Regen Network — Quick Guide & Overview

Realigning The Economics Of Agriculture; Everything You’d Want To Know.

Regen Network is the project bringing sustainability and environmentalism to the Cosmos ecosystem. The innovative network is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain focused on ecological data, assets, and agreements using the Tendermint Consensus Engine and built on Cosmos SDK. But this doesn’t say a lot about the heart behind this network’s projects and goals. So, let’s have a look.

Part 1 — What is the Regen Network?

The founders of the Regen Network were troubled with the current ecological crisis that humanity is facing. According to them, the crisis is a result of us failing to account for the aggregate impact of our decisions that mainly focus on efficiency, profit, and comfort but deliver severe long-term damage to the earth.

Their research on agriculture found that a good focus of their efforts for improvement should be on soil. More specifically, on adding carbon to the soil. After all, the ground we walk on is the foundation of the health of our global economy and the earth. Additionally, research shows that while the agribusiness is worth around $5 trillion in business globally, they produce 12 gigatons of CO2 each year. However, it holds the potential to become a massive carbon sink, being able to sequester billions of tons of CO2 per year into the soil and above-ground. And while consumer trends have been moving towards eco and sustainability, critics are saying that that is not enough for significant change. Therefore, Regen’s founders suggest that we must create the ability to explicitly track the ecological impacts of our actions.

The Regen Foundation is focusing its effort on scientific research and infrastructure development that creates a transparent, open Ecological State Protocol. The Regen Consortium and Community Staking Pools act as the representative body that manages the ledger and the cultural shift towards true-cost accounting. They are aiming to create a culture of collaboration towards building an infrastructure that is needed to bring earth’s needs into our collective awareness and take action.

INTRODUCTION VIDEO: Welcome to Regen Network - YouTube

The Regen Ledger

The Regen Ledger serves as a directory of ecological data sources. While some data might be more valuable on-chain, the data will be largely sold off-chain to obtain the knowledge as to who submitted the data. The hash of the data will point to where this data is stored. The blockchain technology, in the case of the Regen’s Network, makes automated auditing possible, after which the appropriate data can be completely transparent.

When asked about the matter of data storage for ecological purposes, George Landua, Chief Regeneration Officer at Regen Network told us the following:

“The approach to verification of ecological state, and quantification of that state is what I would call intersubjective verification. In landscape ecology and earth observation science we correlate multiple sources of data (information) and bind them together into a “data cube”. The blockchain makes it possible for different data sources to be woven together to correlate, confirm or deny claims about ecological state as a basic function of a marketplace for the value generated by our ecosystems. The value generated by ecosystems is usually considered a public good. A public good is something the market “fails to account for and therefore is most often considered an externality. That is to say that businesses profit by degrading public goods. In order to reverse this trend the provisioning of public goods has to be valued. In order to value something you have to be able to: 1 verify it for the multiple stakeholders who benefit, and 2. quantify the value being generated. Both steps are impossible without a public ledger. While this might be a bold statement, the Regen team believes it to be true. Because, without something that allows different private sources of truth to be brought together for a claim about ecological state and the quantified goods produced by it (carbon sequestration for instance), we cannot efficiently achieve consensus about the value of this public good. Hence, we cannot economically value it, and therefore we continue to degrade it as a matter of course”.

Regen Offerings

The Regen’s Network focuses on three offerings. The first is the collaboration with farmers worldwide. The application that Regen is developing enables farmers and funders to create agreements about farming practices and ecological change. Through this offering, the Regen Network is trying to create a standard and, for farmers, profitable ways to introduce changes to the way they use the landscape.

Often farmers aren’t free to decide what to do with their land, this goes as far as the waterways on the farms being controlled by local government and tested, as well as there are regulations to how high the “weeds” around it grow etc.

The second application that will be built on the network is based on transparency. The Regen Network and its team of scientists allow anyone in the world to access open, scientifically valid information about the state of the planet. There’s no longer the need to rely heavily on local authorities. With this transparent information, the network aims to activate the chain of significant environmental change. A third application focuses on community. The Regen Network is building an open community that holds resources and tools such as high-quality data about ecological subjects.

A government could use the Regen network to monitor and enforce their existing policy. (This is from the protocol use level). At the app and market level, the credits must have ecological state protocols (commonly referred to as monitoring-reporting-verification systems) and must be calibrated to local ecosystems for accurate outcome statements about soil organic carbon. Science-driven policymakers with strict land use planning therefore will by nature of good verification need access to the same data about soil health outcomes as the market demands, and the farmer needs in order to make decisions based on ecological performance.

I don’t really see strict policy about land use as a barrier: but more likely a benefit to adoption.

How are you competing with CO2 trading all over the world?

We will offer a better tech and science backbone for carbon markets. We are backwards compatible and can interface with existing standards, while making life easier for all the users of existing markets (buyers, sellers, verifier, auditors, etc.).

For instance, existing markets will be able to migrate registry service to the Regen blockchain and take advantage of superior tools and transparency from legacy systems, while benefiting from a bespoke blockchain built and governed for purpose and a developer community with domain knowledge.

In the long term, these changes in the way farmers utilize their grounds, will not only produce healthy air and soil, but they will be able to “sell” their ecological services. They are making it an extra income for a profession that’s only just holding its head above the water for years. Moreover, because the Regen Network is integrated and decentralized, land stewards can receive around 80 to 85 percent of profits generated, unlike in traditional business where middlemen take 80 percent leaving only 20 for the land steward or project.

Ecological Regeneration Projects

What is regeneration? The Regen Network refers to regeneration as “the growth of vitality, viability and evolutionary capacity of a system. As defined by Carol Sanford, the seven first principles of regeneration are whole, potential, reciprocity, essence, nestedness, nodal, and development”.

The regeneration of the world’s ecosystem is an essential aspect of Regen Networks’ goals towards a cleaner environment. To obtain this goal, the Regen Network doesn’t just work together with farmers for better soil. They also work on three other projects; that are solely focused on regeneration. The first is the Forest Protection Project. With this project, the aim is to protect the world’s forests, because it would help solve about ⅓ of the climate crisis. While much money gets allocated to the Amazon and other forests around the world, a big part of the money never reaches the forests. The Regen Network states:

“Since indigenous communities protect 25% of the Amazon basin and have territories with deforestation rates 2–3 times lower than other lands, they are key to keeping our forests intact and stabilizing our climate”.

These communities, however, often lack resources to pay consultants and the expensive systems needed. That’s why the Regen Network is aiming to get funding directly to the front line of the rainforest community based on verified monitoring evidence that they are genuinely protecting their forests. Check the video below to see how it works.

VIDEO — https://youtu.be/6z_yLSqYnDk

Other projects that they are currently developing are the tracking of regeneration and compensating farming projects.

Part 2 — Token and Development

The Regen Network’s ecological ledger and the contracting platform are built on the Cosmos SDK. However, despite all the possibilities that this ecosystem provides, Regen believes that eventually, governance and incentive issues created by the development of other DApps upon the system will result in issues. Therefore, they are building the Regen Ledger, the first blockchain dedicated to ecological claims. This ledger is a Tendermint-core-based PoS blockchain with bonded validators, which will provide network security and durability.

$REGEN Token

$REGEN is heavily influenced by the design of the Cosmos ATOM , but adapted for the use of ecological data and outcome markets. The Regen Network will be governed as a public blockchain by token holders according to the same models outlined and implemented by Cosmos.

Token distribution is as follows:

• 38,000,000 Sale allocation
• 35,000,000 Community Dao’s and Foundation allocation
• 22,000,000 Regen team & Community
• 7,000,000 Liquidity

Staking these tokens accrue 26.5% annual percentage yield (APY) at the moment. Besides, delegating is a critical function to secure the Regen Ledger, holding the token lets you participate in community governance and support the growth and development of the Regen Network.

