In the spring of 2025, Rifai Sicilia received our largest grant to date, 8 ETH in matching funds from Octant Epoch 7, supported by 90 donors. By the end of summer, ETH's price had risen enough that we had a real opportunity. We used the treasury to purchase a 1-acre forest in Scopello, Sicily, which we named Sharewood Forest, the first property of our bioregional commons land trust.
Rather than sell the ETH outright, we decided to use it as collateral on Aave and borrow against it to pay for the land in installments. It was an elegant plan, until it wasn't. But within every crisis grows an opportunity.
In October, ETH began to fall. By December, we had maxed out our credit line on Aave, and association members chipped in personally to cover the final payments. We were committed, there was no going back. But closing on the land wasn't the end of it. We still needed another €5,000 to cover taxes and the notary required to officially transfer the title.
Then came January 31st. ETH dropped from roughly $3,000 to $2,000, and we were forced to close our Aave position to avoid liquidation. Our credit was maxed. Our savings were gone. How were we going to find the money? What we did have was social capital and trust within the broader ReFi and commons network that we could tap into.
After reaching out to trusted friends, an idea emerged: a personal loan structured as a real-world DeFi primitive. We offered to repay the principal in cash earned from the new land, while paying interest in olive oil. Sharewood Forest has 40 mature producing olive trees, and Butterfly Hill, our flagship agroforestry site that we tentatively tenant farm, has 240 more that will begin producing in 2–3 years and reach full maturity in 5–10.
Three friends lent us €5,000 over a 3-year repayment period. Our lawyer drafted the contracts. Payment arrived in EURC. Sharewood Forest is now legally registered to Rifai Sicilia DAO in Italy, and spring programming is already underway generating more donations and revenue from the community.
This difficult journey forced us to get organized and grow in ways we had been avoiding: we now have a bank account, an IBAN, and a revamped website improving week by week. And that olive oil loan planted the seed for something bigger GrowFi.
We've been active on multiple funding platforms over the years, Gitcoin, Giveth, and Octant have all been genuinely helpful, but quadratic funding rounds are unpredictable. Planning an annual budget around them is difficult, and you're always at the mercy of matching sponsors and timing.
In November, at Devconnect in Buenos Aires, I spent time with Diogo from Agroforest DAO in Brazil and Jango, the developer behind Juicebox and Revnets which are two protocols that help projects crowdfund using smart contracts, exchanging ETH for project tokens. Juicebox allows ongoing rule updates; Revnets locks the rules in permanently. These conversations planted the seed for an onchain CSA.
The Community Supported Agriculture model is one of the oldest forms of regenerative finance: buyers purchase shares of the harvest at the start of the season. The farmer gets cash upfront to buy seeds, hire workers, and carry operations through to harvest. When the produce comes in, shareholders redeem their shares for a portion of it. It's simple, proven, and deeply human.
GrowFi takes that model and scales it onchain turning social capital into liquid cash loans.
Juicebox is our low-fidelity MVP, a first step to validate the CSA model for our bioregional portfolio of projects, association operations, and GrowFi protocol development. Supporters deposit ETH and receive RIFAI tokens, which can be redeemed for olive oil, guided tours, educational experiences, and any other product or service we bring to market in 2026 and beyond.
When GrowFi is fully live, supporters will be able to stake their RIFAI tokens to back specific regenerative land sites, earning real yield from the harvest or its cash equivalent from product sales. The diversified harvest of a syntropic farm is tokenized as a campaign: investors buy into the total seasonal yield, stake to earn their share, and redeem when the harvest comes in at the end of the year
GrowFi is the deeper layer: a lending platform and DEX inspired by early yield farming, but backed by real trees verified through the Silvi platform. It enables both micro-lenders and larger capital allocators to participate in bioregional regeneration. And because it's fully open-source, any project using Silvi for tree-planting initiatives can deploy the protocol to finance their own development.
We're currently running multiple funding channels in parallel, and they can work together.
