What is Regen Network?

The variety of purpose-built blockchains within the Cosmos ecosystem is immense. Undoubtedly one of the most revolutionary projects existing is Regen Network. Why? Because it tries to tackle the most challenging crisis humankind ever faced, climate change, with a unique approach. This Cosmos 101 article will explain how Regen Network works and how the protocol’s tokenomics look like.

(Interested? Check out Cosmos 101 to find out more about Akash, Sifchain, Sentinel, and co!)

Regen Network is a decentralized global marketplace for ecological data built with the Cosmos SDK. It aims to realign ecological health with financial incentives through blockchain technology. At the time of writing, Regen is the 12th biggest zone in the Cosmos ecosystem.

The Effects of Climate Change

Obviously the consequences of human-caused global warming are happening right now. They are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today and will worsen in the decades to come. Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, and plant and animal ranges have shifted.

Furthermore, the ongoing pollution of nature affects our access to clean water and healthy food.

The driving force of climate change is global greenhouse gas emissions, particularly Carbon Dioxide. Especially fossil fuel use is the primary source of CO2. On the other hand, direct human-induced impacts on forestry and other land use, such as deforestation, land clearing for agriculture, and degradation of soils, also emit CO2.

Likewise, healthy soil can also remove CO2 from the atmosphere through reforestation, improvement of soils, and other activities. At this point, Regen Network comes into play.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

Voluntary Carbon Markets

But before zooming into the protocol, let us understand the market standard of how corporations deal with carbon emissions. In 2019 central banks worldwide started counting carbon emissions as a liability on the balance sheet of businesses. As a result, companies have to show a possible pathway to be carbon-neutral in the future.

Due to this radical change, Voluntary Carbon Markets experienced a big boom. The reason for this is the following: If a company can not reduce carbon emissions, it has to purchase carbon credits from other businesses or market participants to cover their pollution level.

Though the problem with these markets is that they are not very efficient and do not incentivize people to find solutions to counter climate change actively.

Regen Network’s approach to Climate Change

As already mentioned, soil is the most crucial carbon sink available for reducing atmospheric CO2 via carbon sequestration. Therefore Regen Network’s primary goal is to incentivize farmers worldwide to build back healthy soil.

That is how it works: Farmers can qualify for different credit programs. In order to ensure precise data from the farmer’s soil, the protocol gathers and verifies ecological data from sensors, satellites, or on-the-ground observations. Next, the data is uploaded into a global data marketplace.

On top of this “protocol native” data, Regen provides another system to qualify credits from other registries using different methodologies. These credits get tokenized and integrated into the Regen ledger. Hence both strategies combined create a diverse marketplace for different types of ecological assets. As a consequence corporations aiming to offset their carbon emissions can use this marketplace to purchase carbon credits directly from farmers.

We can become carbon-neutral by increasing soil carbon by just 0.4% a year.
Gregory Landua, Co-founder of Regen Network

The role of REGEN / Tokenomics

REGEN is the protocol’s native utility token. On the one hand, one can use REGEN to participate in governance, pay fees, and secure the blockchain, which runs a PoS consensus mechanism. On the other hand, participants can use it to access the mix of functions that make it possible to verify ecological outcomes and distribute rewards for those outcomes.