Trinity Morphy continues his discussion with Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson of Ecofrontiers, authors of The Green Crypto Handbook.

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.

Trinity: What might the transition to a blockchain-based green financial system actually look like? How do you see it beginning and which environmental asset sectors are most likely to lead the way?

Pat and Louise: The transition to a blockchain-based green financial system is already underway—not through wholesale disruption, but via a series of overlapping experiments, niche deployments, and hybrid institutional arrangements. It is a transformation emerging in waves, sector by sector, infrastructure by infrastructure.

Some sectors are at the forefront. Environmental credit markets, such as the voluntary carbon market, are fragmented, opaque, and often lack credibility. This has made them fertile ground for innovation. Protocols like Toucan, Klima Protocol, and Regen Network have demonstrated how tokenisation, open registries, and smart-contract governance improves traceability, reduces coordination costs, and creates pathways for more reflexive and participatory MRV systems.

Clean energy finance is also advancing, particularly in the form of revenue-based financing for distributed solar infrastructure. Energy production is measurable, continuous, and geospatially grounded—characteristics that make it ideally suited for tokenisation and automated payments. As outlined in our previous CARBON Copy article, Decentralising the Planet’s Powerhouse: The Promises of Blockchain-based Solar Production the primary obstacle is not technology, but regulatory constraint: grid interconnection rules, off-take pricing, and energy accounting inhibit peer-to-peer energy trade and onchain revenue flows.

In contrast, certain transformation areas are lagging: green bonds and compliance markets remain structurally resistant to innovation. These sectors are shaped by entrenched incumbents and rigid legal architectures. While tokenisation may eventually lower costs and improve transparency, the regulatory burden and high licensing thresholds make these instruments ill-suited for experimentation in the near term. At one point, we were considering founding some sort of green bond startup, but our research with existing blockchain startups revealed the cost of getting a green bond issuance license to be half a million euros—well beyond our means at the time.

In our opinion, the most critical gap today lies in sustainable commodity production and blockchain-native commerce. Without trustworthy, tradeable representations of sustainable and regenerative goods—such as agroforestry yields, watershed services, or carbon-negative materials—green finance remains abstract and detached from ecological reality. Tokenised commodities, anchored in verified ecological performance, can form the basis for bioregional portfolios: asset indexes reflecting the ecological health and productive capacity of specific territories. These portfolios, governed by local institutions and expressed in onchain formats, can serve as both investment instruments and collateral anchors for local liquidity networks. In this context, green stablecoins—currencies backed by green crypto-assets rather than synthetic cryptocollateral—can emerge as credible, stable, and green units of exchange. Early prototypes such as Azos offer promising models for how these systems can be built and tested. We believe such experimentation is essential to the future of place-based regenerative finance.

Another essential missing primitive is tokenised climate insurance, particularly parametric coverage enabled by smart contracts and real-time ecological data. As climate volatility increases, traditional insurance systems are failing—especially for smallholders, cooperatives, and informal economies. Blockchain offers a way to automate payouts, globalise risk pools, and build decentralised protection systems where none currently exist. Climate change is a global phenomenon, and it requires globally coordinated, transparent financial primitives for resilience.

Overall, we want to highlight that this transition is not about commodifying nature—it is about making it legible, participatory, and governable. It’s about granting ecological labour and local stewardship a voice in financial systems that have historically marginalised or ignored them. Our goal is not the financialisation of life, but the ecological re-institutionalisation of finance. In this envisioned future, the tools of Web3 enable the daily practices of regeneration:

  • Households monetise climate-positive behaviors—from rooftop solar to soil restoration—via tokenised claims embedded in programmable registries.
  • Peer-to-peer trade of certified sustainable goods displaces rent-seeking intermediaries, empowering regenerative producers worldwide.
  • Supply chains automatically offset emissions, integrating real-time logistics with composable ecocredit systems.
  • AI agents embedded in digital wallets continuously optimise for nature-positive outcomes—suggesting greener purchases, automating contributions to local rewilding funds, or redirecting staking rewards into bioregional portfolios.

This is not a utopia. It is a design horizon—made possible by today’s tools, and urgently needed in tomorrow’s ecological economy.

Trinity: What regulatory developments and narrative shifts will be most critical in shaping or accelerating this transition, especially given the reputational challenges blockchain still faces around being environmentally unfriendly, difficult to use, and rife with scams?

