- Needs
- Desk Research
- Interviews
- Foundation / Impact Fund
- Coop banks / Consultants & Platforms
- (cs)DAOs
- Dapps Eco
- Insights
- Demand
- Supply
- Fund sources & Model
Needs
Building Ecological/Regenerative Financial System for complementarity, plurality & resilience through Bioregional Development with RegenCoopBank
Feedback to
- Archetype and portfolio
- Investor Data Room Feedback
- Win-win-win strategy
- Go To Market Strategy
- Recommendations on who to talk to
Desk Research
Policy & Market:
Frameworks:
The bioregional economy framework also calls for higher degrees of cooperation between communities residing in the same bioregion, since the ability of each ecosystem to provide is dependent on the stability of others. Communities would therefore be incentivised to self-regulate their actions, and communicate information with others regarding failures and successes. Bioregionalism can be seen in sustainable land management practices such as regenerative agriculture and permaculture. Its ideologies are also manifested in worker and consumer cooperatives, community development finance and ecovillages. While an independent Cascadia could well be a prosperous nation, it is unclear whether it would actually promote better environmental stewardship than national governments. Entrusting domestic workers and individuals with higher degrees of decision-making power is a core tenet of bioregionalism, but whether this would actually translate to better conservation measures remains mostly hypothetical.
- Maintain a healthy balance and integration of small, medium, and large organizations
- Maintain a healthy balance of resilience and efficiency
- Maintain sufficient diversity
- Promote mutually-beneficial relationships and common-cause values
- Promote constructive activity and limit overly-extractive and speculative processes
Since there is no network-formula for effective learning and adaptive management, we suggest assessing it by creating a composite of existing indicators of:
- Poorly addressed human needs, e.g., education, healthcare, nutrition, housing, etc.;
- Underutilized human resources, e.g., unemployment, underemployment, inequality, poverty, etc.;
- Poorly addressed local critical issues (particularly environmental issues from pollution to global warming)
- Educational priority such as school funding, educational attainment, tuition rates, community colleges, professional development, library programs;
- Levels of community involvement, e.g., voting, volunteerism, civic engagement, farmer's markets, sharing economy opportunities, community gardens, community art programs, etc.
- Regenerative re-investment Regenerative re-investment can be measured using ENS by the percentage of money and resources the system invests in building and maintaining its internal capacities and infrastructure. Again, the same measures and principles apply to studies of essential ecosystem services responsible for regenerative, sustainable supplies of energy, water, food and all biological needs of people and economies.
- Maintain robust, cross-scale circulation of critical flows including energy, information, resources, and money Cross-scale circulation can be measured using ENS by how rapidly and thoroughly resources circulate inside the organization. In economics, the Multiplier Effect metric assesses how many times a unit of currency entering a market will be exchanged before exiting that market.
- Maintain reliable inputs & healthy outputs Input reliability can be assessed by how much risk attends critical resources such as energy, information, resources, and monetary flows upon which the system depends. Healthy outputs can be assessed by how much damage outflows do both inside and outside the system. We would assess the input reliability driving the system using existing indicators, including sustainability indicators of renewability such as percentage of energy from renewable sources and declining energy-return on energy invested both based on overall flow amounts.
The Earth's 14 major biomes, which include six subtypes of the generic forest biome -- boreal, temperate broadleaf, temperate conifer, tropical moist broadleaf, tropical dry broadleaf, and tropical conifer. Biomes provide the highest order organizing principle used in the development of the One Earth Bioregions Framework. Download Map (6 MB). Image credit: Karl Burkart, One Earth
Journals:
Interviews
Foundation / Impact Fund
Matthew, Cerulean
Jahed, Cerulean
Katapult FestCoop banks / Consultants & Platforms
Theo Beutel ReFi HubMin-Si(cs)DAOs
Dapps Eco
Luuk Weber / Celo
Eugene, MetagovInsights
Demand
- There are a lot of impact SMEs globally that could use loans/financial services, but are underserved now in regions of South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Asia
- Many traditional businesses (like agro), usually need $50-150k for a short-term in stable coins (less than a year) for capital investments
- But also some digital projects/startups (considered to be more risky) need working capital (mostly salaries)
- Typical yield could be around 10-20% annually (can translate to 5-12% for the lender after all fees)
- There might be a guarantor, assets in collateral or track record
- So far the projects I’ve talked to were from different countries and types, so hard to make generalizations on risks, their alternatives and contracting terms
- Small projects can’t easily provide all the project documentation (thus need smth like a “broker” or another specialist to help them), also there’s some impact, but hard to measure systemically (maybe solved with science advisors, but still mostly debatable)
Supply
- There are a number of dedicated funds like EthicHub (for coffee farmers in Mexico) or Helios DAO (for solar)
- Deals on Goldfinch (Asia, Africa examples) can reach multimillion, multi-year, 11-13%
- Kataput’s fund focuses in the impact venture model (reaches 20% IRR), not suitable though for such investment (I guess Cerulean is pretty much the same)
- There’s some demand for solidarity in banking (1 person holds money in a coop bank despite it providing somewhat worse digital services, but good in nature)
- The model might be less attractive on the bull run, but much better in the bear market
- Models like Grameen usually receive the initial capital as a donation, or at least at very good terms from big companies, public figures or governments as a way to fight poverty
- In any case some form of institutional funding is considered for scaling
- Models like VitaDAO are successful in niches, though they mostly fund early-stage research, take many years to come to the market, and return investments
Fund sources & Model
- Indivisible reserves
- Internal/angels (from the community itself)
- Orgs
- States
$6k / Q = Profit 2.5% / Q (~10% annual) of $240k (e.g. 5 projects x $50k)
Insurance pool in (Regen, GIV, OP, cUSD) tokens