Intro
In 2022 ReFi rose from a niche corner of Web3 bringing carbon credits on-chain, to a movement of people and projects bringing regenerative values into a multitude of new sectors and spaces. There have been many challenges along the way, yet there is so much for us to be proud of and grateful for. Incredible projects have launched, events have been held all over the globe, and a thriving supportive community has emerged. ReFi is solidifying into an unstoppable environmental, social and economic movement, and we can't wait to see what emerges in the coming year. But first, let’s rewind the clock…
Where it all began 🌱
In early 2021, Regen Network was the first notable project taking big steps in utilising public blockchain technology to create the infrastructure for an ecological fintech ecosystem of environmental assets.
“The launch of Regen Ledger is a big step in fulfilling a critical component of our vision to develop ecological fintech infrastructure designed to unlock innovation to combat climate change and regenerate ecosystems” Regen Registry will be the world’s first Ecosystem Service Registry that is fully and natively integrated with a domain-specific public blockchain. “The integration of dMRV, registry, and blockchain is unique and provides the tools that the emerging climate finance industry needs to ensure quality, integrity, and accountability in the new climate action market,”
Gregory Landua (Apr 2021)
While Regen Network laid solid foundations, it was KlimaDAO and Toucan Protocol launch that started to catalyze wider momentum. By the end of 2021, approaching 20 million carbon credits had been brought on-chain and the $KLIMA token reached an all time high of over $3600. The meme of ReFi was born.
From meme to movement 🧗
Coming into the start of 2022 and the euphoria of the previous year was fading fast. $KLIMA was down bad and one might have thought that ReFi was coming to an end as quickly as it started. Yet out of the ashes of this decline, and inspired by the idea of redesigning incentives for a positive impact on our planet, a resilient community started to emerge.
Many more voices joined the fold and fragmented communities of projects began meeting and collaborating. Organizations like Blockchain for Climate Foundation, Moss.Earth, Open Forest Protocol, Flowcarbon, Thallo, Senken and many others emerged to share even more possibilities and visions for on-chain carbon. Even as the sector faced new headwinds with Verra's freezing of on-chain carbon credit tokenization, the community clubbed together to participate in the public consultation. While we are yet to see the full outcome of this, one way or another, on-chain carbon looks set to continue its impressive growth and innovation in the coming year.
Offsetting History ⚖️
One of the biggest milestones this year was of course the widely anticipated Ethereum merge. In September, the blockchain made its switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake (aka “The Merge”) and it represented quite possibly the fastest-ever decarbonisation of any sector ever. It lowered Ethereum’s running emissions by 99.95% and cut global energy consumption by 0.2% at the flick of a switch! 🚀 Yet the ReFi community is pushing to not stop there - what about the large history of legacy emissions? Throughout the year, many Web3 entities have worked to offset their historical emissions, from individual protocols to whole blockchains. Most recently, alongside coalition of partners from the Ethereum Community, Regenerative Finance (ReFi) and Public Goods movements, organisations like the Ethereum Climate Platform and Blocks.garden have launched with the ambitious goal to support the offsetting of the entire legacy carbon footprint of Ethereum itself!
Crypto could go down as the first industry on earth to decarbonize its entire energy history - Ethereum is just the beginning… ⚡ ♻ 🚀
Embracing Diversity 🌟
But carbon is just one part of the ReFi story. Recognising a wide array of interconnected and overlapping issues the world faces, in 2022, ReFi intentionally pushed past the “carbon tunnel vision” and embraced all manner of social, economic, and ecological values - plastic removal, community economies, ocean metagenomics, forest biodiversity, marine ecosystems, Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), Universal Basic Income (UBI), and much more.
The space is also striving towards diversity of ecosystem participants themselves, recognising the importance of elevating voices of the traditionally marginalised and making ReFi more inclusive.
ReFi DAO Reflections ⭕️
It was also a big year for the ReFi DAO community. Here were some highlights:
- ReFi DAO Founders Circles - kicked off in the summer, with over 150 applications for its second cohort helping to sow seeds of collaboration and togetherness.
- ReFi Spring supported over 27 on-the-ground events across the globe forming another key foundation for new connections in this community.
- The ReFi DAO Blog grew to over 1600+ subscribers and seen 47 weekly ReFi news Roundups, 11 project Deep Dives, 4 Event Retrospectives and the launch of two new content streams, ReFi Radar & Community Stories— from an ever growing and diverse community of ReFi content creators from across the globe!
- ReFi Podcast has seen 24 episodes in season 2, bringing total downloads to over 31,000 from listeners in over 50 countries worldwide and featuring an amazing variety of guests and projects. Take a look at the ReFi Podcast mega-thread to recap each episode and some of the key highlights along the way....
ReFi Impact 2022 📈
Inspired by Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics, Jan Konietzko's Carbon Tunnel Vision and Ryan Panchadsaram's Speed and Scale, we have created a map to start to measure and log the ReFi ecosystem’s progress according to metrics that really matter. So far, over sixty projects filled out our survey to share some highly impressive impact - thank you to everyone involved! Check them out at the interactive ReFi Impact 2022 Dashboard and vote on the top performers! 👇
To note - this map only includes those who filled out the form. But let this act as a rough marker and a signal of focus for the coming year, we look forward to how this map will evolve…
2022 is a wrap 🗞️
Overall, there is a lot to be proud of this year. There have been so many inspiring events, project launches and community moments (of which only a snapshot has been covered in this Roundup). We are super grateful for all those involved. Here’s to a regenerative 2023 and beyond. 💫