Pat and Louise: To meaningfully reframe blockchain’s role in climate action, we must move beyond defensive or reactionary narratives. The dominant critiques—environmental impact, speculation, complexity—are symptoms of a larger issue: blockchain has yet to be positioned, in the public imagination and regulatory landscape, as an infrastructure layer for regenerative economic coordination. Blockchain’s core affordances—transparency, composability, and programmability—make it uniquely suited to support financial systems that are locally accountable, yet globally interoperable. This is not a contradiction. It is the design space where blockchain thrives.

One positive narrative and movement we’ve had our eyes on is Ethereum Localism, which is reimagining and treating Ethereum not as a speculative global casino, but as a public good for local economies. Ethereum should be infrastructure for peer-to-peer coordination, rooted in real-world needs. In this case: the needs of watersheds, foodsheds, and climate-vulnerable communities seeking new ways to organise value flows around ecological regeneration.

Realising this vision demands more than theoretical alignment. It requires a new generation of eco-entrepreneurs who see blockchain not as extractive, but as a civic technology—a substrate for cooperative land ownership, open ecological accounting, shared governance, and programmable funding flows that take their cue from our shared underlying material reality. To support them, we need a regulatory landscape that recognises and encourages:

  • Mass experimentation with green tokens. We’re tracking emerging use cases around green tokens with the Regen Atlas, a public goods database of green tokens. We’re happy to report that compared to this time last year, there’s 3-4x more green tokens in circulation, with many more in development.
  • The mass tokenisation and trade of sustainable commodities—to unlock liquidity for agroforestry, regenerative aquaculture, and circular materials. This would simultaneously unlock green stablecoins, allowing us to produce and use climate-positive currencies in our daily commerce.
  • Blockchain-native accounting systems—enabling institutions and logistics infrastructures to track and trade environmental impact as verifiable, onchain data flows (represented by transferable tokens).
  • And crucially, bioregional portfolios—financial instruments tied to specific ecosystem zones, designed to embed local governance and material specificity into global financial circuits without sacrificing their context or sovereignty.

The environmental finance stack we propose in The Green Crypto Handbook is a blueprint for this transformation. The transition we envision is not about perfect markets or silver-bullet proposals. It is about plural infrastructure: hundreds of experiments in encoding ecological value, stewarded by local actors that are empowered by interoperable open-source public blockchain protocols.

Trinity: With the EU’s recent announcement on nature credits signalling growing institutional support, how do you see environmental assets evolving, including those not yet conceived, and what opportunities does this present for your proposed environmental stack?

Pat and Louise: This announcement marks an interesting point in the institutionalisation of environmental assets. For decades, environmental finance has revolved almost exclusively around carbon, leading to what many have called a “carbon tunnel vision”—a narrow fixation that simplifies complex ecological systems into a single proxy metric. The EU’s roadmap for nature credits signals a broader recognition: that ecosystems are more than carbon sinks. They are multi-functional, living infrastructures whose value cannot be reduced to CO₂ equivalence.

This shift is both symbolic and strategic. When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that “we have to put nature on the balance sheet,” it affirmed a growing awareness within institutional circles that biodiversity, soil health, water cycles, and other forms of ecological functionality deserve recognition as capital assets in their own right.

The Environmental Finance Stack is a guidance tool to (re)think environmental asset production—it offers a modular framework for producing, validating, and trading new classes of ecological assets with use of emerging technologies. In this sense, Nature credits are only a beginning. As Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) technologies, data infrastructures, and governance innovations keep maturing, we anticipate the emergence of asset classes that are more complex and diverse to populate an exponentially growing number of balance sheets. The current absence of such asset classes is less a matter of technological feasibility than of institutional stasis and underdeveloped financial imaginaries—areas which The Green Crypto Handbook aims to critically engage.

Trinity: Do you think current environmental asset verification methods, such as third-party audits, satellite imagery analysis, and government-issued certifications, are effective in supporting transparency and trust for on-chain green assets at scale? Or do you believe new verification mechanisms are needed to meet the demands of a decentralised, blockchain-based system?

Pat and Louise: Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) is frequently cited as a core bottleneck in scaling trust for green assets. However, this view underestimates the progress made over the past decade by many innovative players in the climate and nature tech ecosystems. In our view, the MRV problem—defined as the ability to observe and validate ecological conditions at scale—is largely solved, or at least functionally serviceable for the demands of tokenised green assets.

