Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here today doing a continuation of our series for the commons economy roadmap. So I'm here with Giulia Cuarta from the CryptoCommons Association, which is also a part of Bread Chain Cooperative, where they've been doing some really interesting research, and work around what are the various projects out there that are, I guess, facilitating a kind of commons oriented economy. But before I go too far into it, you know, we're going to be speaking to Andrea Leiter, who is an assistant professor at the was it the university or Amsterdam Center for International Law and is also cofounder of Sovereign Nature Initiative. We're gonna be talking about this project. But before we do that, maybe, Giulio, I'll let you explain a bit what is the Commons Economy Roadmap and why, SNI, sovereign nation initiative, is a part of that roadmap.

Cool. Yeah. Thanks for the intro. Maybe then we'll just get right into it. Andrea, if you want to maybe give a a slight introduction to yourself in case you wanna add anything more and maybe an explanation of what S and I is at a high level.

Yeah. Sure. Thank you very much. I mean, thanks, Giulio. It was really a wonderful, serendipitous moment that we met, and ever since, has been a nice collaboration. And, yeah, wonderful to be here with you, Josh. I am a big fan of your podcast, and I'm really happy to to participate here. So, yeah, just to say really, as in the doc as you said in the introduction, I wear a bit two different hats. I have my background really firmly in academia and has for a long time tried to think a bit what you how you can understand value and value generation through law and how legal mechanisms constitute value, encode value, uphold value, allow certain forms of value to travel through time. And so this was an academic obsession in many ways for me for a long time. And then I think around 2015, 2016, I fell deep down into the crypto rabbit hole specifically because it was opening up these questions of what is money and just breaking them open and allowing a certain form of public discourse around them. And so that was the fascination. And from there on, I have been living a bit in these two worlds. And sovereign nature initiative is a project that emerged from this engagement with crypto and from the question of, like, what kind of transformative project does this new form of value creation that is crypto enable? And is it possible? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities? How can we engage with that? So these are really the two things that come together and where I'm at.

Yes. Great pleasure. So SNI, Sovereign Nature Initiative, is an initiative that I cofounded about four and a half years ago or something like that. We officially incorporated as a not for profit foundation in The Netherlands three years ago. So we celebrated our official three year anniversary, and I think it got the right to give it a lifetime of about three years because that's when we really started kicking into gear. And what brought S and I into life is what we internally have always been calling. We want to try if we can flip the economics of ecology. And this is a bit our internal way of trying to say what we are after, and it has a lot to do with, with the fact that care work in general in this economy, be it in the health sector or in, other sectors or be it in ecology, is horrifically underfunded, always dependent on donations, dependent on volunteering, dependent on reproductive labor, if you so wish, that is invisibilized. And so for us, the the challenge with sovereign nature initiative was really want to think about, like, does this new token economy that allows to tokenize all sorts of things and express value in all sorts of ways, would that be a mechanism that finally enables to bring a different light to how value is understood and produced and and acknowledged? So flipping the economics of ecology was an idea to say, what if the value that is intrinsically there in biodiversity restoration and restorative work in general could be expressed in different ways? Which doesn't mean just an an economic value and plugging it in and making it paid, but really, like, what are the possibilities? And the potential, as we all know, in the blockchain sphere is endless now. I mean, potential is our favorite word in the universe. So we started with that same enthusiasm of saying, what can we do with this? This is really interesting, and there is lots of energy in the space and lots of good willed people. So let's try where we can go. And so for the first two two years, I would say, we really were mainly a research and development project. So we have a very generous funder, a philanthropic funder who is into this vision to a degree that he said, I'm gonna be funding this, and let's go wild and explore what we can do. And so for two years, we have been doing mainly hackathons. So our mode of inquiry and our research mode was through hackathons because we always wanted to do bottom up work. So we wanted to start with concrete biodiversity steward project and work with them, understand the context in which they are working, and then try and see what technology, and more specifically than blockchain technology, could do for them. So with them together, we designed different challenges. We found different blockchain projects that would set up bounties, ocean protocol, and Brent McConaughey also with his Nature two point o article was always a big partner in S and I and a big supporter of S and I. But also other treasuries have generously generously given bounties to the hackathon, and so this was a nice way of bringing people together with the biodiversity stewards and defining these challenges. And so we did that. We did this here in Amsterdam with former shipyards place called De Kovel, dear friends and collaborators of SMI for many years, which was engaged with toxic soil and phytoremediation. So they use plants in order to detoxify the soil. And they also have a collective working there, and they have a cafe, and they have, like, offices for people who can't afford to pay office rent in Amsterdam and so on. So it's a whole ecology that is established. And we did the first hackathon with there, which was really beautiful. And we did a big event there also in order to to do community building, to bring people of different walks of life together. And from there, then we went to work with a project in Kenya. And the the idea behind that was indeed to try and say, look. Technology works very differently in the global South, has very different demands, has different possibilities. So let's do a project in the global South to understand what are the what are the parameters there. And we ran another hackathon with Kenya Wildlife Trust. And this is a little, a bit where we found the way to work that we work now. And, really, we landed on EcoData and the value that EcoData can generate and what we can do with it. And this is where we are currently now exploring further.

