Regen Network’s Road Ahead
Where we are headed, and a few stops along the way.
Regen Network has some very ambitious goals: building an ecological and economic toolkit to re-align economic incentives with good stewardship of our planet and ecological regeneration on all levels.
To do so, we pull in many complex technologies, such as blockchain to function as a distributed, ecological ledger. Many people have been asking how we will realize this vision, and especially what is required for the upcoming Q4 mainnet launch. This article should give you some insight into our vision as well as our team’s next steps in making it a reality.
At the highest level, we can divide our planned work into two categories: usability and product. Usability refers to features we consider necessary for building stable products with heavy reach into a non-technical user base, but still missing in the CosmosSDK / Tendermint stack we are using. Much of our work here is done in collaboration with ICF and other Cosmos projects, and may be much of our technical visibility, but really just enables the actual products we aim to build.
Regen Network is a Techstars-backed company, working with The Nature Conservancy to accelerate our product development to meet the most pressing conservation, sustainability, and land regeneration needs. Alongside this partnership, we have five other exciting pilots running that are driving the design of our blockchain. It is very important to us to get real user feedback as we continue to build out the feature set, to keep us focused on the end use of the technology. We have selected one pilot project to be supported at the launch of the network. More details will come later, but the idea is the issuance of ecological credits for verified stewardship of parcels of land, and allowing these credits to be purchased for use as offsets (much like the carbon credits, which we are pioneering in the crypto space in partnership with Chorus One).
What We Need for Launch
Upgradability
To maintain a reasonable development speed for the various products and projects built upon the Regen Ledger, we will need an easy way to upgrade our blockchain without losing all history. To solve this, we have been working on a patch of Cosmos-SDK to allow easy upgrades for a number of months, and have recently tried it out on Regen’s public testnet. This will allow us to push out new binaries in accordance with on-chain governance and the validator set, in a much easier way than the current Cosmos Hub model.
Key Management
Blockchain technology typically uses private cryptographic keys to verify identity. But there is no recourse if you lose them. This is okay for tech savvy users with good backup plans, but other people expect some “forgot your password” box. To make Regen Ledger usable by farmers, we will start with minimally “dynamic multisig accounts”. Thus the farmer may allow either of two devices to sign, or a trusted organization as a co-signer to add a new device, so they are not lost if they lose their phone. To build this out, we are leading a working group with other Cosmos Zones interested in similar features, and working closely with ICF and All in Bits for development work.
Ecological Assets
Moving from usability enhancements to our core product area, we will add the ability to issue and track ecological assets, as well as trade them (or consume them as an offset). This will be a special type of NFT and we will begin with minimal on-chain trading mechanism, as the goal is not speculation but rather use of the credits.
Mapping / GIS
We need to display maps of the various regions under protection, as well as verify that we do not issue multiple credits at the same time for the same land. To start off, we will create a nice map visualization app to visualize all the ecological assets stored on the blockchain. And in the near future, but probably shortly after launch, add some GIS support on-chain to detect overlapping polygons and enforce unique claims.
We have begun work on all the above items already, all with specs and most with at least a prototype solution for it. Nothing here is quite production-ready, but we have tested out theses paths and learned from them, and do not expect any major blockers to build all these aspects out in the next few months.
Visions For the Future
We are looking at a number of usability enhancements to provide us a development environment that supports complex applications like ours. The next sections are not part of our core business and ideally developed in collaboration with other Cosmos projects that experience similar needs.
If you like these ideas and want to work together, please get in touch!
Extensibility
This isn’t just about upgrading binaries on the server — it’s about adding new features quickly and easily. Beyond the upgrade work, this entails adding Web Assembly smart contracting engine to support some custom rules, like contracts, for example. Eventually, it will support a domain-specific language to encode data queries in a human-readable format. For example, a user might read: “Release payment if after Jan 15, 2021 and 50% of ground in polygon X is forested.”
Key Management
This is a much larger feature set. We want to support 2FA, both with multiple user devices, as well as with “cloud” identity verifiers (which cannot act on solely on your behalf, but need to add a second signature). We also want to allow partial, revokable delegations so that users can enable others to add measurements for a region of land, but since it is a delegation of the user’s privilege, they can also revoke it if they detect anything wrong. (There is a key management spec and Cosmos working group devoted to this already).
Client SDK
We need to add many new features to the Cosmos SDK, as well as integrate with off-chain data sources to return the original data verified against sha256 hashes on chain. There is still no clear generic Javascript client for Cosmos SDK and we need to add many more features. This will likely be a cross-platform Kotlin SDK (definitely designed to work both in web and mobile), which can handle light-client proofs. This will likely be a major area of our client-side work in the next year.
Building on that infrastructure, we will also create a number of modules to give us the powerful ecological ledger that we want. These are core to our value proposition:
Ecological Assets
Regen Network allows the creation of token types (fungible and non-fungible) to represent ecological assets, such as the health of an ecosystem. Measuring ecological health and placing it in a tradeable form are key to assigning them economic value.
GIS / Mapping
With land stewardship at the core of Regen Network’s mission, most ecological health data is tied to a land region. We need to both visualize the data in immersive maps on the client side, as well as perform GIS operations on the blockchain. These include calculating the land area in square meters for a GIS polygon, or checking for overlapping polygons to enforce correct asset issuance. This will require some level of integration of GIS algorithms into the blockchain data store.
Ecological Contracts
Simply selling someone rights to an asset or verifiably using an asset exactly once as an offset are basic functionalities we should have ready for mainnet launch. As Regen Network expands, we will support more complex contracts, such as an exchange for purchasing classes of assets, escrow payments to be released by a verifier… or better yet, verification contracts with custom terms for payout based on ecological health.
Ecological Data
To power such contracts, we will need verifiable ecological data available to the blockchain. Handling such data will probably require secondary, custom on-chain data stores. We also need robust ecological data schemas that can capture a large variety of ecological health information, as well as the ability to query that data within a contract and specify what level of verification is needed to execute a contract.
Ecological Data Calculations
Rather than rely solely on people working on-the-ground to manually enter data measurements, we would like to leverage an array of technologies to provide redundant sources of raw data, such as remote sensing and IOT devices that could, for example, track deforestation from satellite images. This data can then be run via off-chain algorithms to compute ecological change. We are in the beginning stages of designing a system where multiple machines can perform such calculations in a Byzantine Fault Tolerant manner, and provide a reliable oracle, turning vast data sets into detailed extracts of on-chain ecological data to feed contracts.
See the Forest for the Trees
This technological roadmap (and even the first pilot projects) are just a means to an end. We are not focused on just launching mainnet, or enabling ecological credits. Regen Network is building a robust ledger of ecological health as the foundation for a new economy. As clearly articulated by The Silver Gun Hypothesis, creating reward-based currencies and financial contracts is essential both ecologically and economically.
Regen Network is the foundational infrastructure for auditable, transparent, and scientifically-robust ecological contracts and currencies. Our focus is on agriculture as the world’s leading climate problem, and its potential as the leading solution. The economic upside of ecological stewardship is uniquely fit to the DeFi (decentralized finance) approach made possible by blockchain. Centralized companies have failed to make ecosystem credits, payments and contracts a scalable industry due to the trust issues involved. Starting from the decentralization made possible by BFT proof of stake consensus puts Regen Network in a position to succeed where other ventures have not.
Learn more about our mission, get involved, and follow along at the links below:
