Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
A Carbon-Negative Blockchain Making Money Beautiful
Not Boring | Packy McCormick | Apr 25, 2022
Source: Celo.org
Celo: The Regenerative Economy
Financialization is a dirty word, but the system is particularly dirty for those whose interests don’t have a price. Ledgard wants to fix that, and help reduce extreme poverty in the process. It’s just one example – albeit the most colorful – of a movement called Regenerative Finance (ReFi).
ReFi is a beautiful idea – a re-imagining of the financial system using the tools humanity now has at its disposal to better account for the needs of all stakeholders, current and future. It puts a price on externalities, charging those who create negative externalities and rewarding those who create positive externalities.
See: While Sustainability Software Booms, Investors Demand Climate Data Proof
Celo is a carbon-negative EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain (I’ll explain) designed to make it accessible and usable by anyone with a smartphone, anywhere in the world. It’s unique among blockchains in many ways, including the fact that it has its own native stablecoins in different denominations – cUSD, cEUR, and cREAL, with many more to come – and in that it plans to back those stablecoins with 40% natural capital backed assets – like forest NFTs and Ledgard’s L-Marks – in the Celo Reserve over the next four years. That’s a huge demand signal to the market: build things that are good for the planet, and we’ll buy the tokens.
That idea came from Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics:
If you back money with more of the things you want to see in the world, you’ll get more of those things.
Celo is based on a belief that programmable money will unlock new economic models, and that changing the features of money (which is possible because money’s just a technology) can lead to a more beautiful world. And it’s a bet that mission-aligned builders will care as much about a Layer 1’s community as they do its tech specs. When everything is open, liquidity has no loyalty, and each blockchain’s technology continues to improve, standing for something, and building a community around it, might be a key competitive advantage in a multi-chain world.
Money is a technology. Technology is a story with wings
Celo seems like the L1 that’s most excited to push the limits of this new primitive, not to generate eye-popping APYs or attract the most total value locked (TVL), but to build regenerative systems by changing the story of money.
See:
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Canada’s Low-Carbon Tech opportunity is now or risk another familiar story
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Decarbonizing Crypto: Getting to the facts of the decarbonisation discussion
Specifically, in his keynote, Sep said that Celo asked: What features of money might lead to a more beautiful world? He listed five things:
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) that’s tied into monetary policy
- Demurrage, a little tax on holding money, to increase its velocity
- Natural Capital Backed currencies, building on Charles Eisenstein’s idea that whatever backs money, people make more of
- Community Currencies, or a network of local currencies that do all sorts of things
- Creation of New Money Without New Debt by doing things like gifting money into existence, or earning it into existence by doing pro-social things
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