Yes and no. I mean, there is that part to it in the sense of saying, yes. For sure, there there remains a somewhat donation element to the whole undertaking. I'm fighting tooth and nail to try and change that paradigm. But I think in all honesty, of course, there is this element that remains that people want to donate, want to support, and that motivates them. But at the core, what we are trying to push for is to say biodiversity stewards produce data about the work that they do. And so they define however they cut the world. No? They produce whatever kind of data they produce. Some and many work with animal identification. That is a very common way of working in conservation work and biodiversity restoration work. But also some work with, like, entities of a land plot and looking at these things and different kinds of so they do what they do in many different ways. And what we do is that we work with them and take the datasets that they produce. And I'm gonna make it a bit more concrete with our first partner, Kenya Wildlife Trust, who works on human wildlife coexistence in the Masai Mara and particularly has a predator protection program with different kinds of predators, but one is focuses on lions. And so it's really the desertification, ever less fertile land, land reform projects with fencing, and all sorts of things that lead to the fact that you have human wildlife conflict, the lion eating the livestock, humans poisoning the lions, and so on. And and that's the the situation that they work with. And so they produce what they call lion catalog. So they really identify the lions for different ways, different methodologies of spotting, of coloring, and so on, and produce data about these lions. And so what we did with this dataset is that we brought it to a Web three gaming community called Monsema. And so what happened in a sense is that the Monsema community developed lion avatar that are connected to the datasets of the lion and the mass lions and the Maasai Mara. So they carry features on the one hand of these lions, but they also have a dynamic element in which the lion the data catalog of the lions is being updated by Kenya Wildlife Trust, and it can have consequence in the game. Now for us, it doesn't matter what they do. Munsama does their in game economics. They do their decision making of what that means. But the the the the proposition is basically to say there is a connection between the data of the, lions in the Masai Mara and the behavior of the avatars or the looks of the avatars in the game and to make that an interesting proposition. And so, basically, that means we found a market for this eco data in the digital economy. And so the these lion avatars were sold as NFTs within the Montsama community, and it was a very successful sale. A 100 k was raised with this. And so of that, 70 k went to Kenya Wildlife Trust and 30 k went to S and I. And so at the core of our proposition is to say it's not we don't we want to move away from the donation. So it's really to say this eco data has value in the digital economy also based on the idea that we have a crisis of digital overproduction in a sense. You know? Like, it's so easy with MidJourney, with all of these programs. Now you can create phenomenal stuff, but it's a bit void of meaning because it has no connection to anything. So the sense that you can create you can connect digital thing to real life data is also a bit of a response of saying this all of this overproduction will shrink and will go away because it's not interesting enough. And the connection to the real is what matters at the end of the day. And so that's our proposition of trying to bring that data that is being produced anyways. It's not extra work. It's what they are doing anyway to bring that into the digital economy and find a market there to improve these digital products and thereby make the funding for the biodiversity store much bigger because also the markets are much bigger. I mean, we have not successfully penetrated the gaming market. We have another collaboration that we did with a web two metaverse. So we did, in a sense, move into this direction. We do have traction. It's not that it's all fantasy, but it's a hard market to move into, especially with a proposition like that. So we need a bit more time to do it. But that's a bit the idea. And we did other projects. We did ticketing with NFTs like that for, crypto events where the image of the dolphin is connected to a dolphin in the Algarve in Portugal. So we have tried to explore different kinds of digital product that would lend themselves to this kind of connection, and we are really, like, trying to create that market. In total, I might say, just a moment of, a bit pride. So in overall, we generated a 170 k for PR stewards in about one year time, and there were more than 1,000,000 items distributed that have this equaling connection to some form of dataset. So there's traction. It's working. It's just working,

