Trinity Morphy sat down with Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson of Ecofrontiers to discuss the pair's recent completion of The Green Crypto Handbook.

Pat Rawson is a multi-potential initiator of ideas with 8 years of blockchain experience. Heʼs produced whitepapers, essays, lectures and research on onchain organisations, cryptomarkets, and tokenised green assets. Prior, Pat was an award-winning art director of five yearsʼ experience working with studios such as Universal, Disney, and Netflix.

Louise Borreani is a green finance specialist, technical writer and researcher who has published pioneer articles and extensive research on the tokenomics of ecosystem protection and restoration. Her research has spanned topics ranging from nature-based asset markets to (d)MRV. She holds a Masterʼs in Environmental Policy from Sciences Po Paris, and wrote her thesis on Blockchain for Environmental Governance.

Note: An X Space hosted by Coral Tribe was also held to discuss the work.

Trinity: Once again, a big congratulations on completing the manuscript, it is no small feat. Could you start by telling us why you decided to write it, who the intended audience is, and what impact you hope to achieve?

Pat and Louise: We wrote The Green Crypto Handbook to address a void at the intersection of green finance, institutional design, and decentralised technologies. While environmental finance is now central to global climate policy, its implementation mechanisms—carbon markets, certification regimes, ESG finance—remain fragmented, opaque, and too often inaccessible to those most directly engaged in ecological stewardship. At the same time, blockchain and Web3 systems offer powerful tools for transparency, participation, and programmable finance, yet they have struggled to articulate a coherent and credible role in socioecological governance. Our motivation was to bridge these worlds.

This book is for both analysts and builders. It targets multiple audiences: policy experts seeking institutional innovation in green finance, technologists exploring environmental use cases for blockchain, academics working on political economy and socioecological governance, and practitioners experimenting with tokenised green assets. What binds them is a shared concern: how do we design financial systems that are materially accountable to the socioecological realities they exist to serve?

Rather than merely cataloging blockchain applications for sustainability, we sought to build a conceptual framework—the Environmental Finance Stack—that maps how green assets are produced, governed, and exchanged across six interlocking layers: from biophysical reality translated in data and institutional legitimacy to onchain protocols, asset issuance, and open markets. In doing so, we challenge the reader to think beyond both legacy green finance and crypto-utopianism. We propose a third path: a programmable, decentralised infrastructure capable of expressing socioecological value with greater equity, transparency, and responsiveness.

Our goal is not just to critique existing systems, but to provide constructive, empirically informed alternatives. The book combines field-tested case studies with conceptual innovations. In short, this manuscript is both a critique and a manual. It equips readers with frameworks for imagining and building a more credible, inclusive, and effective environmental finance regime—one that responds to the climate crisis with the full creativity and coordination capacity that decentralised technologies afford.

Trinity: In the introductory chapter, you raise several compelling ideas around the concept of ecocapitalism. Can you define ecocapitalism for us and explain how green growth policies since the 1950s have shaped it? How does your proposed 'ecocapitalism 2.0' address the current challenges with ecocapitalism?

Pat and Louise: Ecocapitalism is the belief that markets can be steered toward socioecological ends—that capitalism itself can become sustainable if we properly price externalities, fund innovation, and reward green behavior. Since the 1950s, this logic has shaped environmental policy: emissions trading schemes, renewable subsidies, and sustainability disclosures all attempt to align the triple bottom line. But over time, in our opinion, this model has hardened into a technocratic, institutionalised, top-down form of climate action—one that remains slow, opaque, and often extractive.

Most climate finance today still flows through centralised institutions and intermediaries—development banks, carbon registries, ESG raters—whose timelines are counted in years, not blocks. These intermediaries impose verification costs, donor-led priorities, and fragmented funding cycles. Even well-meaning green investments get trapped in a bureaucracy-first logic, where impact is obscured by paperwork and disconnected from real outcomes.

