community the ability to check your wallet address with your allocation, and to audit other allocations, and compare with published allocation schemes. This is the software version and the allocation that is being run in genesis. After this, the Devnet will be halted, and there will be a period of at least two days for RND to update the genesis file — either in the instance of errors, or if the community feels there needs to be a reallocation.
Only token holders will be eligible to vote on the allocation scheme. Any questions regarding discrepancies in personal allocations for testnet participants, contributors and network founders via the private sale, or other contributors to the community process of launching Regen Network can be sent to accounting [at] regen.network. Please see the following blog posts for setting up Keplr for use with REGEN tokens and Regen Network security best practices.
GenTx Submission
For anyone wanting to join our mainnet as a validator at genesis, we will open a GenTx submission process on our mainnet repo from Wed March 31, 2021. GenTx submissions
Launch Ceremony
We will host a live ceremony on the day of our mainnet launch. Genesis will take place at 11 am eastern daylight savings time, 1500 UTC, and is currently planned for April 15th. The launch ceremony will start an hour earlier, and go two hours later than that time. We will be hosting a vibrant conversation with our community. Join the scientists, engineers, land stewards, validators, and community leaders coming together to launch Regen Network! We will announce more details about the ceremony in the lead up to launch.
Now, we’d like to review the details of what is being launched.
Regen Network Whitepaper:
What we said, and what is Actually Happening
Summary:
We have learned a lot while also staying committed to the core principles and mission of Regen Network. We have documented our process of vetting tech stacks to choose a third-generation blockchain solution, our contributions to the Cosmos SDK, and the process of becoming one of the core maintainers. This unexpected arrangement has proven to be a deeply mutualistic relationship. We will go over key points from our whitepaper and give quick updates and links pointing out where we are at with each point.
Ecological State Protocols to Digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification
In our original whitepaper and for a year or more we referred to the process of monitoring, verifying and reporting on ecological health, and the quantification of outcomes as ESP, or ecological state protocols. We have shifted our language to be more in keeping with the general climate accounting and carbon market jargon of MRV or Monitoring, Reporting and Verification. We use the term dMRV to denote that our system is a digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification approach. Our team has pioneered the use of open source data combined with simple in field sampling to create rigorous MRV systems for monitoring and quantification of Soil Organic Carbon and used our now public and automated methodology to underpin the sale of over a million USD worth of soil carbon to Microsoft in a groundbreaking pilot (Here is a list of press coverage and articles about the pilot). We have created an open processing pipeline that is custom built to enable digital signatures at each significant stage of a MRV process to create verifiable claims that can be cheaply audited.
What has not changed is our attention to integrating cutting edge remote sensing, machine learning, and earth observation science into the stateful data graph of a blockchain for verifiable claims and asset creation.
Now there is a large community of contributors. Not just the Core Dev team of RND, Inc, but an increasing community of validators, and developers outside of our core team.
I will walk step by step expanding on the core functionality that Regen Network is working towards and give an update about how we are accomplishing it, what might have changed since the whitepaper, and point out places we have evolved, or changed direction. This section will be fairly technical and is an exploration of how our design and approach to building Regen Network has evolved since the writing of the whitepaper. For contributors to the projects such as validators and REGEN token holders please consider this is a disclosure of changes in approach.
How we are building ecological contracts:
Cosmos SDK Modules written in Golang and CosmWasm Contracts
Our Eco-Credit Module allows users to mint unique batches of eco-credits, send those credits to an arbitrary address and retire the credits after they have been used. This module is closely tied to the Eco-Data Module to ensure a structured representation and verifiable claim backed asset issuance protocol for carbon credits and other natural capital assets issued on Regen Ledger.
We are planning on adopting CosmWasm, which CTO Aaron Craelius helped architect and the amazing team at Confio has built as a cutting edge interchain smart contracting system. We (core team and community) have created a set of smart contracts such as the eco-data payout module and the quadratic funding contract to show interactions between credit issuance, and more complex contract logic.
