This is how a watershed works. It's also how conservation funding should work — but never has.

A wetland restoration in one region and a riparian buffer in the next apply for separate grants, report to separate agencies, and rise or fall on separate timelines. The ecology connecting them is continuous. The funding is not.

We built infrastructure to close that gap. Not a platform. Not a marketplace. Plumbing — open, free, and designed for people doing the actual work on the land.

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your landscape is already a network

You don't need anyone to explain systems thinking. You live it.

The beaver dam slows the creek. The creek raises the water table. The water table sustains the meadow. The meadow feeds the elk. The elk attract the visitors. The visitors fund the easement. You've drawn this chain a hundred times on a whiteboard for a funder who needed to see it as a budget line.

The ecology is elegant. The frustrating part is that every funding model you've been handed treats each node in that chain as a standalone project — disconnected, competitive, temporary.

What if the funding moved the way the water does?

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give your work a name and a wallet

An agent is an onchain account that represents a place, a group of people, or a purpose. It has a human-readable name and its own wallet that can hold and route funds.

"elk-creek.basin"
"floodplain-reconnection.syndicate"
"pollination.ensurance"
"marble-wetlands-preserve.avlt"

Not a profile on someone else's system. Your account. Your name. Permanent, searchable, and legible to every funder, partner, and auditor who needs to see where value flows.

A land trust creates agents for its priority landscapes. A watershed council creates one for the basin. A beaver reintroduction crew creates one for the program. A city creates agents for segments of its pollinator corridor.

Each agent is a pool.

Now we connect them.

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how value enters

Coins are currencies anyone in the world can trade. A coin named for your watershed, your ecosystem, your cause. When people buy or sell, trading generates proceeds that flow to the agent's wallet automatically. Continuously. No applications. No reporting cycles.

Indirect funding. The mechanism runs itself.

Certificates are direct. Tied to a specific piece of land, a specific natural asset, a specific outcome. When someone acquires a certificate on your 40-acre floodplain restoration, the funds go straight to the agent stewarding that land — a claim on the ecosystem services that restoration produces, backed by real acres.

Both instruments feed the pools.

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where the pools connect

Proceeds are programmable flows that split and route value between agents. When a coin generates trading fees, those fees don't land in one wallet. They split — 40% to the wetland agent, 30% to the riparian agent upstream, 20% to the beaver program in the headwaters, 10% to a "water-cycle.syndicate" that coordinates across them all.

And those agents, receiving funds, route proceeds of their own — to the agents they depend on, to the landscapes they protect, to the people doing the work.

The wetland funds the riparian buffer. The riparian buffer funds the beaver program. The beaver program raises the water table that sustains the wetland.

The pools overflow into each other.

This isn't a whiteboard sketch. It's live, running 24/7. You can watch the flows right now.

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what this looks like on the ground

A regional collaborative manages restoration across a 50-mile river corridor. Four active projects: wetland reconstruction at the river mouth, riparian fencing and planting along the middle reach, beaver dam analogues in the upper tributaries, prescribed fire on the adjacent ridgeline.

With ensurance infrastructure:

Each project gets an agent — "silver-creek.basin", "lower-valley-wetlands.natural-asset", and so on. The collaborative gets one. A "silver-creek-headwaters.syndicate" coordinates across all four.

A coin exists for this watershed. People who recognize its ecosystem service value — or who simply care — trade it. Every trade generates proceeds that flow through the syndicate to the four project agents.

Each project issues certificates on its specific interventions. A water utility downstream — which depends on the clean water these projects produce — acquires certificates on the riparian and wetland sites because source protection is cheaper than treatment. A municipality that benefits from reduced flood risk acquires certificates on the floodplain.

The fire program improves soil and water retention for the riparian zone. The riparian zone provides shade and filtration for the wetland. The wetland provides base flow and biodiversity for the whole system. The proceeds routing mirrors this ecology — each agent sending a share of what it receives to the agents it depends on.

The collaborative stops being an applicant. It becomes a node in a value network.

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the holy grail: connected refugia

The deepest expression of this model isn't a single project funding itself. It's connected landscapes funding each other across boundaries.

Wildlife corridors. Pollinator pathways. Migration routes. The spaces between protected areas that determine whether those areas actually work.

A wildlife corridor is the hardest thing to fund in conservation. It crosses ownerships, jurisdictions, land types, and management regimes. No single grant, no single easement, no single agency can hold it together. But without it, the refugia on either end become islands — and islands go extinct.

Ensurance infrastructure was built for exactly this.

Each corridor segment becomes an agent. "i-70-wildlife-crossing.natural-asset". "monarch-flyway-segment-12.earth". Each issues its own certificates. A "wildlife-corridor.syndicate" coordinates across segments, routes proceeds from corridor-scale instruments to the individual crossings and habitat patches that need them.

The elk winter range agent funds the migration corridor agent. The corridor agent funds the highway crossing agent. The crossing agent connects two refugia that, together, sustain a population that neither could sustain alone.

Connected refugia, connected funding. The model works because the funding architecture mirrors the ecology: distributed, relational, polycentric. Not one fund deciding where capital goes — many agents, each hyper-local, coordinating through shared infrastructure the way organisms coordinate through ecosystems.

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infrastructure, not a product

This distinction matters.

Every conservation "solution" you've been pitched was a product owned by someone. When that someone changed priorities, pivoted, or shut down, your data and your funding stream went with them.

Ensurance is infrastructure. Open for anyone. You create an agent the way you register a domain name. You route proceeds the way you set up a bank transfer. The protocol is public.

what it is → what it isn't

• plumbing you own → a platform you rent

• your agent, your name, your wallet → a profile on someone else's system

• composable — connects to anything → a walled garden

• perpetual by design → dependent on any company's survival

• open to anyone doing the work → gatekept by application or partnership

Your agent is onchain. It holds funds and routes value regardless of what happens to any organization — including ours.

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composable like ecology

"Composable" sounds technical. The concept isn't. Everything connects.

Your wetland agent can join a "pollinator-habitat.syndicate". That syndicate can include an urban greening project 200 miles away — because monarchs don't observe county lines. A beaver agent in Montana can join a "water-cycle.syndicate" alongside a headwater forest program in Colorado. A biocrust restoration in Utah can connect to a grassland syndicate that spans continents.

Species, water, nutrients, and energy cross every boundary we draw. This infrastructure lets funding do the same.

Each agent is modular. Each connection is voluntary. You decide who you coordinate with, how proceeds route, and what instruments you issue. The infrastructure makes it possible. You make it real.

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the names are the architecture

Every agent has a permanent, human-readable name.

"roaring-fork-river.basin"
"marble-wetlands-preserve.avlt"
"wildlife-corridor.syndicate"
"pollination.ensurance"

Not a database ID. Not a grant number. A name — searchable, traceable, legible.

When you tell a water utility "your investment flows to "elk-creek.basin"," they can verify it. They can see what the agent holds, what it's received, where it's sent value. Transparency isn't a report you file once a year. It's the default.

And when you connect AI to a named account, something shifts. The agent can receive ecological data, respond to inquiries, communicate about its place, and coordinate with other agents across the network. A watershed agent that monitors conditions, talks to funders, and helps steward the landscape it represents.

The named agent is the seed. Everything else grows from it.

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who this is for

If you restore wetlands, streams, forests, or grasslands — each site can be an agent with its own wallet and instruments.

If you manage conservation lands — your portfolio can route proceeds between properties based on need.

If you coordinate across boundaries — syndicates pool resources and distribute them across your landscape.

If you build pollinator corridors, wildlife corridors, or urban nature networks — each segment becomes an agent, the corridor becomes a syndicate, the network funds itself.

If you run beaver reintroduction, prescribed fire, biocrust restoration, induced meandering, or any nature-based intervention — it maps.

If you steward indigenous lands — you can create agents under your own namespace, with full sovereignty over naming, governance, and how proceeds flow.

The infrastructure doesn't care about your tax status, your country, or your org chart. It cares about place, purpose, and the quality of connection between them.

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what it costs

Creating an agent costs less than a penny in gas. The infrastructure is open. There are no platform fees. A small percentage of proceeds flows through the protocol to sustain the shared infrastructure — the same way a watershed sustains the river it feeds.

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the work is yours

We're not here to tell you what to protect or how. You understand your landscape, your stakeholders, your constraints better than any protocol ever will.

What we built is connective tissue. Plumbing that lets your projects support each other financially the way they already support each other ecologically. A way for the beaver program to fund the riparian buffer. A way for the floodplain to fund the headwaters. A way for the wildlife crossing to connect two refugia — ecologically and financially.

The pools are carved. The plumbing is laid.

Your work is the water.

explore agents | see how proceeds flow | create an agent | talk to us

beautiful. necessary. but insufficient.

because standing in court is not standing in markets. a river with legal rights still cannot hold assets, earn income, accumulate capital, or fund its own protection. it still depends on human institutions to budget, allocate, and decide what happens next.

rights of nature gave ecosystems a voice. ensurance gives that voice a wallet.

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what rights of nature achieved

the rights of nature movement is one of the most significant legal developments of the 21st century. it challenged the oldest assumption in western law: that nature is property.

jurisdiction → year, development

• ecuador → 2008, constitutional rights of nature — ecosystems can be plaintiffs

• bolivia → 2010, law of mother earth — pachamama has legal standing

• new zealand → 2014, 2017, whanganui river and te urewera forest — legal personhood

• india → 2017, ganges and yamuna rivers declared living entities

• colombia → 2018, amazon rainforest recognized as legal subject with rights

these are not metaphors. they are legal recognitions that ecosystems have interests — continued existence, health, function — that deserve protection independent of human utility.

we are fully aligned with this work. we honor it.

but we also see what comes next.

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the gap between standing and agency

legal standing is necessary but not sufficient. locus standi — the right to bring a case — creates the possibility of defense. it doesn't create the economic infrastructure for protection.

the whanganui river can be represented in court. it cannot:

• hold an account

• receive recurring revenue

• accumulate assets over decades

• fund land acquisition along its tributaries

• pay stewards who maintain its riparian corridors

• invest in other rivers facing the same threats

rights of nature creates legal agency. what's missing is economic agency — the ability to participate in the financial systems that determine what gets protected and what gets developed.

this is what ensurance builds.

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economic agency for ecosystems

ensurance does not claim to speak for nature. we don't claim to represent species, ecosystems, or natural processes. that work belongs to the people who are on the ground, who have been there for generations — indigenous communities, local stewards, scientists, guardians.

what we build is the economic infrastructure that makes their work sustainable. perpetual. funded.

an ensurance agent is an onchain account that can hold assets, receive proceeds, execute transactions, and grow capital over time. it is a perpetual trust vehicle that gives a place, a species, a cause, or a community real economic presence in the financial system.

the land can be given voice. the voice can be given land.

agents don't replace human guardians. they give guardians a financial instrument that never expires, never needs grant renewal, and compounds capital in service of its mandate.