Ecocapitalism 2.0 proposes a different approach—one grounded in protocols, not paperwork. Thanks to crypto, we now have a global financial infrastructure that is radically accessible, programmable, and borderless by design. Anyone with a wallet can mint, govern, or trade green assets. Impact can be tokenised, verified onchain, and governed transparently through shared registries. Ecocapital no longer needs to wait for institutional approval—it can flow endogeneously and directly to regenerators, data providers, and stewards on the ground.

Crypto has already proven it can mobilise capital at planetary scale: trillions in liquidity, millions of wallets, and open protocols that never sleep. Ecocapitalism 2.0 asks: what if we used that machinery—not for speculation alone—but to reprice the biosphere, regenerate commons, and rewire markets to reward ecological truth? What if we take the most powerful financial infrastructure capitalism has produced—blockchain—and redirect it towards the same triple bottom line? Ultimately, this is the scalable machinery we need to address the climate funding gap, and something that Ecocapitalism 2.0 is uniquely poised to reform.

Trinity: A key concept in your book is the environmental finance stack, which you describe as “targeted responses to the structural shortcomings of today’s green finance system”. Could you enlighten us on this proposed stack, why the current system needs to be replaced with it and the main barriers to replacement?

Pat and Louise: The environmental finance stack as introduced in The Green Crypto Handbook is a multi-layered framework for structuring the production, validation, and exchange of ecological value in a digitised and networked economy. It arises from the recognition that existing green finance mechanisms—while often well-intentioned—are hampered by structural inefficiencies: bureaucratic latency, centralised verification monopolies, opaque asset provenance, and siloed market access. These limitations undermine the capacity of contemporary institutions to respond with the scale, speed, and material integrity demanded by the climate crisis. The stack comprises six vertically integrated layers:

  • Underlying Material Reality: the ecological substrate (forests, oceans, carbon cycles, biodiversity) that anchors any claim of environmental value. In this layer, we also include the sensing technologies (e.g., sensors, oracles, remote sensing) that convert material conditions into raw data.
  • Data Layer: the technical infrastructure for storing, refining, and translating raw, material data into actionable insights and legible forms—serving as the bridge from analog reality to digital abstraction.
  • Institution Layer: the assemblage of rule-makers, validators, and certifiers (including both legacy institutions and emergent crypto-institutions) that enforce norms around finance, legitimacy, and risk.
  • Protocol Layer: the normative, legal, and programmable systems (smart contracts, DAOs, registries) that automate rule execution, reduce transaction costs, and enforce standards around green asset production.
  • Asset Layer: the financial instruments themselves—tokens, NFTs, structured claims—that embody ecological value in transferable, composable forms.
  • Market Layer: the liquidity environments through which such assets are priced, exchanged, and integrated into broader financial flows.

Crucially, the stack is not proposed as a wholesale rupture with legacy systems. Rather, it is inclusive of existing methodologies—such as traditional carbon credits, sustainability-linked bonds, and ESG-linked project finance. By being inclusive of existing ecocapitalism, it can then provide specific design recommendations to enhance existing green asset production practices with greater transparency, automation, and interoperability.

The barriers to replacement are non-trivial: institutional inertia, regulatory uncertainty, technical asymmetries, and reputational baggage from speculative cryptomarkets all play a role. Nonetheless, the stack provides a flexible, forward-compatible architecture—one that acknowledges the achievements of legacy systems while addressing their critical shortcomings. It invites both augmentation and integration, not erasure.

Trinity: You suggest that blockchain shifts the Overton window of what is possible in green asset production, enabling alternative mechanisms to value green assets. This is something that the ReFi (Web3 regenerative finance) space has been looking into for quite some time, to varying degrees of success and failure. In light of challenges like low user adoption, greenwashing concerns, and funding scarcity, how do you see ReFi’s role in providing these alternative valuation mechanisms and are there any promising opportunities you see emerging?