Data: our Eco-Data Module and our Data Schema approach have continued to follow the principles outlined in our whitepaper to ensure data integrity and quality are both underpinning the claims and asset functionality of Regen Ledger. The Eco-Data module allows users to anchor, store and sign data on the blockchain. This is all being created while keeping track of the merging IID (Interchain Identification Descriptor standards and DiD (Decentralized ID) standards being generated by the www.internft.org working group. Active discussions abou the 2.0 approach to our data module is underway here.
Supply Protocols: Supply protocols will be possible in the future using the Eco-Data Module and we are assessing an NFT based certificate system for non-transferable certificates to track claims that are not assets, but instead must be attached to an identity on the ledger.
Regen Registry: progressive decentralization strategy for DQP (Data Quality Protocols).
Our early vision was to have a fully decentralized data quality management protocol. That has been found to be not only technically infeasible, but socially unreasonable. Quality and trust emerge out of social relationships. The backbone of the data quality assurance system we are building is governance, curation and reputation. Our registry system requires known people to register and vet credit classes, and allows for governance over the registry and even specific credit classes. In this way the community can progressively build more and more control and influence over what gets listed on the registry. For a deep dive into the existing Regen Registry system have a look at: The live project pages where projects that have approved credit methodologies are listed live now, and the documentation for project and credit developers, monitors and verifiers to follow in getting credits listed in the registry.
Identity, organizations, key management, and arbitration
The land tenure verification system follows the same logic as all of the verifiable claims infrastructure in the whole logic of Regen Network. For more in depth understanding this work we would suggest looking at the draft RFC-009 on interchain DiD standards which outlines the high level approach we are also taking. Generally a credit class, or any other verifiable claim, can program in thresholds to pass for accepting a claim such as ownership of a parcel and the right to issue credits. For instance there can be an identity in the system such as a county government officer with the exclusive ability to grant or revoke a certificate of ownership. Or there can be decentralized approaches where if a threshold of actors verify you are who you say you are and you own the rights to an asset or address (like the digital representation of a title of land and it’s associated rights) that gives you the ability to issue on behalf of that address. We are working on key pieces of infrastructure to allow this system to work in a flexible way that follows object capabilities logic and allows for the delegation of rights and permissions in the generation of verifiable claims. A key part of this is the groups module, which allows governance over specific rights and capabilities intrinsic to a specific address or key pair in the Regen Network protocol.
Within the OpenTEAM community context we are working on the concept of a meta registry system or “clearing house” for claims assets and data to allow for interoperability between different services, blockchains, databases and even data schemas.
Foundation and Network Governance, Consortium
Regen Foundation received its charitable status from the US Internal Revenue Service in 2020. 2021 will be Regen Foundation’s first year in operation. With a cash donation from Regen Network Development, Inc., Regen Foundation has hired an outstanding Executive Director. Revathi Sharma Kollegala has extensive experience in digital p2p governance, and will be leading the Regen Foundation efforts to execute the initial priority of getting the Community Staking DAOs up and running. (In addition to a million other things!)
As a blockchain entity, Regen Foundation has a commitment to transparency. We want our token holders and other network stakeholders to be able to see the legal documents to which Regen Foundation is held to account, as well as being able to see who can edit them, and track what has changed and when. For these reasons, Regen Foundation has published their By-Laws, Conflict-of-Interest Policy, Treasury Management Policy, and Financial Management Policy on GitHub via LaTeX.
Although Regen Foundation has a group of founding Consortium members, the Consortium has not yet been very active. After mainnet launch, the consortium governing Regen Foundation’s board will be re-engaged.
Regen Ledger will launch with staking reward economics identical to that of Cosmos.
Notice of minor change to token economics:
As outlined in section 5.7 of the Regen Token Economics Paper, the RND, Inc. team had originally intended to shorten the period for block reward inflation to rise and fall from a 1 year curve to a 1 quarter curve. We still hope to be able to change that parameter, but it has proven to be a larger engineering feat than anticipated and we chose to focus our attention on keeping a launch timeline and building out the core feature set of Regen Ledger. We encourage the community to engage in governance to determine if this small adjustment we had suggested in the Regen Token Economics Paper is needed.