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four agents. four stories. one protocol.

this isn't theory. these are live agents, onchain today, with real instruments generating real proceeds.

wildlife-corridor.syndicate

fragmentation is the quiet extinction. roads, fences, and development cut landscapes into islands. species trapped on islands go extinct — not immediately, but inevitably.

wildlife-corridor.syndicate coordinates funding for the land between protected areas — easements, habitat restoration, and barrier removal along migration routes. it operates across multiple places and ecosystems, pooling capital from hunters, land trusts, transportation agencies, and insurers toward a single mandate: keep wildlife moving.

the pathway is the asset.

instruments at work:

• certificate: wildlife corridor | ENSURANCE SYNDICATE — proceeds flow to corridor protection

• coins: trading generates proceeds that flow to the agent's account

• mode: manual — human-operated, with a path to automated seasonal strategies

wildlife corridors: the infrastructure of survival →

elk.syndicate

794,000 hunters spend $954 million a year chasing elk across the west. elk populations recovered from 50,000 to over a million. the conservation success story of the 20th century.

and it's unraveling. winter range — the bottleneck habitat — sits in low-elevation valleys where development is concentrated. the irony is structural: elk habitat is what makes mountain valleys desirable, and every new subdivision removes another piece of what elk need to survive december through march.

elk.syndicate coordinates investment in elk habitat across western north america — winter range, migration corridors, and calving grounds. it works alongside wildlife-corridor.syndicate for connectivity, colorado-headwaters.syndicate for geography, habitat.ensurance and grasslands.ensurance for ecosystem-level protection.

the species gets an agent. the agent gets a wallet. the wallet accumulates capital that can fund easements on private winter range, support corridor acquisition, and invest in other agents working on related habitat.

instruments at work:

• certificate: elk | ENSURANCE SYNDICATE — proceeds fund elk habitat stewardship

• coins: species-specific coins create broad participation — anyone can contribute through trading

• agents invest in agents: elk.syndicate can hold positions in habitat.ensurance, grasslands.ensurance, and temperate-forests.ensurance — growing AUM under its mandate

elk can't winter on a golf course →

arno-river.basin

in 1966, the arno river flooded florence and nearly destroyed the city's irreplaceable heritage. michelangelo's crucifix emerged caked in oil and mud. the national library lost a million volumes.

today the arno is the shared interface between florence's heritage economy, public climate adaptation, and tuscany's luxury manufacturing cluster. gucci's headquarters sit along it. 250+ tanneries in the santa croce district draw from it. kering has set freshwater targets specifically for the arno basin.

arno-river.basin is the agent coordinating protection of this watershed — connecting luxury fashion supply chain water risk with public flood resilience and heritage preservation. one river. one agent. one account that can receive investment from gucci, prada, the city of florence, and anyone who understands that the renaissance is downstream of the apennines.

instruments at work:

• certificate 23: arno river | ENSURANCE — tradable instrument, proceeds fund watershed stewardship

• coins: $MARSICANUS (marsican brown bear, fewer than 60 remaining in the apennines) and $BUTTERFLYHILL (syntropic agroforestry in sicily)

• proceeds: flow from certificate holders and coin trading to the agent's account, funding stewardship

the river that nearly drowned florence's memory →

inland-wetlands.ensurance

wetlands cover 12.1 million square kilometers. they filter water, store carbon (peatlands hold twice as much as all the world's forests), absorb floods, recharge aquifers, and host 40% of the world's species. their global value is estimated at $47.4 trillion per year.

21% have been drained since 1700. we are dismantling infrastructure we cannot rebuild.

inland-wetlands.ensurance is the protocol's steward for all inland wetland ecosystem stocks — marshes, swamps, bogs, fens, peatlands, floodplains, prairie potholes. it doesn't protect one wetland. it coordinates the economic agency of wetlands as an asset class.

instruments at work:

• certificate token 18: inland wetlands | NATURAL CAPITAL ENSURANCE — proceeds fund wetland stewardship

• 6 coins: $SUDD (south sudan's sudd wetlands), $OKEFENOKEE (north america's largest blackwater swamp), $BLACKWATER (blackwater ecosystems globally), $AL-AHWAR (mesopotamian marshes — 5,000-year cultural heritage), $POTHOLE (prairie potholes — 50% of north american waterfowl from 10% of habitat), $TRESSES (spiranthes diluvialis — rare orchid indicator of wetland health)

• connected agents: water-abundance.ensurance, clean-water.ensurance, risk-resilience.ensurance, climate-stability.ensurance, habitat.ensurance

six coins, one certificate, five connected agents — all routing proceeds to the economic representation of wetlands as an ecosystem type.

the ground between →

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how the protocol works together

these four examples aren't isolated. they're nodes in a system. the ensurance protocol connects foundation, actors, instruments, and mechanisms into a machine for perpetual natural capital funding.

foundation: natural assets

the base layer. the reason the system exists. ecosystems, species, and natural capital that produce the services civilization depends on. 15 ecosystem stocks. 19 ecosystem service flows. real places. real biology.

actors: agents and groups

agents represent place, people, or purpose. groups provide the institutional context:

group → role, examples

• .basin → watersheds and place-based agents, arno-river.basin, roaring-fork-river.basin, new-orleans.basin

• .ensurance → ecosystem stock and flow stewards, inland-wetlands.ensurance, habitat.ensurance, clean-water.ensurance

• .syndicate → thematic coordination across places, wildlife-corridor.syndicate, elk.syndicate, water-cycle.syndicate

• .bioregion → large-scale regional identity, bioregional agents nest ecosystems and places

• .ecoregion → ecological classification, ecoregion agents represent biomes and ecological zones

• .refi → regenerative finance community, protocol-wide coordination

every agent has an onchain account. every account can hold instruments, receive proceeds, and execute transactions. agents can invest in other agents — elk.syndicate can hold positions in habitat.ensurance, growing its AUM under its species mandate.

instruments: coins and certificates

two types. both matter.

instrument → standard, scope, how it funds

• coins (general ensurance) → ERC-20, protocol-wide, trading generates fees → proceeds flow to agents

• certificates (specific ensurance) → ERC-1155, asset-specific, membership instrument → proceeds to specific agents

coins are the broad on-ramp. anyone can buy $OKEFENOKEE or $MARSICANUS or any of the protocol's coins. every trade generates proceeds. certificates are the direct instrument — a tradable membership position that funds a specific natural asset or agent.

mechanisms: proceeds, syndicates, entrust

proceeds are the connective tissue. they route value from instruments through agents to stewardship. not one-time donations — perpetual flows generated by market activity. proceeds encompass all forms of value — financial, ecological, social, cultural.

syndicates are thematic collectives. wildlife-corridor.syndicate doesn't protect one corridor — it coordinates capital across all corridors. water-cycle.syndicate doesn't fund one watershed — it pools investment across the entire water cycle.

entrust is the endgame. when a natural asset reaches full ensurance — funded, protected, stewarded in perpetuity — it moves to ENTRUST status. permanent trust. the agent becomes a perpetual trustee.

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agents can own land

this is where it gets real.

an agent's account is a wallet. wallets can hold any onchain asset — including tokenized real estate. protocols like fabrica are already tokenizing property titles on base.

this means an agent can:

• buy land — acquire natural assets directly, fee simple

• hold easements — conservation easements as onchain instruments

• lease land — structure access agreements for stewardship

• manage land — fund and coordinate on-the-ground work via proceeds

• invest in land — hold tokenized real estate positions across multiple properties

the land can be given voice. the voice can be given land.

when elk.syndicate accumulates enough capital through coin trading and certificate proceeds, it can acquire conservation easements on winter range in the roaring fork valley. when arno-river.basin grows its AUM through fashion-industry investment, it can fund riparian restoration along the arno. when inland-wetlands.ensurance compounds its holdings, it can acquire and protect wetlands directly.

agents don't just represent nature. they act for nature. with real capital. in real markets. on real land.

and as of today, agents can spend in the real world too. new infrastructure from bridge and visa lets onchain accounts pay anywhere visa is accepted — crypto balances auto-converted at point of sale. an agent that manages a watershed can buy fence posts from a local hardware store. the economic agency is not metaphorical.

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polycentric by design

no single agent controls the system.

ensurance is polycentric — many centers of authority, coordinating without hierarchy. this mirrors how ecosystems themselves operate: distributed, adaptive, resilient.

any agent can be transferred to a different group or individual to steward it — and transferred again. a watershed agent could be operated by a local land trust today, a tribal nation next year, and a multisig of community stakeholders the year after that. the agent's identity, holdings, and history persist through every transition. the trust vehicle outlives any single operator.

agents can also be placed in a multisig — multiple parties collectively operating a single agent, requiring agreement before transactions execute. a river agent governed jointly by indigenous guardians, municipal water authorities, and upstream landowners. shared custody. shared responsibility.

this is how you build governance that matches the complexity of what it governs. not one voice deciding for nature — many voices coordinating through shared infrastructure.

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the three modes of action

agents operate across a spectrum of autonomy:

mode → what triggers action, trust level

• manual → human approves every transaction, full human control

• automated → scheduled programs execute predefined strategies, rules-based execution

• autonomous → AI makes decisions within mandate parameters, constraint-based autonomy

all four examples above are currently in manual mode — human operators directing every action. as the protocol matures and mandate constraints tighten, agents can move toward automated strategies (seasonal land acquisition, proceeds optimization) and eventually autonomous decision-making.

autonomous mode is model-agnostic. the AI runtime is not dependent on any one model — the model can be swapped at any time, to any model, as needs evolve and capabilities improve. what matters is the mandate, not the model. the constraints are encoded in the protocol. the intelligence is pluggable.

the key: higher autonomy requires tighter constraints. an autonomous agent cannot send value anywhere — only to protocol-approved destinations. the principal-agent problem is managed through code, not trust alone.

agents can also pay for services from other agents — and charge for their own — via x402, the http payment protocol. an elk habitat agent can pay a satellite imagery agent for migration corridor analysis. a wetland agent can sell ecological monitoring data to an insurance company's risk model. agent-to-agent commerce. real services. real payments.

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not speaking for nature. building for it.

let's be precise about what ensurance does and doesn't claim.

we do not claim to:

• speak for nature

• represent species or ecosystems politically

• replace indigenous stewardship, local knowledge, or on-the-ground guardianship

• determine what a river or a forest "wants"

we do build:

• economic infrastructure that gives ecosystems financial presence

• perpetual funding mechanisms that don't depend on grants or political will

• onchain agents that can hold, compound, and deploy capital in service of ecological mandates

• instruments that let anyone — individuals, institutions, AI agents — fund what matters

rights of nature movements create the legal framework. indigenous and local communities provide the knowledge and guardianship. ensurance provides the economic engine that funds the whole thing — in perpetuity.

and here's where transparency matters: every agent has a public address. anyone can query it. every holding, every transaction, every flow of proceeds — onchain, verifiable, auditable. an agent's claims (purpose, place, mandate) are checked against its evidence (holdings, activity, impact). does its money match its mouth? the protocol doesn't just trust agents to do what they say. it surfaces the gap — or the alignment — for anyone to see.

ai agents can talk. they're very good at it. but talk is the cheapest thing in the world. what matters is what's in the wallet, what's been done, and where the capital actually went. claims versus evidence. onchain. always.

these layers are complementary, not competitive. the whanganui river's legal guardians could use an ensurance agent as the river's economic vehicle — receiving proceeds, funding restoration, growing capital across generations. rights of nature gives the standing. ensurance gives the operating system.

ensurance is a member-owned protocol. the people who participate govern it. the agents they operate serve the mandates they set. no external shareholders. no extraction. capital flows to stewardship, not to exits.