Development

In Q1 of 2019, the first Testnet of the Regen Network was launched. In Q3 and Q4 of the same year, Regen successfully ran Testnet 1001. The following year, they successfully ran and closed their second Testnet: Algradigon-1. The Algradigon-1 Testnet was created to onboard new validators who wanted to join, implement, and ensure the undertaking of upgrades. Algradigon-1 was launched on 23rd Jan at 17:00 UTC, with 38 validators signed on the genesis block.

• COSMWASM Kontraŭa Testnet was launched in Q1 of 2020. It is an Adversarial Testnet that focuses on network load-testing with the Regen Ledger running on CosmWASM.
• Aplikiĝo Testnet, the fourth Testnet, will launch in June 2020. The focus of this Testnet will be on application-specific testing and simulation of the ecosystem service credit creation and trading. If everything goes right, this will be the last Testnet.

At the moment regen-devnet-6, regen-devnet-5 and regen-redwood-1 are the active testnets.

Here you can see a list of all testnet Regen has gone through https://github.com/regen-network/testnets.

Regen Ledger v3.0

Regen Ledger v3.0 is the newest version and is currently deployed on mainnet. It updates the eco-credit module to include basket functionality, enabling the aggregation of heterogeneous ecosystem service credits into baskets. Credits from different credit classes and batches that meet defined criteria can be deposited within a basket in exchange for basket tokens.

Basket token holders may hold or sell them — potentially on Regen marketplace or an external market such as Osmosis, an automated-market maker (AMM) blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, or Sushiswap, Uniswap, and other AMMs in another blockchain.

A basket token holder may also later redeem their basket tokens in exchange for an equal amount of eco credits in the basket.

The Regen validator set successfully performed the Ledger v3.0 upgrade in 12 minutes!

Regen aims to provide core features. Read more here: GitHub — regen-network/regen-ledger: Blockchain for planetary regeneration.

Why NCT?

Nature-based carbon credits are of higher quality than non-nature-based carbon credits because of their intrinsic benefits, including:

• Ecological benefits.
• Habitat preservation.
• Species protection.
• Social and economic benefits for communities who engage in carbon credits projects.

These credits typically sell for market price premiums, and in more limited vintage quantities, than other forms of carbon credits. Nature is a finite resource.

Reference: NCT: Pool Party Report — Toucan. https://docs.toucan.earth/protocol/pool/pool-parties/nbct-nature-based-carbon-tonne

The digital carbon marketplace will evolve, offering indexes that focus on distinct credit types to utilize fungible strategies for different carbon credit types.

Thanks to Regen Networks, protocols like Osmosis, Stargaze and Cheqd have become carbon neutral already, we want to see more networks like these taking the pledge and going zero carbon. Stakin is thrilled to say we’re working with Regen Network towards a greener future for Proof-of-Stake using carbon credits. We’ll be offsetting our carbon footprint. Check all the details in our Medium article here.

Plans on their roadmap include:

Ecocredit Marketplace Functionality is going to implement the ability to list, sell, and purchase.

Decentralized Credit Exchange (Credit DEX) where the ecological credits can be bought and sold and still show the metadata associated with each credit.

DAOs & Token Minting

Final thoughts

Just over a year after Mainnet launched, the Regen network is ready to take off; their Grants initiative launched in Nov 2021, Regen believes that everyone should have the opportunity to be onboarded into the regenerative finance marketplace. https://registry.regen.network/ is great for following up current projects that are already using Eco Credits on the Regen Network. Furthermore, spending time with the community on Discord shows a very engaged crowd, they are on top of governance, have a Community Call every other Wednesday at 17:30 UTC, you can notice their commitment to decentralization as they encourage members to others to distribute delegations between validators fairly.