History of ReFi (regenerative finance)

Published in

Reverse Climate Change

5 min readJan 9, 2023

ReFi is a small part of the growing space of regenerative industries. These include Regenerative Farming, Regenerative Medicine, Regenerative Design, Regenerative Development and many more.
In all these example, “regeneration” refers to systems or practices that aim to repair and restore natural systems, rather than exploiting or degrading them.

Here are a few examples.

Farming

6 core principles of regenerative agriculture:

understand the context of your farm operation: how does your farm fit into the greater ecosystem of the region and climate
minimize soil disturbance: use land with a long term perspective, practice stewardship through practices like crop rotation
maximize crop diversity: use natural plant relationships to make your farm more sustainable, for example using cover crops
keep the soil covered: ensure optimal soil health
maintain living root year round: ensure optimal root health
integrate livestock: integrate both plant and animal agriculture into cohesive systems that have both economic and environmental impacts

Architectural design

Designing a building or a city space has moved beyond an original concept of “do no additional harm” or “use only what you need, and no more.” This put the focus on our individual sustainability versus the greater environment. Now, architects keep in mind concepts such as:

Green Roofs & Skins
Building designs with skins that actually clean the ambient air
wastewater treatment
energy consumption & production
Building designs with skins that sequester carbon
Capture of Rainwater

Finance (Economics)

The word ‘economics’ (or oikonomos in Greek) was defined by Greek philosopher ‘Aristotle’ as “the pragmatic science of living virtuously as a member of the community”. A more current-day definition spells out the social responsibility of an economic system as “shifting the economy by transferring control of capital to communities most affected by racial, economic, and environmental injustices”. You can see from the values below that there is a social/communal aspect to finance.

Builds Community Wealth
Shifts Economic Control
Democratizes the Workplace
Drives Social Equity
Advances Regenerative Ecological Economics
Re-localizes Primary Production and Consumption
Strengthens the Public Sector
Builds Movements and Power
Retains Culture and Tradition
Restores Indigenous Sovereignty and Promotes Decolonization
Restores Right Relationship within Ourselves and with Our Communities

The United Nations Department of Economics & Social Justice (notice how those 2 departments “economics & social justice” are joined under 1 umbrella organization) produced a list of 17 global goals for sustainable development.

Crypto ReFi

The long history of regenerative processes fits nicely within recent developments in the crypto space. Simply put:

ReFi is the use of blockchain technology to create financial instruments or platforms that have a:

positive impact on the environment
or support sustainable development
or support the funding of projects that contribute to practices that support the regeneration of natural systems

Many of the first use cases related to building out carbon marketplaces; here’s just a few & when their tokens were released:

2020; Moss.Earth (MOSS), JustCarbonRemoval (JCT)
2021; Toucan (BCT, NCT), Regen.Network (REGEN), Klima (KLIMA)
2022; Carb0n.Fi (ZRO), Carbon Credit Token (CCT), FlowCarbon (FLOW)

By some estimates, there are over 50 million carbon tonnes that have been tokenized so far. That is a positive impact for sure.

But from the slide below, there is much angst in the crypto space due to the preponderance of attention being exclusively on carbon emissions.

Within ReFi, there is so much more than carbon. Here’s a few of the various categories:

Communities: ReFi DAO, Future Quest, Climate Collective, Climate DAO
Tech: Open Earth, Kolektivo
Biodiversity: SimplexDNA
Education: ReFiDAO, ClimateCollective, Celo Foundation
Energy: RedGrid, LiquidStar, PowerLedger
Funding: Allegroy, Flori Ventures, Farm VC, Allied Crowds
Liquidity: PrimeLaunch, Symetric, ReverseClimateChange investment club
Ocean: MarinaChain, ReeFi DAO, Aquari, Algae Token
Solar: Helios
Waste Management: DeTrash, Centrifuge, BasinDAO
Wildlife: EarthDollar, Project ARK, Interspecies Money

Seeing how ReFi projects works together

The Climate Collective org is building a map of the web3 ReFi projects. Take a look and see how this space is interconnected.

See: https://kumu.io/climate-collective/web3-climate-map

Epilogue

This origin story of crypto’s ReFi space was put together by volunteers at the Reverse Climate Change investment club (a ‘Liquidity-as-a-Service’, community-run crypto club that supports all projects in this ReFi space).

Info was gathered from varied published sources and industry peers, however history has a way of being fuzzy. So if you have corrections or additional info that could be added, please reach out & share. The story of ReFi is worth sharing.