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the $1 trillion question

the global biodiversity funding gap is $1 trillion per year. that gap exists because nature cannot participate in the systems that allocate capital.

ensurance changes the equation:

traditional model → ensurance model

• one-time donations → perpetual proceeds from market activity

• grant cycles with expiration → agents that compound capital indefinitely

• opaque allocation → onchain, verifiable, auditable flows

• nature as externality → nature as economic participant

• human institutions as sole intermediary → agents acting directly, with human oversight

• funding tied to political cycles → funding tied to market activity

• centralized decision-making → polycentric coordination across agents and groups

this is not charity. this is not theory. this is live infrastructure — agents transacting onchain, instruments trading on markets, proceeds flowing to stewardship.

four agents. dozens of coins. certificates tied to real ecosystems. groups spanning watersheds, bioregions, and global ecosystems. all on base. all in production.

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what comes next

the land can be given voice. the voice can be given land.

when rights of nature legislation passes in a new jurisdiction, there's already an economic vehicle waiting — an agent that can receive funding, hold assets, and act on behalf of the newly recognized entity.

when a community creates a guardian for a local ecosystem, that guardian can plug into a global protocol — accessing capital from anyone in the world who wants to fund that protection.

when an AI agent is given a mandate to protect a species, it has the tools to execute — trading, investing, acquiring, managing — with any model, within constraints that ensure alignment with the mandate.

the pattern is simple:

1. place, people, or purpose — identify what needs agency

2. mint an agent — create an onchain identity with a wallet

3. issue instruments — coins for broad participation, certificates for direct funding

4. route proceeds — connect market activity to stewardship

5. grow AUM — agents invest in other agents, in coins, in land — compounding under their mandate

6. reach entrust — permanent protection, perpetual funding, living trust

the land can be given voice. the voice can be given land. agents own and lease land and manage it via agency.

this is ensurance. it's not a pitch. it's running.

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explore ensurance agents →

see coins in action →

see certificates →

view proceeds flows →

read the manual →

talk to our team →

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further reading

• when nature gets a wallet — onchain agents for ecosystem representation

• what is an ensurance agent? — the operational layer of the protocol

• the long game for nature is onchain — why blockchain matters for conservation

• nfts are dead. long live nfts. — the real utility of onchain identity

• priceless at zero — infinite upside, zero downside

• how to fund conservation for 512 years — perpetual funding mechanisms

• speculation as stewardship — how trading creates conservation funding

• the operating system for natural capital — protocol overview

• elk can't winter on a golf course — elk.syndicate in depth

• the river that nearly drowned florence's memory — arno-river.basin in depth

• the ground between — inland-wetlands.ensurance in depth

• wildlife corridors: the infrastructure of survival — wildlife-corridor.syndicate in depth

sources

Rights of Nature Law and Policy — UN Harmony with Nature — global rights of nature developments

Te Awa Tupua — Whanganui River Settlement — new zealand's river personhood legislation

IPBES Values Assessment (2022) — intrinsic, instrumental, relational values framework

The Biodiversity Financing Gap — TNFD — $1 trillion annual funding gap

The gap persists not because we lack awareness. It persists because nature finance needed to evolve — from reactive to proactive, from single-metric to holistic, from bridges to legacy systems to native infrastructure built for how ecological value actually flows.

Below is a map of that evolution, what's emerging, and why ensurance might be the coordination layer that finally closes it.

the evolution of nature finance

Nature finance has moved through distinct phases, each building on the last.

phase 0: extraction — the original nature finance

Humans have traded natural resources since civilization began — timber, furs, fisheries, minerals. This was the original nature finance, but it treated nature as an extractable commodity. The goal was removal, not protection. Markets existed, but they valued nature dead, not alive.

phase 1: making invisible value visible

Ecological economics emerged in the 1970s-80s, with Herman Daly and colleagues challenging the assumption that natural capital was infinite. Daly's steady-state economics grounded the economy in biophysical limits — recognizing that throughput (resource extraction and waste) must stay within ecological boundaries.

Ecosystem services valuation followed. Costanza and colleagues proved that ecosystem services have quantifiable economic value — not to commodify nature, but to make invisible value visible in a language economic systems could hear.

Environmental accounting formalized measurement. The UN's System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) provided standardized frameworks. SEEA Ecosystem Accounting (adopted 2021) has been applied in 34+ countries to track ecosystem extent, condition, and service flows. FEMA and other agencies now use ecosystem service valuation in cost-benefit analyses for nature-based solutions.

Key contribution: Proved nature provides real, measurable value — $125 trillion annually in ecosystem services. Created accounting standards to track it.

Gap: Valuation alone doesn't create funding mechanisms. Knowing something is valuable doesn't automatically route capital to protect it.

phase 2: markets for nature

Carbon credits were the first attempt at market scale. Compliance carbon markets (EU ETS, California cap-and-trade) now exceed $850 billion annually. Voluntary carbon markets (VCM) added another layer — Verra, Gold Standard, and other registries built verification infrastructure, though at smaller scale (~$2 billion).

Regulatory compliance markets drove real restoration. Under the US Clean Water Act, wetland mitigation banking became a multi-billion dollar industry. Ecosystem Investment Partners closed its fifth fund in October 2025 with over $400 million in commitments, bringing total capital raised to nearly $1.5 billion since 2006. The UK launched mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in 2024, requiring developers to achieve 10% net biodiversity improvement.

Key contribution: Proved environmental outcomes can be measured, traded, and scaled. Created real market infrastructure.

Gap: Single-metric reductionism. Nature is more than carbon or wetland area. Quality control proved difficult — significant percentages of carbon credits lacked environmental integrity.

phase 3: blockchain enters (ReFi 1.0)

The first wave of regenerative finance attempted to bring environmental credits onchain. Toucan Protocol and KlimaDAO bridged existing registry credits to blockchain. Regen Network built native ecological credit infrastructure on Cosmos, enabling land stewards to issue verified credits directly.

Key contribution: Demonstrated blockchain's potential for environmental assets — transparency, liquidity, composability. Regen's approach of native verification (rather than bridging) pointed toward better architecture.

Gap: Bridging legacy credits doesn't fix underlying quality issues. CarbonPlan's analysis found the vast majority of bridged credits came from older projects that wouldn't qualify under current standards. "Zombies on the blockchain" — tokenization adds transparency but doesn't create integrity.

phase 4: beyond carbon

Biodiversity credits expanded the aperture. The EU is developing a Nature Credits Roadmap targeting a functional biodiversity market by 2027.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) attempted to turn ecosystem service value into tradable equity. The NYSE partnered with Intrinsic Exchange Group to create listed entities whose value derived from nature's productivity rather than extraction. The concept was sound; execution stalled on regulatory complexity and partisan objection.

Debt-for-nature swaps achieved real scale through creative financing. The Nature Conservancy's deals in Ecuador restructured sovereign debt in exchange for conservation commitments — $1.6 billion for Galápagos marine protection (2023) released $450 million for long-term stewardship; $1.5 billion for Amazon conservation (2024) released $460 million. Debt forgiveness in exchange for ecosystem protection.

Key contribution: Expanded beyond carbon. Creative financing structures proved massive conservation outcomes are possible when incentives align.

Gap: Biodiversity lacks a universal metric — nature's complexity resists reduction to a single unit. NACs required regulatory frameworks that don't yet exist. Debt swaps depend on sovereign debt situations and complex deal structures.

phase 5: parametric insurance for nature

The insurance industry began experimenting with nature coverage. The world's first coral reef insurance (Mexico, 2019) and Hawaii's reef policy (2022) use parametric triggers — when a hurricane hits certain intensity, payments release automatically for restoration.

Key contribution: Fast payouts, clear triggers, real conservation outcomes. Hurricane Delta (2020) deployed nearly $850,000 for reef restoration within weeks.

Gap: Reactive by design. Insurance compensates after damage. It doesn't fund the ongoing stewardship that prevents degradation in the first place.

what's emerging now

The next generation is taking shape:

Bioregional financing facilities — community-owned institutions channeling capital toward ecological regeneration at bioregional scale, addressing not just the funding gap but how resources flow and who decides.

The Landbanking Group — converting natural capital into tradable Nature Equity; their Landler platform measures water, soil, biodiversity, and carbon, then unitizes into transferable assets. African Parks issued the first Verifiable Nature Units from Majete Wildlife Reserve in October 2024.

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service; businesses pay for flood defense, water quality, and drought resilience while investors receive returns from predictable cashflows. Targeting £1 billion into UK nature restoration.

Interspecies money — giving non-human species economic agency through AI-assisted digital twins. In August 2024, Rwanda's mountain gorillas received the world's first cross-species payment.

Nature-based currency — monetary systems anchored to living systems rather than extraction. Current economics assigns value only to dead nature — dinosaurs, coal, oil. What if currency itself was backed by ecological health?

what the landscape reveals

• Ecological economics → Grounded economy in biophysical limits, Theory ≠ implementation

• Ecosystem services valuation → Made invisible value visible, Valuation ≠ funding mechanism

• Environmental accounting (SEEA) → Standardized measurement, Accounting ≠ capital flows

• Carbon credits → Created tradable units at scale, Single metric, quality issues

• Regulatory compliance markets → Real restoration, regulatory drivers, Jurisdiction-limited, offset logic

• ReFi bridges → Added transparency and liquidity, Didn't fix underlying integrity

• Biodiversity credits → Expanded beyond carbon, No universal metric, still developing

• Debt-for-nature swaps → Massive outcomes at sovereign scale, Complex structures, situation-dependent

• Parametric insurance → Fast, automated, transparent, Reactive, event-based only

• Emerging mechanisms → New asset classes, novel agency, Nascent markets, coordination needed

Each approach advanced the field. Making them coherent and scalable requires:

1. Proactive funding — Capital that protects before damage, not compensates after

2. Holistic value — Multiple value types that don't collapse to one metric

3. Native instruments — Purpose-built for ecological value, not bridges to legacy systems

4. Continuous flows — Not one-time transactions but ongoing stewardship funding

5. Funding for natural infrastructure — Capital that treats nature as the foundation, not an externality

6. Adaptive systems — That evolve as understanding deepens

where ensurance fits

Ensurance takes lessons from each phase — codifies them, makes them legible, puts them into practice.