Any contributions to our Artizen project unlock significant matching funds, sometimes 5–10x. USDC contributions (available via crypto wallet or credit card) are recorded onchain, which means we can retroactively reward early supporters with RIFAI tokens that can be redeemed for goods and services that we offer such as tours, workshops, and residencies across our portfolio of projects and partners, or staked to specific projects to earn real yield. The Artizen season 67 runs through the end of June, and matching payouts would come later.
For those who want instant impact: ETH sent directly to our Juicebox campaign goes to our DAO multisig. That ETH can serve as collateral to borrow USDC, which can pay for tools and labor now as we have a lot of work to do to prepare the projects for summer tourist season, and autumn harvest season today.
Revenue from our 2026 operations across all three land sites Butterfly Hill and Sharewood Forest in Castellammare del Golfo and Porto Botanico in Ragusa will further support the treasury as we grow to be reinvested in a tool library to support more projects in 2027.
How much olive oil can one person realistically consume in a year? A Sicilian would say 20 liters. But olive oil is just the beginning. GrowFi's real potential is in making bioregional regeneration an investable asset class — one that can scale across hundreds and thousands of hectares.
This opens doors to regenerative real estate: land stewards who need affordable natural buildings to live in, with harvests that pay off a mortgage in 5–10 years rather than 50. It opens doors to larger infrastructure investments and artisanal enterprises such as lumber mills, olive presses, wine cantinas, sonte masons, textile factories, all as nodes in a bioregional portfolio of businesses.
With AI-assisted development, Rifai Sicilia can now build in-house solutions through our website, with ReFi protocols running quietly in the background. The average user just sees the culture, the community, and the impact. Bringing GrowFi to life is now a matter of attracting the first supporters and capital allocators. A 25 ETH fundraise is no longer out of reach.
While there are many DeFi crowd-lending platforms for regenerative agriculture such as Project Mocha which focuses on coffee in Kenya, and Ethic Hub in Latin America, GrowFi is a general purpose open source protocol that any syntropic agroforestry site can deploy. But the real unlock is in bioregional organizing to unlock the latent social capital where trust turns into tradable cash flow.
If you remember ReFi Mediterranean and Rifai Sicilia participated in the first bioregional quadratic funding round through Silvi last year. We are earning cash payouts from that matching pool now as we continue our planting efforts. The key to success here is (re)distribution and getting both the word out for investment opportunities expanding the trust network on the ground, transparently onchain.
The goal is to build enough trust among a growing group of people to share financial, human, and knowledge resources and bootstrap a regenerative economy from the ground up. As more capital enters the network and more trees mature, future harvests get reinvested into more people, projects, and places. An upward spiral, not a race to the bottom.
We're already seeing it in real time: more local community members at our educational workshops, more international visitors seeking regenerative cultural experiences, deepening relationships with other nodes across Sicily, and growing engagement with our partner organizations, ReFi Italia, ReFi DAO, and Greenpill Network as well as the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
When people talk about real-world adoption of blockchain technology, this is what it looks like. It's happening now, on the ground, in the soil.
Silvi — 2025 bioregional reforestation quadratic funding round payouts now being distributed
Grassroots Economics — Using mutual credits to coordinate labor across our land sites
Bloom Network — Publishing impact reports and blog posts, earning quarterly cash payouts
Green Goods — 0.75 WETH staked and earning yield in Octant v2 vaults, with returns directed toward climate-positive actions
Octant — Epoch 7 allocation helped us acquire Sharewood Forest; ongoing participation in climate rounds
Artizen — Active round with substantial matching endowment through June 2026
Juicebox — Live 90-day campaign running March 21 to June 20, 2026
Running from March 21 to June 20, 2026, Rifai Sicilia has launched a 90-day crowdfunding campaign with a goal of raising 25 ETH (approximately €50,000) across all platforms. The funds are earmarked across five pillars:
Butterfly Hill (€10,000) — A 20,000m² syntropic agroforestry site near Castellemmare del Golfo, already home to 1,000 planted trees including olives, almonds, avocados, and mangos. Funds will go toward irrigation upgrades, a tractor, toolshed, and compost bay to bring the young food forest to full productivity.