Pat and Louise: Although ReFi may seem well-established, the space is still in its infancy. Most of its core infrastructure—registries, protocols, and standards—has emerged only within the past two to three years. Yet in that short time, ReFi has achieved a major conceptual breakthrough: expanding the Overton window of what can count as a green asset and how environmental value can be made legible, tradable, and governable onchain.

Its early contributions have been largely infrastructural and epistemic. Projects like Toucan, Regen Network, and Open Forest Protocol showed that environmental claims could be tokenised, priced and transacted outside legacy systems—embedding ecological data into smart contracts, open registries, and novel incentive structures. Despite challenges—low adoption, market volatility, greenwashing concerns, and fragile funding—these efforts proved the viability of composable, digital green assets.

Now, the field is entering a more mature phase. A key catalyst is the rise of real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation, particularly of commodities like real estate, solar infrastructure, metals, and agricultural goods. As these assets move onchain, they lay the groundwork for more complex environmental instruments. ReFi stands to benefit—not by competing with RWA finance, but by integrating ecological metrics into commodity flows. A regenerative coffee farm, for example, might issue yield-bearing tokens while embedding claims around soil carbon or biodiversity. A revenue-bearing solar investment can simultaneously monetise the production of onchain renewable energy certificates. A conservation foundation can embed land use and access into stewardship NFTs—and so forth. This convergence enables multi-dimensional green assets—unlocking new forms of collateral and deepening market relevance.

Ultimately, ReFi’s core value lies in its institutional and protocological imagination: it’s a testbed for rethinking asset design, governance, and market coordination. This isn’t something that’s going away anytime soon. Despite funding scarcity, there seem to be more and more green tokens everyday, and in line with this, we’d encourage new projects and players to look towards what has worked before they start building. There’s successful use cases out there, despite ReFi’s nascency.

Trinity: Do you believe blockchain is mature enough to support a meaningful transition? Are there aspects of the current infrastructure that still need to evolve to make this transition viable at scale?

Pat and Louise: Yes, we believe blockchain is mature enough to support a meaningful transition—if we recognise that infrastructure maturity is not purely technical. It is also political, cultural, and institutional. Many of the building blocks needed for a new environmental finance architecture—programmable registries, verifiable claims, composable markets, and multi-stakeholder governance—already exist and are actively being deployed. We’re still missing a few crucial primitives, such as location-aware dApps (see: Astral Protocol) and mass tokenisation of commodities, but this point feels moot. Overall, what remains underdeveloped is not the tech stack, but institutional readiness to use it.

In The Green Crypto Handbook, we describe this transformation across the Environmental Finance Stack. In this light, blockchain’s maturity must be assessed not in isolation, but in its ability to interlock the Environmental Finance Stack’s layers. What remains underdeveloped aren’t the technical tools, but the ecosystem’s readiness to use them at scale. To this end, the most pressing challenges are social:

  • Credible onchain institutions: While DAOs and smart contracts offer governance primitives, they often lack contextual depth. We need protocols capable of encoding scientific legitimacy, local knowledge and baselines, and procedural fairness—in collaboration with existing place-based institutions, not in abstraction from them.
  • Legal and regulatory bridges: Today’s blockchain-native green assets often lack formal recognition by regulators and institutional investors. Scaling requires legal sandboxes, jurisdictional templates, and hybrid registries that translate onchain verifiability into off-chain trust.
  • Cultural legitimacy: Blockchain still carries the residue of its speculative origins. To serve planetary regeneration, it must reframe itself as public infrastructure for socioecological coordination—a neutral, programmable layer for civic trust and ecological finance.

In short, the tools are here—or nearly here. The real work now is alignment: between code and culture, protocol and place, asset and ecology.


Continue to Part 2 of the interview.

The answers in this article are the personal opinions of Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson and do not necessarily reflect the views of Trinity Morphy and CARBON Copy.