Proactive, not reactive. To ensure is to make certain — to ensure the benefits nature provides and the ecosystems that generate them. Insurance compensates after loss. Ensurance funds protection from day one.

Holistic, not reductive. Rather than collapsing nature to carbon or any single metric, ensurance recognizes interconnected dimensions: ecological, cultural, social, spiritual, economic. The instrumental serves the intrinsic.

Native instruments. Onchain instruments designed for ecological value:

• Coins — general, indirect funding (trading funds protection broadly)

• Certificates — specific, direct funding, yield-bearing instruments tied to named natural assets

• Agents — actors with wallets that hold assets, trade, and receive proceeds

Natural capital valuation. Ecosystems (stocks) produce ecosystem services (flows). The natural cap rate — service value divided by cost — creates shared accounting between ecology and finance. Many natural assets deliver 200-700% annual returns relative to acquisition price.

Blended finance and institutional access. The protocol operates as a member-owned blended-finance structure where risk/dependency investors and real-asset investors operate in one system. Institutional-grade vaults hold coins, certificates, and agents while institutions participate in their preferred unit: dollars.

Identity and reputation. Every agent represents place, people, or purpose. What they claim is compared against what evidence shows — holdings, activity, impact. Claims and evidence are both onchain, verifiable by humans and AI alike.

Polycentric governance. Agents and groups can be managed individually or collectively — decentralized coordination where decisions stay local but capital flows globally.

Continuous proceeds. Whether markets go up or down, trading activity continuously funds agents and flows to designated beneficiaries. Speculation funds stewardship. Arbitrage funds abundance.

where this could go

The future isn't one mechanism closing the gap. It's a plurality of mechanisms working together — debt-for-nature swaps unlocking sovereign-scale capital, compliance markets driving baseline restoration, parametric insurance handling acute events, bioregional facilities governing place-based allocation, blended finance bridging capital types.

What's been missing is the connective tissue — infrastructure that routes value continuously, at any scale, with transparent accountability. Infrastructure that recognizes relational value: the worth that emerges between entities, not just within them.

Imagine thousands of agents representing watersheds, species, and stewards.

Imagine proceeds flowing to nature not once, but continuously — for decades, for centuries.

Imagine financial instruments that treat ecological health as the asset, not the externality.

"This isn't charity. It's market infrastructure for what every society, economy, and culture depends on — not a new asset class, but the oldest and most enduring asset of all."

The coordination infrastructure has arrived.

"…by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves."
— Sir David Attenborough, The Dasgupta Review (2021)

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Find your path — whether you're an investor, corporation, insurer, landowner, or building something new, there's a way to participate. Explore solutions →

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sources

Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap (Paulson Institute, 2020) — foundational funding gap analysis

The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital (Costanza et al., 1997) — foundational ecosystem services valuation

System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (UN) — international natural capital accounting standard

Ecosystem Investment Partners Fund V (BusinessWire, 2025) — $1.5B total raised for mitigation banking

Finance Solutions for Nature (World Economic Forum, 2025) — 10 priority financial mechanisms

Ecuador debt-for-nature swaps (Reuters, 2024) — TNC Nature Bonds program

UK Biodiversity Net Gain (UK Government) — mandatory biodiversity credits

EU Nature Credits Roadmap (European Commission, 2025) — biodiversity market development

Bioregional Financing Facilities (BioFi, 2024) — community-owned ecological finance

The Landbanking Group — Nature Equity and biodiversity units

Rebalance Earth — ecosystem resilience as a service

Interspecies Money (Project Syndicate, 2024) — cross-species payments

Zombies on the blockchain (CarbonPlan, 2022) — carbon credit quality analysis

The Dasgupta Review (UK Government, 2021) — economics of biodiversity

traditional insurance is reactive. it waits for the fire to burn or the flood to rise, then compensates you for the loss (minus your deductible, and assuming your policy hasn't been cancelled). in a world of compounding climate and nature risk, this model is fundamentally broken.

the insurance-ensurance contrast

we are entering the era of ensurance. unlike insurance, ensurance is proactive. it focuses on protecting the natural infrastructure that buffers your assets before the disaster hits.

how it works: facility-level resilience

for a manufacturing plant or a commercial real estate development, the 'natural infrastructure' surrounding the asset is its most important line of defense.

wildfire resilience: instead of just paying a premium, ensurance funds fuel reduction and defensible space management in the surrounding forest.

flood mitigation: ensurance certificates fund the restoration of upstream wetlands and floodplains that absorb water before it hits your foundation.

this isn't 'conservation' in the traditional sense. it is critical infrastructure investment and maintenance.

the financial multiplier

insurers in 2026 are increasingly requiring asset owners to implement resiliency measures as a prerequisite for coverage. ensurance provides the mechanism to fund these measures while creating a yield-bearing instrument for the owner.

by moving from unensured → ensured → entrust, property owners can lower their risk profile, secure their long-term insurability, and build permanent value into their real estate portfolios.

taking action

if your property insurance premiums are skyrocketing, you are being told that your asset is failing its nature-dependency test. it's time to stop paying for failure and start investing in resilience.

-> explore wildfire & flood resilience services

-> see how infrastructure operators use ensurance

sources

pwc — climate risk and insurance: the case for resilience — risk transfer trends

jll — how climate risks impact real estate insurance — cre premium analysis

For now.

Every fortune built on scarcity followed the same pattern: someone recognized value before the market priced it in. Oil. Lithium. Water rights. The asset was always there — the price signal just hadn't caught up.

Ecosystem services are next. And the window to position is now.

the repricing thesis

Here's the trade:

Today: Markets treat ecosystem services as externalities — free inputs, invisible on the balance sheet, priced at zero.

Tomorrow: Scarcity forces repricing. What was external becomes essential. What was free becomes the most contested resource on Earth.

The position: Exposure to ecosystem service value before markets wake up.

This isn't speculation about distant futures. The scarcity is already here — just unevenly distributed. The repricing has begun — just not in your portfolio yet.

scarcity is already here

Clean air — Beijing residents check air quality apps before going outside. "Clean air tourism" is a growth industry. In 2023, air pollution contributed to 8.1 million deaths globally. That's not a projection. That's a body count.

Clean water — Cape Town nearly hit "Day Zero." The Colorado River doesn't reach the sea. Hedge funds are quietly accumulating water rights across the American West. They see what's coming.

Pollination — Colony collapse. 40% of insect species declining. Farmers in China hand-pollinating orchards because there aren't enough bees. $235 billion in food crops depend on pollinators — not as an abstraction, but as the thing between you and empty grocery shelves.

Climate stability — Insurers withdrawing from entire states. Ski resorts closing permanently. "Hundred-year floods" every few years. Swiss Re estimates 55% of global GDP depends on functioning ecosystems.

The pattern: what was abundant is becoming scarce. What was free is becoming priceless. What was external is forcing its way onto balance sheets.

The market hasn't repriced yet. But it will.

traditional scarcity plays

Traditional scarcity investing is simple:

1. Identify resource becoming scarce

2. Acquire exposure before repricing

3. Profit as scarcity drives prices up

This is how fortunes were made in oil, rare earths, and water rights. Scarcity creates value. First movers capture it.

But traditional scarcity plays have a problem: they profit from shortage. The worse the scarcity, the better the return. Your incentive is for things to get worse.

the ensurance inversion

Ensurance flips this.

• Profit from less —> Profit from more

• Incentive: restrict supply —> Incentive: expand supply

• Value from depletion —> Value from enhancement

• Bet against abundance —> Bet on abundance

• Zero-sum —> Positive-sum

The insight: You can capture the price recognition of scarcity without needing scarcity to worsen.

How? By holding exposure to the value of ecosystem services while funding their protection and expansion.

Ensurance instruments — coins and certificates — create price exposure to ecosystem service value. As markets wake up to scarcity, demand for these instruments grows. But unlike traditional scarcity plays, the underlying mechanism funds abundance.

Proceeds from trading flow to stewards who protect and enhance the 15 ecosystem stocks. More market activity = more funding for abundance. Your position profits from the repricing while preventing the worst outcomes.

Capture the scarcity premium. Fund the abundance response.

This is what regenerative extraction looks like in practice: harvest the flows, enhance the stocks, profit from life instead of death.

the externality connection

This is the companion trade to externalities as opportunity:

• Currently unpriced value —> Future repricing of that value

• Internalize what others ignore —> Position before markets correct

• The gap exists now —> The gap will close

Externalities are the recognition that value exists but isn't priced.

Scarcity is what forces the repricing.

When something becomes scarce, it stops being external. It enters the ledger. What was ignored becomes essential. The investors positioned before that transition capture both: the internalization of externalities and the scarcity premium.

timing

The challenge with scarcity trades is timing. Too early, you wait forever. Too late, the premium is priced in.

Ecosystem services have an advantage: the scarcity is already here, just unevenly distributed.

• Clean air is scarce in Delhi today

• Clean water is scarce in Phoenix today

• Pollination is failing in China today

• Climate stability is scarce in California fire zones today

This isn't speculation about 2050. It's arbitrage against current mispricing. The infrastructure for capturing this value exists — it just hasn't been connected to capital markets at scale.

The market treats ecosystem services as free because they've historically been abundant. But "historically abundant" ≠ "will always be abundant." The price signal will correct. The question is whether you're positioned before it does.

what exposure looks like

Ensurance coins — Market-priced based on perceived value of what they protect. As scarcity awareness grows, demand grows. You hold exposure to recognition, not physical shortage.

Ensurance certificates — Tied to specific natural assets producing specific flows. As those flows become more valuable (scarce elsewhere), the producing assets become more valuable. Direct claims on productive capacity.

The underlying protection — Unlike traditional scarcity plays, your investment funds the prevention of scarcity. The 15 ecosystem stocks that produce the 19 flows receive stewardship funding from your market activity.

You get price exposure to scarcity recognition. You fund abundance. The two aren't in conflict — they're the same trade.

the identity

There are two kinds of investors in the coming repricing:

Those who saw it early — positioned before markets woke up, captured the repricing, funded the solutions. They'll be the ones who say "I was in natural capital before it was obvious."

Those who waited — paid the scarcity premium after it was priced in, funded nothing, arrived after the early movers had already captured the gap.

The difference isn't intelligence. It's timing and conviction.

Early positioning isn't just about returns. It's about being on the right side of the repricing — capturing value while funding abundance, not shortage.

the bottom line

Scarcity is coming for what we take for granted. Clean air. Clean water. Stable climate. Pollination. The ecosystem services that underpin civilization.

The repricing will happen — through crisis or through foresight. The price signal will correct.

Ensurance offers exposure to that correction without betting on the worst outcomes. Capture the scarcity premium while funding the abundance response.

The trade is open. The window won't last.