Launch Functionality:
We will be launching with full staking, governance, and REGEN token functionality, as well as a fully funciotnal IBC module. As a community we are planning upgrades to enable transfers, ecocredit module, ecodata module and groups module. At launch token holders can stake and participate in governance to make decisions around transferability, enabling IBC and adoption of the feature modules that are either done, or nearly completed. REGEN token holders (after transfers are enabled) can also manage the 2million REGEN community fund (that also receives 2% of total block rewards per block)
We will also engage in governance decisions to signal direction and future module development.
Research into future functionality
Research is underway by th community on an NFT module for eco-art, an asset wrapping module for vaulting btc and offsetting btc and other assets to achieve carbon negative DeFI assets.
Token distribution at mainnet launch
This section gives more details of the REGEN Token sale, an overview of the pools, allocations and timelines as they currently exist. Regen Network Development, Inc is overseeing the launch and ensuring that all measures are taken to ensure a secure and successful launch.
Total Supply and Market Cap
The total supply at mainnet launch is set at 100 million tokens.
It’s important to note that 35% of this supply is allocated toward Regen Foundation and the Community Staking DAOs and will be permanently locked and though these tokens give the DAOs the right to participate in governance, can be staked, and earn block rewards, when calculating circulating supply and market cap, they should be excluded as they cannot ever be traded or sold.
The prices for the tokens in the most recent round of the private sale were $0.46 per token with the three-year lock up terms and $0.63 per token with the one-year lock up terms. If we apply the $0.63 price multiplied by the 65 million implied circulating supply (not counting inflation mechanism) we arrive at a pre-public market cap of $40.95 million.
35 million (non-tradeable) REGEN tokens — Community Staking Pool and Regen Foundation
As mentioned above, these tokens are not tradeable or transferable, as so act like a different class of token that plays an important role in governance and security of the chain, but should not be considered in calculations of circulating supply or market cap.
- 5 million of these tokens will be staked and managed by Regen Foundation
- 30 million of these tokens will be initially held by the foundation with the express purpose of engaging specific stakeholders to participate in governance.
Details about the community staking Dao allocation can be found in the Token Economics paper, this blog, and this presentation. The community staking dao program, and distribution is managed by Regen Foundation.
23 Million Non-Sale Allocation
These tokens have been allocated to the founding team, advisors, and were used to bootstrap the convening of the community.
- 15 million — Regen Network Development, Inc
- Half of this will be company discretionary funds, aligning the company with the health of the network for the long run.
- These tokens are locked up for in the 3-year vesting schedule that begins to unlock one year after mainnet and completes at the end of three years after mainnet.
- Half of this has been allocated to a team member compensation pool. At the time of launch, 5,325,948 are being directly distributed to the individual team members at genesis and 2,174,052 remain in the pool as unvested team tokens and compensation for future hires.
- Almost all of these tokens are locked on a 3-year vesting schedule.
5 million — Network Bootstrapping Fund
- 1,760,535 tokens have been distributed to validators via incentivized testnets and token contracts.
- 1,239,465 will be stewarded by RND at launch to continue swift deployment of tokens for community building (for hackathons, bounties, incentivized testnets and token agreements for development work from community members.)
2 million tokens will be allocated to the community spend pool.
- The community spent pool accrues 2% of the total network block rewards into an account that can be distributed by a governance vote.
- We will follow the same pattern as the Cosmos Hub community spend pool.
3 million — ATOM holder airdrop
- RND inc will steward the 3% of the token allocation earmarked for an ATOM holder airdrop in order to execute a compliant stake-lock or worklock airdrop. We may socialize other options for this allocation with the community and will either execute to the letter of what is stated in the whitepaper (a compliant airdrop) or follow community wishes.
42 Million Public Sale Allocation
Regen Network Development, Inc carried out the execution of the public sale of REGEN tokens, through two simultaneous sales, one which was in accordance with Reg D regulations for US accredited investors only, and the other in accordance with Reg S regulations for non-US persons only. All SAFTs are considered unregistered securities and have a moratorium on their sale for a minimum of 12 months after the signing of the SAFT.