Sharewood Forest (€10,000) — Sicily's first DAO-owned commons: a 4,000m² forested parcel in Scopello, legally owned by the association and governed collectively. The site already produces olive oil and will be developed into a regenerative tourism hub, complete with a trail network, solar power, rainwater collection, compost toilet and an outdoor kitchen for community events.
Porto Botanico Expansion (€10,000) — An outdoor learning center in Ragusa seeking to acquire a neighboring parcel to build a greenhouse that supplies seedlings and genetic material to the local community.
GrowFi Development (€10,000) — Funding the build-out of an open-source regenerative finance protocol (more on this below).
DAO Operations (€10,000) — Covering the five-person management team's administrative, legal, marketing, and outreach costs as the association grows toward financial self-sufficiency.
One of the campaign's most innovative components is GrowFi, an open-source regenerative finance protocol that Rifai Sicilia is developing to turn agricultural and regenerative production into investable, on-chain assets.
The core idea is simple: what if you could own a fraction of an olive garden, or any syntropical agroforestry farm and earn its harvest?
GrowFi operates on a two-token model:
$CAMPAIGN — represents the trees itself; defined as a geofenced “project” permanent and deflationary
$YIELD — represents the seasonal harvest; burned upon redemption
Each tree or agricultural asset is divided into 1,000 tokens, making micro-investment genuinely accessible. A single token represents 1/1,000th of a tree at roughly $0.14; a full tree costs around $144. The starting price can be determined by each individual project owner and this is just a vivid example.
A concrete example — investing in a 100-tree olive farm:
Imagine a Sicilian farmer launches a GrowFi campaign for their 100-tree olive grove. The total campaign issues 100,000 $CAMPAIGN tokens (1,000 per tree). An investor buys 5,000 tokens — a 5% stake in the grove — for around $720. Those tokens are then staked to earn $YIELD over the growing season. When the harvest comes in, the producer reports the total yield (keeping 30% off-chain for their own operations), and the remaining 70% is split: 2% goes to the protocol, and 68% flows to token holders. The investor burns their $YIELD tokens to redeem either a physical shipment of olive oil or its USDC equivalent. Their $CAMPAIGN tokens remain, and they can restake for next season — or, as other investors exit, their share of future harvests actually grows, since $CAMPAIGN tokens are deflationary by design.
Tree health and harvest data are verified through Silvi.earth dMRV reports, bringing real-world ecological accountability onto the chain. The entire system runs fully on-chain with no backend, deployable on any EVM-compatible Layer 2 to keep gas costs low.
We have two ways to contribute, and both matter.
With USDC or credit card → Artizen Artizen accepts both crypto and traditional payment, making this the easiest entry point for anyone who doesn't hold ETH. Every contribution unlocks substantial matching funds from the Artizen endowment — sometimes 5–10x your donation — making this one of the highest-leverage ways to support regenerative land projects right now.
With ETH → Juicebox ETH sent directly to our Juicebox campaign goes straight to the Rifai Sicilia DAO multisig. In return, you receive RIFAI tokens — redeemable for olive oil, regenerative tourism experiences, and educational programs. When GrowFi launches, RIFAI tokens will be convertible into GROWFI tokens, which can be staked to earn real yield from our harvests or converted back into stablecoins.
In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing a simple GrowFi MVP so you can take a guided tour of the protocol how campaigns are structured, how yield is earned, and how redemptions work. Whether you're a curious supporter or a potential capital allocator, this will give you a hands-on feel for what regenerative DeFi looks like in practice.
Every contribution large or small helps demonstrate that another way is possible: that crypto capital can flow into living ecosystems, and that the harvest can flow back out to the people who believed in it early.
🌱 Contribute on Artizen — USDC or credit card, with matching funds 🌿 Contribute on Juicebox — ETH directly to the DAO
Learn more at rifaisicilia.com. The GrowFi protocol is open-source and available on GitHub.