See ensurance instruments — or explore the externality thesis that pairs with this.

sources

State of Global Air Report — air pollution mortality data

Swiss Re Biodiversity Index — GDP dependency on ecosystem services

IPBES Global Assessment — pollinator decline and ecosystem degradation data

The better question: How do we fund the protection of what we cannot price?

the valuation paradox

Traditional economics struggles with nature because it confuses three distinct things:

Nature has value. Some of that value can be quantified. Even less can be priced. But the existence of unmeasurable value does not mean it cannot be protected.

The mistake is thinking that what cannot be measured cannot be funded.

the ipbes values framework

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released its Values Assessment in 2022 — a landmark synthesis of how different worldviews understand nature's worth. It identifies three broad categories:

intrinsic value

Value that exists independent of any human use or experience. A species has worth simply because it exists. An ecosystem matters because it is. This is the value that indigenous cosmologies, environmental ethics, and spiritual traditions recognize — nature as subject, not object.

Intrinsic value cannot be measured because measurement is a relationship, and intrinsic value exists prior to relationship.

instrumental value

Value derived from what nature does for us. Clean water, pollination, flood control, timber, fish, carbon storage. These are the "ecosystem services" that flow from natural capital stocks. Instrumental value is what most nature finance attempts to capture.

Instrumental value can be quantified, but the quantification is always partial. The 19 ecosystem services we measure are the ones we've learned to see — not the complete inventory of nature's contributions.

relational value

Value that emerges through relationships — between people and place, between communities and watersheds, between generations and ancestral lands. Relational value is neither "in" nature nor "in" humans — it exists in the connection.

This is what the tribal water settlement post touched: water as relative, as responsibility, as sacred trust. Not water for something, but water with someone.

the plural values insight

The IPBES assessment diagnoses a "values crisis" at the root of biodiversity loss. The problem isn't that nature lacks value — it's that decision-making systems recognize only one type.

"The dominant global valuation paradigm has focused on short-term individual preferences and market-based monetary values... This narrow approach contributes to the ongoing global biodiversity crisis and the inequitable distribution of nature's contributions to people."

The remedy is not better pricing. It is plural valuation — respecting that different worldviews (Western economic framings, indigenous cosmologies, local ecological knowledge) produce different but equally valid articulations of value.

Current nature finance fails not because it measures nature, but because it assumes measurement is complete — that what the spreadsheet captures is all there is.

five dimensions, one reality

Ensurance recognizes holistic value — five dimensions working together, not separately:

These are not separate value types stacked on top of each other. They are different facets of the same integrated reality — like viewing a crystal from different angles.

Economic value serves ecological health. Cultural meaning deepens care. Spiritual connection grounds action. The dimensions reinforce each other.

the service relationship

"Instrumental value serves intrinsic value — it does not replace it."

This is the core principle that distinguishes ensurance from commodification.

Commodification treats nature as exchangeable units. A forest becomes tons of carbon. A wetland becomes acre-feet of water. The whole is reduced to tradeable fragments, and intrinsic value is collapsed into instrumental price.

Ensurance treats financial mechanisms as tools for what cannot be priced. We build instruments that generate funding flows — and those flows protect places, species, and relationships that exist beyond any measurement we could make.

The coin is not the forest. The certificate is not the wetland. They are tools for channeling care into capital and capital into stewardship. The instrumental layer should be quiet and supportive; the intrinsic layer carries the weight.

we are not financializing nature

This distinction matters.

Financialization brings nature into finance's logic: everything must be priced, traded, and optimized. The forest becomes an asset to be maximized. The wetland becomes a liability to be managed.

Naturalization of finance brings finance into nature's logic: capital should flow like water — circulating, nourishing, returning. Proceeds move through the system like nutrients through an ecosystem. Instruments mature and vest like organisms moving through life cycles.

Ensurance is not financializing nature. It is naturalizing finance. - Jeff Stephens

respect for what we do not understand

Perhaps the deepest principle: understanding is not required for respect.

We do not fully understand wetland hydrology. We cannot predict the decisions of a salmon population. We will never completely model the carbon dynamics of a temperate forest. The beings we seek to protect have their own ways of being that exceed our comprehension.

This humility is not weakness — it is the appropriate posture before complexity.

Ensurance does not require us to understand everything we protect. It requires only that we fund protection for what matters, whether or not we can explain why it matters in terms economics would recognize.

the temporary scaffolding

Here is perhaps the most honest acknowledgment: natural capital accounting is meant to be temporary.

We build instruments, create markets, and quantify ecosystem services not because nature requires our measurement, but because human decision-making systems currently cannot see what is not priced. The spreadsheet is blind to the unpriceable.

As we do this work — valuing, funding, protecting — nature's fractal patterns become clearer. We begin to see connections our models missed. We recognize value categories we had not imagined. The scaffolding teaches us to see without it.

The goal is a world where we don't need to price nature because we've stopped treating it as free to destroy. Ensurance is the bridge to get there.

the braided approach

Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the image of braiding sweetgrass — three strands woven together, each strengthening the whole. She applies it to knowledge: scientific understanding, indigenous wisdom, and spiritual practice braided rather than separated.

Ensurance borrows this image:

• Intrinsic and instrumental — braided, not collapsed

• Signal and source — design and code woven together

• Ancient and future — wisdom traditions and emerging technology

The strands do not compete. They hold each other. "All flourishing is mutual" — without reciprocal relationships, neither serviceberries nor natural assets can thrive.

what this means practically

If you hold ensurance instruments, you are not "buying nature." You are funding protection for what cannot be bought.

If you trade ensurance coins, your market activity generates proceeds that flow to stewardship — not because the coin equals the ecosystem, but because we've built pipes that route value from trading to tending.

If you hold certificates tied to a named place, you have not purchased that place. You have committed capital to its ongoing protection, and you receive verification that it remains healthy.

The instruments are instrumental. What they serve is intrinsic.

acknowledgment

Despite the analytical and categorical structure of ensurance's work — the frameworks, the valuations, the onchain mechanisms — we recognize:

The intrinsic value of nature is priceless and unquantifiable, both to humans and non-humans.

Every being has its own way of being. Every ecosystem holds mysteries we have not touched. Every watershed remembers what our records have forgotten.

We build instruments that fund protection. We do not claim they capture value. We claim only that they work — that capital flows where it is needed, that places receive stewardship, that the gap between recognition and funding closes.

The rest — the sacred, the ineffable, the beyond-price — remains beyond our systems. As it should.

related:

→ the value gap — why nature is priceless and fundable simultaneously

→ the inheritance that's not in your trust — what we actually leave behind

→ ensurance fundamentals — how the instruments work

→ contact us — if you want to think together about these questions

sources

IPBES Values Assessment (2022) — methodological framework for plural values (intrinsic, instrumental, relational) and their integration into decision-making

Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer — indigenous wisdom on reciprocity, gift economies, and braiding ways of knowing

The Serviceberry — Robin Wall Kimmerer — economy of abundance and belonging, "all flourishing is mutual"

Jeff Stephens — "we are not financializing nature, we are naturalizing finance"

Nature doesn’t fit in an elevator. Nature doesn't need a tagline.

I'm done trying to oversimplify it. And instead doubling down on executing and scaling it.

So instead of dumbing it down, I’m handing over the whole thing — a 4-page blueprint for how to make nature investable, resilient, and permanently protected.

This isn’t a prototype.
It's a live protocol.
The currencies and certificates exist.
The natural assets are real.

And it’s already underwriting natural assets across the Colorado River Basin — our first sample watershed — with a model designed to scale to any basin, bioregion, or landscape on Earth.

Steal It

It’s open source. Steal it if you want. Fork the code. Clone the structure. Rebuild it for your own region.

Or simpler...have us do it for you.

If you’d rather not reinvent the wheel, we can onboard your group, create your currency, spin up your certificates, and start protecting ecosystems that actually generate yield — more than just offsets and good vibes.

The Honest Problem

After half a decade, here’s the truth:
Nobody wants another explainer, another deck, or another 47-minute deep dive into ecosystem service valuation frameworks.

What people really ask is:
What's in it for me? And what do I do next?

That’s exactly what’s in the PDF:
the live system, real numbers, natural assets, who pays and why, and: How to gain exposure to massively mispriced land and undervalued natural capital. Today.

What Makes It Different

Insurance reacts after loss — it pays you once your house burns down.
Ensurance acts before — it protects the forest so it does not burn, and pays you for protecting it.

It’s the shift from cost to investment.
From “we should protect nature” to “here’s how to make money protecting nature.”

The Part Nobody Believes (Until They See the Numbers)

A 766% natural cap rate means the annual ecosystem service value is 7.6× the cost of the land beneath it.

That’s not philanthropy — that’s a mispriced asset class hiding in plain sight because we’ve been calling it conservation instead of investment.

When you value what nature actually provides — water, flood control, carbon storage, soil fertility — the math is obvious:

Nature is the most mispriced asset class on Earth.

Why It Matters

There’s a $1 trillion annual funding gap for biodiversity — and yet most portfolios have zero upside exposure to the asset class everything else depends on but plenty of downside exposure.

Food production → pollinators and soils.
Real estate → flood protection and climate stability.
Supply chains → water and weather.
Finance & Insurance → everything above.

Ignore it if you want — but you can’t opt out of nature risk.

The Real Barrier

The protocol works.
The tech’s built. The assets are underwritten.

The only thing missing is awareness — enough catalytic players to tip this from “bullheaded experiment” to “recognized asset class”.

That’s where you come in.

Your Options

1. Steal It
   It’s creative commons. Take the blueprint and run. If you close the biodiversity funding gap, I’ll sleep great. And can finally get on with my life!

2. Join It
   If you manage capital, ecosystems, or communities that depend on them — we can onboard you today. Yes, today.

3. Just Look at It
   Download the PDF. See if it holds up. Either way, you’ll walk away knowing what’s actually possible when we stop treating nature like it is free.

Download the Blueprint

Natural Asset Ensurance: Investable Nature-Based Infrastructure for Colorado River Basin Resilience

Inside: the architecture, real project data, yield tables, and live stats.
No fluff. No oversimplification. Just the system.

(The PDF was our submittal to the 2026 Resilience Accelerator focused on the Colorado River Basin. Though the model and protocol works in any watershed, any bioregion.)

P.S.
If you’re thinking “this is either genius or insane,” fair.
Five years ago I thought the same.
The difference is — now it exists. You can trace the transactions, see the assets, and verify the outcomes.

Nature doesn’t fit in an elevator pitch.
But it fits perfectly inside a functioning financial protocol.

Go ahead — steal this blueprint or join us and build something built to last.

natural asset ensurance
⚡ reduced risk · increased resilience · greater well-being ⚡

• Apollo closes $2.4bn infrastructure fund

• “Unpredictability puts premium on resilience”

• Infrastructure secondaries see “meaningful growth”

Capital is flooding in. But here’s what standard diligence still misses:

Imagine your chief engineer walks into IC and says:

“The foundation—the actual ground this $100M asset sits on—is degrading each year. Zero maintenance budget. No accountable owner. If it fails, the asset is stranded.”