The sale was conducted through the following rounds and terms.
Friends and Family Round, — 6,882,568 tokens sold
- Dates: 4/24/2018–5/14/2019
- Lock up terms: 1-year lockup — all fully vested at mainnet (except for one participant who agreed to a 3-year lock and so has about a year to go).
- Price — variable, but most at $0.10 per token.
- 12 unique investors
Phase 1 Private Sale — 5,775,029 tokens sold
- Dated: 5/15/2019–12/31/2019
- Lock up terms: All but one participant chose the 3-year lock up
- Price: $0.21 (3-year lock) and $0.49 (1-year lock)
- 19 unique investors — 2 follow-on investors adding to their earlier allocation
Phase 2 Private Sale, — 2,101,913 tokens sold
- Dated: 3/01/2020–9/30/2020
- Lock up terms: All but one participant chose the 3-year lock up
- Price: $0.35 (3-year lock) and $0.56 (1-year lock)
- 15 unique investors
Phase 3 Private Sale — 22,303,521 tokens sold
Q4 2020 — Q1 2021 (Just closed last week)
- Price $0.46 (three year lock) and $0.63 (1-year lock) -
- mixed between 3-year lock-up and 1-year lock up
- 25,000,000 total allocation
- 216 unique investors and 13 follow-on investors adding to their earlier allocation
- One Small Planet Capital was the lead investor on the round.
*Note: All but 295.49 tokens were sold out. To distribute the remaining tokens, first we rounded every participant’s allocation up to the nearest whole number and then we distributed the last 217 tokens by giving 5 token bonuses to 42 wallets and one 7-token bonus starting with those wallets having the smallest allocations.
*A brief note on lockups. Locked tokens can still stake, receive block rewards and fees, and participate in governance. They simply cannot be transferred until the locking period ends.
The lockup periods:
- 1-year lockup cliff lock. You receive your tokens at mainnet and can stake, but no transfer until 12 months when all tokens are unlocked
- 3-year lockup — You receive your tokens at mainnet and can stake, but tokens are locked for 12 months at which point tokens begin to unlock monthly until the end of 36 months.
Public sale
4 million REGEN Tokens have been set aside for the public sale, which is anticipated to take place within the next 2–3 months and will kick off the provision of liquidity so that community members can access REGEN tokens as needed. Regen Network Development, Inc is collecting a list of those who would like to be notified about the sale. To be added to that list, go here.
Our Vision for Governance of the Protocol
At launch we will have a central threaded discourse forum running at http://forum.regen.network.
This forum will also be linked to a #governance discord channel on the Regen Discord Server, which is our community communications hub. This is a simple approach to clear communications about protocol governance for the community. This infrastructure will be hosted and maintained by RND, Inc. at the beginning, with a commitment to progressively decentralize the stewardship of these key community spaces.
We are researching integrations with Hylo, loomio and looking into democracy.earth, commons stack and various leading governance protocols and approaches to determine the best way of building direct digital democracy governing Regen Network as well as offering tools for the Community Staking DAOs, eco-credit developers and all Regen Network stakeholders. A central part of our strategy will be centered around building tools for the new Cosmos SDK Groups Module that the Regen Engineering team is currently working on for the whole cosmos community.
Protocol Charter
Inspired by the Confio team’s work with Tgrade, we intend to work towards publishing a protocol constitution shortly after mainnet launch, and will use the discourse and Discord forums to socialize ideas, and consider off-chain voting mechanisms for signalling and engagement before bringing a constitution to the community for ratification.
Wrap Up
With nearly 500 community members in our genesis file at launch, active carbon credits already being bought and sold, a suite of new pilots, independent teams developing integrations, applications and modules on Regen Ledger right after launch, and a core team dedicated to ecological regeneration and social empowerment, the regenerative future we are all working towards has never been closer. Regen Network has always been a huge, and long term project…and mainnet launch is only the beginning! It’s been a long windy road to build the technology, science, and more importantly community that is now coming together as Regen Network.
