In our first Localism Highlight conversation, the Token Engineering Commons had the privilege of speaking with Wasabi, co-founder of the Kokonut Network, a groundbreaking initiative using Web3 tools to bring regenerative agriculture and economic sovereignty to underserved communities.
The talk was rich, layered, and deeply grounded—literally. It showed how blockchain isn’t just for high-speed finance or digital art, but can be used to build better systems from the soil up.
Here’s what we learned.
Wasabi’s journey began as a typical crypto user—curious about the tech, but unaware of the deeper cultural and systemic dimensions of Web3. That changed when he began researching DAOs, token design, and governance. What started as an exploration turned into a mission: to support real-world communities left behind by traditional systems.
Enter the Kokonut Network, a DAO-powered project based in the Dominican Republic, tackling a fundamental issue: how to finance, organize, and sustain regenerative agriculture at the community level.
Regeneration, as Wasabi frames it, is about using resources in a way that creates more value over time—without exploitation. In practical terms, that means:
No chemicals or synthetic inputs.
Aligning farming practices with natural cycles.
Prioritizing water preservation and soil health.
Producing long-term resilience, not short-term yield.
In this context, agriculture isn’t just farming—it’s a way to revitalize land, communities, and economies.
The Kokonut Network tackles three interlinked challenges common to many local economies and development projects:
Data Fidelity
Without trustworthy data, communities can’t access capital. Whether it’s funding, support, or trust, everything starts with high-quality, verifiable data.
Liquidity
Many local economies generate value but can’t tap into liquidity. The Kokonut Network offers an alternative: community-owned capital flows that allow locals to co-govern and co-benefit.
Distribution
Supply chains usually extract value from the bottom up. Kokonut flips this. With local-to-global distribution via DAO membership, value stays within communities, even across borders.
These three pillars—data, liquidity, and distribution—are the foundation of the Kokonut Framework, an open-source, modular playbook anyone can adapt.
At its core, the Kokonut Framework is:
Modular: you don’t need to launch a token or DAO on day one.
Practical: it adapts to different landowners, resources, and goals.
Open-source: anyone can fork it to serve other use cases.
It starts with diagnosis—not just of the soil or weather, but the community’s needs, aspirations, and risks. From there, decisions on crop selection, infrastructure, and financial models are made intentionally.
Each farm becomes a learning loop, informing the next iteration. As of today, Kokonut operates six farms (three active, three in development), all funded by grants, with a commercial-scale farm (“Kokonut v1”) on the horizon.
The Kokonut Data Hub is a crucial piece of infrastructure. It tracks everything from crop forecasts and resource usage to expenses and operational metrics—almost 200 data points per farm.
Future stages include:
Integrating public APIs (weather, vegetation indices)
Adding IoT sensor data
Evolving into an open data platform that anyone can verify or build on
The goal? For data itself to become a revenue stream—a form of intellectual and digital capital that complements the physical output of farms.
One of the key insights from Wasabi’s talk is the importance of language and user experience. Most local communities don’t speak in tokens or governance primitives. They speak in pain points: lack of funding, transparency, or trust.
Wasabi meets them there.
Whether in town hall meetings or on the farm, the message is simple: “We’re building co-ops where the treasury, the rules, and the decisions are public by design.”
The Kokonut Network has big dreams:
Grow from 6 to 12 farms by 2025
Launch Kokonut v1, the first farm funded directly by the DAO
Open source their tools: the Ecosystem Canvas, impact flywheels, and plug-and-play forecasting models
Invite other communities and builders to fork, remix, and scale the model to new regions
And behind it all is a long-term vision: to show that Web3 can back real-world assets, rooted in regeneration, not speculation.
If you’re a crypto builder, the Kokonut Network offers a roadmap for on-chain infrastructure with real-world impact.
If you’re working in a non-Web3 organization, this is a living example of how data, trust, and coordination can be rebuilt at the local level—with or without tokens.
And if you're simply someone who cares about regeneration, this is a call to action: let’s build systems that work for the people who work the land.