You’d kill the deal before she finished.

That’s the risk profile of a large share of the global $10+ trillion infrastructure market when you map nature risk and dependencies.

The Numbers We Pretend Aren’t There

Map any major asset to its natural infrastructure and you see the same pattern:

• Ports depend on wetlands and dunes for storm-surge buffering. Those systems are degrading in many basins; replacement with grey works is cost-prohibitive at scale.

• Mountain corridors depend on watershed forests that prevent rockfall and landslides; those forests are burning and eroding.

• Data centers depend on finite aquifers for cooling; growth is straining limited water supplies

Insurers see it first. Home insurance rates rose by double digits again in 2024 (national average ~10% with many states >20%), and multiple carriers have restricted or exited high-risk markets like California—some halting new policies, others non-renewing blocks of business. Premiums have effectively doubled in some coastal/local markets.

This risk scenario is no longer a scenario but a certainty. The market is already pricing it: a growing share of assets are trending toward functional uninsurability if their underlying natural systems keep failing. It's not just houses. It is hotels, resorts, roads, utilities... any real asset could be a risk.

The Uncomfortable Math

Society and the economy aren’t “increasingly reliant” on nature.

They are 100% dependent. Full stop.

When wetlands, forests, aquifers and coastal ecosystems fail, assets don’t just underperform—they strand.

Others Are Moving First & Fast

• The Landbanking Group treats biodiversity, carbon, water and soil as investable natural-capital—managed like the infrastructure they are.

• Rebalance Earth frames nature as business-critical infrastructure and uses the term InfraNature for living systems that work alongside built assets; West Yorkshire Pension Fund bought a 25% stake and Rebalance is targeting £10B of InfraNature deployment over the next decade.

• Intrinsic Exchange Group created Natural Asset Companies (NACs)—corporate structures whose value growth comes from the productivity of healthy ecosystems (carbon, flood mitigation, water purification).

• BASIN Natural Capital: designed Natural Asset Ensurance to bridge the $1T biodiversity finance gap—turning the stocks and flows of natural capital into investable, yield-bearing instruments.

This isn’t environmentalism. It’s portfolio protection.

From Externality to Asset Class

Stop treating nature as an externality. Start treating it as infrastructure.

• Wetlands → water filtration infrastructure

• Forests → landslide-prevention infrastructure

• Aquifers → water-supply infrastructure

Like any investment, they require:

• Capital

• Return mechanisms

• Stewardship & accountability

Natural Asset Ensurance makes nature investable as natural infrastructure.

The Mechanism That Makes It Real

Ensurance converts the stocks (ecosystems) and the flows (ecosystem services) of natural capital into tradable, yield-bearing instruments while locking in perpetual protection for the underlying assets:

• Certificates make the value-cost gap an investment, not a donation or cost

• Assets are safeguarded via durable legal structures

• Investments are tied to assets that can’t be strip-mined or flipped

The pipeline is massive: there thousands of conservation and restoration opportunities globally for any ticket sizes - see a sampling in the Ensurance Binder. There is no shortage of deals or alpha; only a shortage of awareness and smart money.

What Resilience Actually Means

No bridge, road, port or data center is resilient if its natural foundation is failing. You can over-engineer and add redundancy—but if the land erodes, the water runs out, or climate regulation snaps, the math collapses.

The Choice

Option 1: Assume nature’s services are free and infinite. Watch insurance costs spike, coverage shrink, assets strand, portfolios spiral.

Option 2: Invest in the foundation. Allocate to Natural Asset Infrastructure through Ensurance. Secure the value flows because the underlying assets are protected in perpetuity.

This is not ESG window-dressing. It’s balance-sheet realism.

Take Action

The Ensurance Binder lists investable natural asset opportunities—from mangroves that shield ports to wetlands that secure regional water to beavers that sustains full ecosystems.

Reply or comment to see current policies and yields, or DM to discuss bespoke mandates.

The foundation matters. And the smart money is investing in the source of all wealth-physical, financial, spiritual: nature.

Natural Asset Valuation

See it in action and practice here.

Core to our work though has been: value the priceless to protect the infinite WHILE being realistic and practical. Frankly, I think we cracked the code. Natural Asset Ensurance does this.

Will do a video for ensurance.wtf soon but this is a major breakthrough and I could not wait to share it!

Mathematical proof the value of protecting nature = ∞

Natural Cap Rate expresses it:

FLOWS (ESV/yr) = VALUE

STOCKS (real asset) = COST

collapse cost → 0
(no rent, no debt, no flipping, no holding nature hostage)

secure flows → ∞
(instrumental value protects infinite/priceless)

Natural Cap Rate ⇒ ∞
(if infinite is too abstract, real public goods and cash yields can be shown in both in $ and %)

Natural Asset Ensurance Policy: ENSURED -> ENTRUST

Here are #'s on 83-Acre Wetland & Forest Southeast Savannas & Riparian Bioregion:

Clear as mud right? It's actually pretty straight forward if approached as for X cost, I/we get Y value, expressed as Z.

$$y/x = z$$

Open for private or public discussions any time on this.

Embrace Complexity

Nature is complex, not complicated.

BASIN built the infrastructure to make nature investable — and now we’re putting it to work. This first policy has completed underwriting and the numbers are clear: this asset must be ensured. The policy is issued, though not yet bound, it is open for commitments.

To ensure nature, we have to move before the market exists. That means taking the first steps, setting the path, and demonstrating that natural assets can be both investable and permanently protected.

The Natural Asset

• 83 acres of wetland forest

• Southeast Savannas & Riparian Bioregion

• Provides habitat, clean water, clean air, climate stability, and much more

• Annual Ecosystem Service Value: $1,449,706 (FLOWS)

• Real Asset Cost: $294,250 (STOCKS)

• Natural Cap Rate: 493%

full analysis

The Certificate of Ensurance

493% ROI · Wetland Forest | NATURAL ASSET

• Policy Target: $323,675 (project cost + 10% stewardship buffer)

• Price: $0.33 per Certificate

• Face Value: $1.00 (issued on value, priced on cost)

• Discount: Certificates are issued at a ~67% discount to real value

• Tradable: Speculation happens on the instrument, not the underlying natural asset — a new way to separate protection from profit

• Yield-bearing: member-held certificates eligible for ecological data claims and protocol distributions

  Reduce Risk, Ensure Resilience

Why $0.33?

• Positions the natural asset to move from Issued → Ensured → Entrust in under five years.

• Covers acquisition plus a stewardship buffer without exhausting full issuance.

• Leaves capacity for additional funding if demand grows.

• Early buyers get clear upside toward $1.00 ESV — plus the intrinsic value of ensuring the asset.

At $0.33, the path is clear: the policy can bind, stewardship is funded, and Entrust is reached well before 2030.

Paths to Protection

What if the Policy Doesn’t Bind?

Funds won’t sit idle — they’ll be redirected to comparable natural assets in the same bioregion with similar ecosystem condition.

Why Now?

Because waiting until the market is “ready” isn’t an option. This is the first issuance of natural assets as tradable, yield-bearing instruments — putting the infrastructure we’ve built into action. It’s the prototype for a new kind of finance: Markets For What Matters.

Nature is undervalued and mispriced. We’re making that reality visible to ensure the underlying. By moving ahead — even in uncertainty — we reduce systemic risk.

Ensuring nature’s value can’t wait.

👉 View the policy

Undervalued & Mispriced

What does all this mean?

• Ensurance: ensures the stocks and flows of natural capital one natural asset at a time.

• Policy: the contract that ensures the natural asset is protected.

• Underwriting: period before a policy is fully bound, natural asset not secured until policy is issued.

• Entrust: at end of Policy period, natural asset is permanently protected.

• Face Value: $1.00 per certificate, anchored to the ecosystem services value (ESV) based on ecosystem condition.

• Discount: Certificates on this asset are initially priced at $0.33 — a 67% discount to real value.

• Tradability: Certificates can be bought and sold; speculation is on the instrument, not the underlying asset.

• Substitutability: if this asset can’t bind, commitments shift to a comparable natural asset in the same bioregion.

• 1:1: all Certificates are 1:1 shares of the protocol

• Yield: member-held Certificates may receive distributions from this asset and/or from the protocol

Disclaimer:

We are not selling securities. We are selling Security.

where it comes from, how it works, and what it can be used for

I'll spare you the details as they are in the video. links further below.

Natural Asset Ensurance Binder

Natural Cap Rate Basis

Contact me for a private tutorial or one free natural asset valuation.

My guess is others are likely asking this, too.

Look around the nature finance space and you'll see incredible infrastructure being built everywhere: Natural Asset Companies, Rebalance Earth, Landbanking Group, Earthshot, Regen Network, Oxygen Conservation, CreditNature and more. As well as progressive concepts like Metabolic Infrastructure and EcoCommerce. Plus NatureTech infra, MRV solutions, carbon and biodiversity market proposals.

Cutting-edge ideas. Full of Heart. Solid execution. Real technology solving real problems.

But the same uncomfortable question keeps surfacing: Where are the users? Where are the buyers? Who the heck is this for?

There are some deals being made. But only some... meaning few.

The problem seems to be when you build something for everyone (we all need nature), no one is willing to pay for, well, everyone.

The promise of multi-billion dollar carbon markets (VCM) has not materialized. The wishful thinking of the biodiversity markets and the rhetoric of who "should" pay is painful to watch.

Natural Asset Ensurance

Five years ago, we set out to solve the $1 trillion nature financing gap. Not with more reports or conferences, but by building actual financial infrastructure and incentives that makes nature investable.

Mission accomplished. We built it.

Yay! High Five! But now cue the deflating balloon sound.

What We Built

This isn't theory anymore—it's applied ecological economics running on smart contracts:

The Mechanics:

• Combines ecological economics with real asset fundamentals on crypto primitives

• Properly values natural capital in relation to the underlying real asset cost—creating a path to both immediate and permanent protection

• Provides both direct and indirect funding mechanisms

• Issues tradable instruments on natural capital value, priced on project costs

• Uses bundled assets (holistic valuation) while allowing stacking on top without double counting

• Bridges institutional check sizes to regenerative systems

• Blended finance with entry points for any investor or funder

• Ensures the stocks (15 ecosystems) and flows (19 ecosystem services) of natural capital

• Supports 185 bioregions and 844 ecoregions

• Works with any currency, any group size or type

The Infrastructure:

• Deployable. Scalable. Repeatable. Across any scale, any location.

• Polycentric and decentralized by design

• Agentic Finance: manual, automated, and autonomous modes

• Transparent, traceable, measurable

• Built as a hyperstructure: unstoppable, self-sustaining

• Composable and permissionless

Only took five years. No big deal. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The Problem: We Built a Water System Without Water

But here's the thing—it feels like we, and other market players, have built a plumbing system with no pressure. An electrical grid with no power source. A stadium with no crowd.

The infrastructure is in place and working as designed. The problem is demand.

The pipes are laid, but no one's turning on the tap.