A new generation of MRV providers—leveraging remote sensing, drone-based LIDAR, machine learning classification, bioacoustic monitoring, and field-data integration—have already exceeded the capabilities of many legacy certification processes. Dozens of startups now offer near-real-time, high-resolution ecological data, with increasing precision across carbon stocks, biodiversity, soil health, and even water cycles. The limiting factor is not our ability to observe, but our ability to monetise and route that information through financial systems.

The real constraint lies not in verification, but in integration: how we connect these advanced observation systems to onchain infrastructures capable of representing, transacting, and governing ecological value in open markets? Existing institutional pathways—third-party auditors, government registries, and ESG ratings—were designed for analog-era finance. They remain closed, permissioned, and slow, and they are fundamentally misaligned with the affordances of decentralised systems.

What is needed now is a programmable architecture that allows diverse verification signals—whether field-verified or AI-inferred—to be incorporated into asset logic, such that asset issuance, retirement, and trading are governed by transparent, onchain rules. Protocols like Open Forest Protocol, Gainforest, and Glow are already experimenting with this integration, where MRV functions not as a bottleneck, but as a feedstock to automated asset creation and governance.

In short, the trust gap is no longer technical; it is infrastructural. We need markets that are native to data—markets where green assets are created and traded not after institutional approval, but in response to verifiable signals embedded in the asset logic itself. Until this market structure is in place, the full potential of nature tech will remain unrealised.

Trinity: As green finance and environmental markets grow, there are concerns – with which I agree – about the over-financialisation of nature, where we reduce ecosystems and biodiversity to tradable assets. How do you view this tension, and where should we draw the line between valuing nature and commodifying it?

Pat and Louise: The critique of over-financialisation—the idea that ecosystems and biodiversity are being reductively abstracted into tradable assets—is both necessary and overdue. But it is important to recognise that nature has long been financialised through less visible means. Ecosystems are routinely embedded in economic calculations, property regimes, insurance models, and state-led valuations of land use, extractive potential, and risk. What blockchain-based systems make possible is not the initiation of this financialisation, but its unveiling.

As Bruno Latour argued in Politics of Nature (2004), the core question is not whether nature is politicised, but whether we acknowledge and make that politics explicit. Similarly, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) describes how states render forests, rivers, and landscapes "legible" for the purpose of taxation, extraction, or control. Financialisation has long been part of that project—except that until recently, it was conducted behind closed institutional doors, without public transparency or modular tools for resistance. To make nature legible is to make it governable; to not make it legible is to leave it vulnerable to exploitation behind closed doors. The critical tension lies not in the act of valuation itself, but in who defines the terms, how the values are constructed, and what power is granted by their representation.

We argue in The Green Crypto Handbook that blockchain systems are not initiating this trend but unveiling it—exposing the value systems that already underlie ecological governance, and offering new ways to design, dispute, or even reimagine them. In this sense, crypto protocols offer not simply new tools for commodification, but a venue for contestable abstraction. Tokens can encode not just price, but provenance, local governance rights, ecological thresholds, or stewardship labor. Decentralised registries can make visible the epistemic scaffolding behind valuation choices. Markets can be made modular, pluralistic, and politically programmable.

The problem is not that nature is valued; the problem is how narrowly we have defined value, and how few actors have the power to set those terms. The line should not be drawn between valuing and commodifying, but between systems that are democratically accountable and epistemically plural—and those that are technocratically imposed and economically extractive. Crypto, far from accelerating ecological reductionism, may offer a mechanism for decentralising the politics of valuation—bringing previously invisible forms of care, labor, and regeneration into financial discourse, not to commodify them indiscriminately, but to protect them through visibility and shared governance. Where we must draw the line is not at abstraction itself, but at abstraction without representation—the imposition of value logics without political voice.

Crypto, in this light, is not merely a tool for digitising natural capital. It is a contested platform for rewriting who gets to define ecological value. It opens a space where valuation becomes programmable, modular, and potentially inclusive—if built with care. The grammar of tokenisation can either flatten or enrich our relationship to nature. The difference lies in how we choose to encode.

Trinity: A big thanks to the both of you for taking the time. Best of luck with getting the manuscript published and whatever else lies ahead.

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.