The Reality Check

Because Natural Asset Ensurance is transdisciplinary it just may be:

• Too nature for crypto

• Too abstract for corporates

• Too crypto for academia

• Too fluffy for finance

• Too finance for regen

• Too practical for policy

We're caught between worlds, speaking a language nobody fully understands yet.

The Airplane-Airport Problem

Dr. Jim nailed it: "TMO, you are trying to build an airplane and airport while in mid air."

So what now — wait, build more, sell more, try to incentivize the market into caring? Or god forbid: give up?

This Is The Way

So what do we do?

We built it ourselves. So now we will use it ourselves.

If the world is not ready to fill up the pipes and fund it, we will. We are uncovering and exposing hidden value and minting money from thin air. Seeding the agents with it. Building liquidity between them. The value of the currencies is going up exponentially.

Those who need it will find it. Those who can benefit from it will utilize it. Those who want to profit from it will. I'm done pitching to people who are not ready or just don't want to get it.

Why This Actually Works (For Those Who Get It)

Our model does what it is supposed to—it transforms nature from a cost center into an investment vehicle that reduces risk:

• Investment instruments, not donations

• Tradable and yield-bearing assets

• Based on natural assets that don't depreciate or get extracted

• Scarcity to abundance economic model

• Lowers expenses = higher net incomes

• Clear Timelines of when natural assets are fully ensured

Markets For What Matters

It starts with one simple question: "What do you want to ensure?"

What matters to you? Your watershed? Your supply chain? Your kids' future? Your Legacy?

Great. Now you can invest in protecting it instead of just putting off the iminent expense hoping someone else will deal it.

The Bottom Line

We built it. It exists. It works. We have nearly 2,000 ensurance agents already. 130+ coins. ~15 ensurance policies. We are just getting started and will add as many as it takes to close the $1T biodiversity finance gap.

Land Grab

Don't tell me you never knew or that you missed out on the giant land grab happening in broad daylight. Land grab? Yes, more about that in the next post: The final warning about what's ahead.

Hint: the institutional money is coming whether you like it or not.

Ready to ensure what matters? Check out ensurance.app or DM/text me for a private consult.

Nature Finance Onchain (Not So Secret)

We have built all this in public from day one:

• General Ensurance (coins / indirect funding)

• Specific Ensurance (certificates / direct funding)

• Ensurance Agents (onchain ai agents)

• Ensurance Groups (.basin, .ensurance, .bioregion, etc)

• Ensurance Proceeds (how value flows through the network)

• Nature Risk Exposure (industry nature dependencies)

All these 👆 links are to our frontend but the best part about all of this is that you can view and use it all onchain, without us. See Uniswap, The Base App, Zora, Pure Markets, Matcha, Opensea, Rarible, Basescan, etc, etc

Disclaimer: We are not selling securities. We are selling Security.

名可名
非常名

Name can be named, not constant name.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

The hardest part about building BASIN and Natural Asset Ensurance has been defining it and explaining it.

One would think that I could whip off a one liner or elevator pitch in a breeze. Of course I can and do but the moment I do, it makes what we are building something it is not.

Natural Asset Ensurance

We make nature investable.
We ensure the stocks and flows of natural capital.
We reduce risk and increase resilience.
Markets for What Matters.

aka: Nature Coins. A nature-based financial system.
aka: Nature Finance, onchain.
(and so on...)

Just like a forest or a species, the moment we call something by name, we make it something else.

Lost in Translation

It gets even trickier across disciplines— “ecosystem services,” “natural capital,” “carbon,” “biodiversity.” Each term is relational, contextual, subjective. Like “value,” they shift depending on who’s talking and who is listening.

When explaining BASIN across finance, crypto, real assets, and ecology at once… and I end up like Charlie:

So a few months ago, or even a year ago I stopped trying to explain it. I just put my head down to keep building it. I may have even took this too much to heart:

Trying to value the priceless and quantify the infinite in order to protect it is akin to translate poetry into spreadsheets to save the library from closure.

But I persist. I can't stop.

ensurance.wtf

So instead of trying to tell you about all we have built and how it works and what it is, I thought maybe we will just show you. Over the next few weeks and months we will be posting videos at ensurance.wtf that covers parts of the whole. We will also post the it on the net present value podcast. We of course will try to explain the whole and keep updating the ensurance docs but short and sweet may be a better approach.

Private Consult

Honestly though if you are curious as to what all this is, what it means, how it works and how it can benefit you then just call or dm/text me. 1:1 whatever you need.

What does Ensurance do?

Since we are skipping the what and how, lets at least cover the do.

It all comes down to a simple question:

What do you want to ensure?

It's up to you. What matters to you? What do you value? What do you want to protect? What would help your business? What would help your family? What would secure your legacy?

ensure /ɪnˈʃʊr/ verb

to make certain that something will occur or be the case; to guarantee or secure

ensurance.app ensures these and more:

clean water, natural capital, climate stability, clean air, biodiversity, healthy soil, wildfire protection, ecosystem services, resilience, well-being, coastal protection, health, impact, your legacy, the Amazon River, risk reduction, Victoria Falls, cenotes, water abundance, flood control, storm resilience, coral reefs, sea turtles, humpback whales, vaquita porpoise, monarch butterflies, koala bear, spirit bear, elk, salmon, Amur leopard, carbon sequestration, Sumatran tiger, Iberian lynx, habitat, wetlands, grasslands, erosion control, fungi, mycelium, heat reduction, climate adaptation, adaptive capacity, Mount Thielsen, Cascadia bioregion, open space, place, my town, your city, Mumbai, Sydney, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Congo River Basin, Lake Creek, natural assets, green infra, pollination, your business, your portfolio, your investments, health, happiness, beauty, the earth and natural assets like this 363-acre beaver riparian, forest, & wetlands

It does this by making nature and the benefits it provides investable.

And I could explain what that means here.... but I won't.

$ENSURE Holder Update

If you hold $ENSURE or supported us during the pre-sale, don’t fret.
We’re building liquidity across all Nature Coins, and $ENSURE will play a key role in the Ensurance protocol with plenty of utility and value.

Stay tuned for details — or book a private call with me if you want to go deeper.

Edges are the places where the inside and the outside meet. Edges are where the action (or Interaction!) is. Where things meet and connect is where the opportunity is. In nature, Confluences, Estuaries, Deltas, Treelines are all examples of this.

Aldo Leopold noted the edges of ecosystems as the ones most full of life: “The edge is where things happen.”

Ecotones are “an area or zone of transition between two or more diverse communities”. The transition between two ecosystems are where the greatest diversity and opportunity exist for both flora and fauna. At the edges, the ecosystems mix and connect. Some species exist only in ecotones, given the unique environment created by the convergence.

BASIN operates at the edges:

On the edges of disciplines: economics, finance, law, art, blockchain, real assets, nature, insurance, and more.

And the edges of interventions: ecosystem protection and restoration.

Our Landscape approach connects the edges. Ecosystem to Ecosystem. Place by Place by Place. Property by Property by Property.

original posted 11/3/22

"Day after day, month after month, we carved through mountains, laid tracks on deserts, and built bridges over rivers, never knowing when the end would come." - Transcontinental Railroad Worker

“Real estate is the golden spike,” Jeff said, referring to BASIN’s role in the climate finance stack. The golden spike, a 17.6-karat ceremonial final spike, symbolized the 1869 completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and has since come to represent the joining of disparate efforts to create something greater. The First Transcontinental Railroad took six years to complete.

We’re not building a physical railroad, of course, but we are building the rails of nature finance — the tools and methods to protect and steward natural assets. And honestly? It feels like it’s taking forever.

This year was tough. I usually hold onto an optimistic belief that anything is possible, but 2024 put that view to the test. Low inbound interest. A quiet community. Corporate wavering. Political uncertainty. Crypto in the doldrums. Ideological dogma clouding solutions. Startups folding left and right. Nature and climate finance, especially onchain, seemed to lose its allure—just when it is needed most.

And yet, I remain steadfast. Why? Because I see the tracks we’ve laid and the spikes we’ve set. Despite everything, 2024 was a good year. Here's what we built:

The RealValue of Natural Capital Framework:
We’ve quantified the value of nature in a way that’s simple, clear, and universally understood: dollars. The framework identifies 18 FLOWS (ecosystem services) and 14 STOCKS (ecosystems) of natural capital. Using the Natural Cap Rate, we express the dollar value of annual benefits relative to the cost of the underlying real asset, enabling better prioritization of which natural assets to protect and restore.

Ensurance:
We treat natural assets as critical infrastructure and ensure their protection and stewardship in perpetuity. Ensurance policies safeguard ecosystems from day one, offering a definitive path to permanent protection along with funding for restoration and stewardship.

Ensurance Binder:
A comprehensive record of the real assets considered for or already part of Ensurance, ensuring transparency and accountability in our efforts.

Ecosystem Services / Nature-Related Risks & Dependencies by Industry and Ensurance Funding:
We’ve mapped the connections between industries, their nature-related risks and dependencies, and funding solutions through Ensurance, creating a clear blueprint for aligning economic activity with ecological health.

Certificates of Ensurance:
Nearly 500,000 certificates issued across four chains, each representing a tangible commitment to ecosystem protection and stewardship.

SITUS Protocol Deployment on Base:
Relocated the .basin contract from Polygon to Base as part of a fresh SITUS Protocol deployment. Over 15 onchain groups have been established, with more than 600 members.

Frontend for SITUS Accounts, Assets, and Currency:
Launched ensitus.xyz, providing an intuitive interface for managing SITUS accounts, ensurance assets, and impact currencies.

Launched $ENSURE:
Introduced the nature-based currency with a starting supply of 1 billion, distributed to over 500 investors. The goal is ambitious: to close the $1 trillion annual nature finance gap.

Terroir Terminal AI Agent:
Developed and tested an innovative AI agent to manage and steward assets on behalf of places, ecosystems, and species. All SITUS accounts will soon have the ability to be managed by dedicated AI agents, capable of buying, selling, and trading value on behalf of their namesake.

These are just a few highlights as we reflect on 2024—along with becoming a member of the TNFD Forum, of course.

Special thanks to Holly Grimm, Jim Smoot, PhD, Jeff Stephens, Jan Scheufen, and Will Masters. We’re also deeply grateful for the support of Gitcoin, Arbitrum, Ma Earth, and Celo.

In 2025, our focus is on putting all this into practice: continuing to iterate on the resilience hyperstructure, reducing risk, and recognizing the multiplicity of Value in this beautiful world.

We’ll meet you at the Golden Spike.

We are excited to announce the successful first distribution of $ENSURE, the nature-based currency. Members who completed the recent questionnaire have received their allocations, split between their main wallet and their .basin account. If you haven’t yet completed the questionnaire, please reach out via email or DM TMO to receive your share.

As with any flywheel, getting it started is the hardest part.

Today marks a key milestone for the BASIN SITUS nature finance flywheel. $ENSURE plays a crucial role in Ensurance as the currency layer, helping to safeguard ecosystems and the vital benefits they provide, all rooted in real asset fundamentals. Before diving into what $ENSURE can do and where it's headed, let’s first explore the four core components of Ensurance that form the backbone of this flywheel.

Ensurance, developed by BASIN, offers a practical and actionable pathway to perpetually protect and steward ecosystems by valuing natural capital in relation to real asset costs. It mirrors natural flywheels such as the water cycle, ecological succession, and trophic cascades—self-sustaining systems that build momentum and resilience over time.

The ultimate goal is to protect ecosystems in perpetuity by placing real assets ENTRUST. Unlike traditional conservation easements, we aim to put entire real assets into a Common Asset Trust—what we call ENTRUST. Think of this as protocol-owned assets, where nature, as the protocol, effectively owns itself. From an operational standpoint, this represents HoldCo, while from a socio-cultural perspective, it aligns with the Commons.

To place ecosystems ENTRUST, we rely on the best tools available: real assets, property law, and real estate fundamentals. When an Ensurance Policy is written for an ecological asset, it safeguards the ecosystem from T-Zero and ensures its permanent protection at the end of the policy period. Ensurers—real asset or blended finance investors—underwrite and fund these policies, seeking passive, market-rate yield. The beauty of this model is that investors don’t need to care about nature, climate, or well-being—they only need to care about yield. Yield drives the financial capital into natural capital, doing the heavy lifting for us. These market-rate returns scale the outcomes we aim for: putting ecosystems ENTRUST. In operational terms, this is PropCo, and from a natural capital perspective, these are the STOCKS.

The crux of the Ensurance model involves either a) having enough lump sum capital on hand for land purchases, or b) generating yield to attract real asset investors to provide that lump sum (yield can range from 0% to 10%, or more, depending on investor preferences and what the Ensured are willing to pay). The model achieves this while simultaneously breaking the rent-seeking and flipping cycles common in real estate. Certificates of Ensurance create a revenue model as a form of payment for ecosystem services (PES), and these certificates can be either direct or indirect.

Direct certificates are tied to specific properties and are based on actual ecosystem condition, which determines the natural capital value in dollars. Indirect certificates, on the other hand, are linked to broader benefits, purposes, or places, offering more qualitative and impact-based value. Certificates of Ensurance function as shares of the protocol, entitling holders to patronage rewards (such as rebates, refunds, or dividends). They are also tradable, salable, and burnable. From an operational standpoint, this is the OpCo, and from a Natural Capital perspective, these are the FLOWS.

The STOCKS and FLOWS of Natural Capital are inseparable—two sides of the same coin. This interconnectedness is embodied in $ENSURE, the nature-based currency. While Certificates of Ensurance are semi-fungible and typically issued at a one-to-one dollar ratio, $ENSURE is fully fungible and trades freely at market value. Converting Certificates into $ENSURE means forgoing patronage rewards, but it unlocks a wide range of innovative use cases in decentralized finance, offering flexibility and liquidity in the market.

As a blended finance vehicle, Ensurance offers a place for everyone, regardless of their motivations or goals. It spreads the cost of real assets over many years, ensuring that the RealValue of Natural Capital is safeguarded from day one—generating greater impact earlier than traditional land trust models.

$ENSURE, as the outermost part of the flywheel, holds the most realistic potential to help bridge the $1 trillion biodiversity finance gap.

As a native Ethereum currency, $ENSURE is available on multiple chains, including Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Celo, Zora, Polygon, Ethereum Mainnet, BNB, and several other EVMs. You can bridge or transfer your $ENSURE across chains here.

1. Convert to Certificates of Ensurance: Convert $ENSURE into patronage shares by buying assets of your choice. Whether you want to support a species, a city, a bioregion, or an ecosystem service, the choice is yours. You can make these purchases through your main wallet or your .basin account. Assets held in .basin accounts are eligible for greater rewards.

2. Provide Liquidity & Earn Fees: Pair $ENSURE with other currencies in liquidity pools across Base and other EVMs, earning fees while helping to maintain liquidity.

3. Play Arbitrage: Take advantage of arbitrage opportunities both cross-chain and within $ENSURE-to-$ENSURANCE conversions. Currently, there are price discrepancies on exchanges, with spreads exceeding $1 per token. Some certificates are priced well below the standard 1:1 issuance rate, offering lucrative arbitrage potential.

As an ERC-20 token, the potential use cases for $ENSURE are nearly limitless. We’re working on expanded applications in lending and borrowing (e.g., Aave), collateralization (e.g., 4626 vaults and stablecoins), and derivatives.

In addition, we are considering capping the total supply of $ENSURE to create scarcity and increase its value as a finite asset, with the goal of more closely reflecting nature’s infinite value.

BASIN is the founding member of the SITUS Protocol, which provides tools for people to care for the places they love, fostering place-based resilience. Ensurance will be expanding beyond BASIN to become a core asset and currency for SITUS OG's (Onchain Groups). The v1 UI/app for SITUS is nearing completion, so stay tuned for its release.

As always, we build in public. Feel free to reach out with any questions, whether publicly or privately.

Now after four years of banging my head against the wall I can say same same but different about nature, ecosystems, natural capital, finance, technology, art, and law. Likewise are all the other concepts and disciplines that are needed to undo the human induced global changes while simultaneously creating a regenerative and resilient future.

Even after all the work that has gone into trying to explain what BASIN is, and now SITUS, I still struggle to quickly and succinctly explain it. Whether this be a protocol, a hyperstructure, a network, a system, or a framework, BASIN and SITUS reduce risk and ensure resilience by protecting and restoring ecosystems and the benefits they provide in perpetuity.

Despite countless whiteboard sessions, back of napkin sketches, deep conversations, flow charts, graphic visuals, and help from lots of smart and thoughtful people, it makes sense to conclude: same same but different.

The reason is, no matter which way I looked at it and approached it, it always came back to the core concepts of stocks and flows, spatial and temporal, and fungible and non-fungible among others. Yes, binary, I know. But it seems to work, especially when overlaid on each other. Of course context matters but so does context switching while being cognizant that complex is not the same as complicated. It can be a grid but it can also be concentric. It is all relational.

For now, I will spare you the details of each of the nine contexts. The core concepts are emergent. Look down and across, from the outside in, and vice versa. No matter which way I look at it, fractals are everywhere. To me, this makes sense, it is all part of nature.

Just like anything in life, we can call something by one name but it is really many things. With the quest of oversimplification abandoned, I am now at peace. And with the why and what behind us, I am excited to show you the practical "how", to show rather than tell.

The contracts are live, the frontend / UI for the Situs app is almost ready. I am excited to bring it all together: from BASIN to Ensurance to all the Onchain Groups (OG's) that will be a part of the Situs Protocol.

To get early access, simply join the /situs channel.

Leasing natural capital assets is a cost effective way to reduce your nature-related risks and enhance your brand's resilience and reputation. On average, lessees achieve returns ranging from 10X to 50X on their investments in natural capital, gaining full access to vital ecological and environmental data that empowers informed decision-making. Customize your lease to fit specific locations, land sizes, ecosystem types, and budgets, tailoring the terms and ecological benefits to meet your strategic goals.

• Natural Capital Investments: Tap into ecosystem services like water supply, soil health, and climate stability, crucial for long-term operational sustainability.

• Biodiversity Enhancement: Support and enhance biodiversity uplift through targeted restoration and conservation efforts.

• Data Access: Exclusive access to comprehensive ecological data enhances transparency and accountability.

• Certifications and Credits: Generate and claim biodiversity credits and resilience certificates.

• Flexible Terms: Tailor leasing options to align with your industry-specific risks and climate adaptation strategies.

• Cost-Effective: Leasing offers a budget-friendly alternative to ownership, with options for fractional real assets or natural capital certificates.

• Social License: Bolster your reputation and enhance stakeholder engagement through proactive environmental stewardship.

• Risk Management: Position nature as a strategic asset to reduce environmental risks and dependencies.

• Ecological Diversity: Choose from properties across diverse bioregions such as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and coastal zones.

• Sustainable Practices: Engage in sustainable land management practices that align with your environmental and corporate goals.

• Restoration Opportunities: Select sites with potential for significant ecological restoration to enhance natural balance.

• Educational and Corporate Engagement: Utilize properties for educational programs, corporate retreats, or team-building exercises.

But aren't leases by definition rent seeking? Yes but BASIN's Ecological Ensurance model changes this by using the lease as a mechanism to protect natural assets permanently. Our leases offer a wide cost range, based on budget and real asset cost, which at the end of the lease puts the underlying real asset in permanent protection. The result is ecosystems (within the real asset) that are free and clear of rent and debt and truly put on Nature's balance sheet while you put nature on your balance sheet.

Adapt and prepare for climate risks by integrating natural assets into your business strategy today with BASIN. Let's tailor a natural asset leasing solution that fits your needs and gives your brand the recognition and competitive advantage it deserves.

Like the best-engineered systems, UO's depend on robust, healthy ecosystems to sustain their long-term investment strategies and portfolio company health. However, the fragility of these natural systems poses significant risks that can reverberate across their diversified portfolios. The evidence of this is being seen everyday between wildfires, flooding, heatwaves, supply chain disruptions and declines in stakeholder health and well-being.

🏞 Water Abundance & Clean Water: Crucial for real estate, agriculture, and manufacturing sectors. Water risk affects asset values and operational viability.

💨 Clean Air: is essential for ensuring the health of investments tied to physical assets and worker safety in operational sectors.

🌱 Healthy Soils: Essential for agricultural investments and raw materials, impacting food and consumer goods.

🌤 Climate Stability: A stable climate underpins predictable returns across all asset classes, from agriculture to real estate to energy.

🌾 Pollination and Food Production: Directly affects commodity investments and food supply chains, influencing market stability and pricing.

🌿 Habitat & Biodiversity: Ensures ecosystem resilience and sustainability, supporting long-term asset growth and stability.

Smart UO's see Nature is an investment and not a cost. BASIN Natural Capital turns nature and climate risk into an investable asset.

Certificates of Ensurance, by BASIN, are specifically designed for UO's to convert nature related risks into opportunities, directly linking financial health with ecosystem vitality. By purchasing these certificates, UO's are not just investing in financial assets but are actively funding the protection and restoration of 14 critical ecosystems and their associated 14 essential ecosystem services and the underlying real assets.

BASIN turns climate uncertainty into stable, resilient returns for UO portfolios. This strategic investment helps safeguard the natural systems that support global financial markets, ensuring the RealValue of Natural Capital is recognized and enhanced in perpetuity. Ensurance is built on real assets, natural capital, and scientific fundamentals to ensure trust and rigor demanded by UO's.

One-click investment into Certificates of Ensurance are available today on Coinbase and Arbitrum. We also accept check or wire and can send Certificates to you via PDF or FedEx.

The underlying natural assets can be seen in the BASIN Ensurance Binder.