it's spent, it's gone, and then you have to fundraise again. And it's, like, clearly not sustainable nor regenerative. It's, like, the opposite maybe. Exactly. Beautiful, Giulio. I think that's exactly the the summary. Exactly. That's what we are trying to do. But so from my understanding, I don't remember if you mentioned it while you were speaking, but this is part of like, the framework that you guys are using is this deep protocol. So this is, like my understanding is that data is being collected by all these different organizations and ecological stewards, and the deep protocol is this kind of, like, technical formulation that takes in that data, probably by some sort of standards that are either already created or maybe ones that you have had to create because maybe there weren't so many standards. And then this can be translated into or fed into via either an API or, it's posted on chain. There's probably a couple of different ways you can think about this, for for other, basically, entities and organizations to use that data for their games, for their art, for whatever kind of, like, digital services that they maybe would like some sort of connection to real life rather than kind of yeah. I think digital labor and products are incredibly abstract. They're incredibly abstracted from the material reality in which, like, very far down the line, you know, there's no connection between, like, this screen that I have here and, like, the many underwater cables that are, like, flowing through the through the bottom of the ocean, for example, or whatever else. So this provides a way to almost what's the right word? Like, there's, like, you know, the Marxist term is, like, alienation, that, like, we're alienated from, like, material reality in many ways or, like, the working conditions of other working class people. But here, there's almost, like, a way to unalienate or de alienate in certain ways by putting the material up front as, like, something that is actively a part of,

like, some sort of digital product or something like that. Yeah. So I think that's that's where we are hoping to get there and to do that. And, indeed, I mean, like, the what you what you mentioned, DEEP stands for decentralized ecological economics protocol. And it's really the idea is to try and develop something like an outer economy based on that. So I think also what Giulio mentioned before that the idea is to create a loop that continues. Now it really I think one of the things that, are extremely important is that you do have to have some kind of swirl, some kind of traction. I have a close friend and collaborator, Eric Baudelot, and he has this very beautiful way of speaking about the the role of the swirl and how you create a whirl in a in a whirlpool. And then he says things like you can't be alone in a liquidity pool. So I think really, like, this idea of having to keep things in motion and having a certain dynamism is crucial for understanding how you do keep an economy in motion, and you move away from the donation model. And so this is really where we want to exactly incentivize data is being is being fed into the protocol and that it becomes utilized ever better. The question of how this construction site looks exactly is another rabbit hole that goes really deep and is much more goes, Alessandro Matti, our head of partnership and field research. It's his cup of tea because the way that the data is being interpreted and analyzed and fed in is also based on best conservation practices. So the whole the the whole economy of conservation is its own economy where you have standards, where you have rules, where you have ways of reporting, where you have ways of accessing funding, and so on. So there's a whole universe there. And in in order not to make extra work, the idea is to go in through these conservation standards and try to make the data feed in as seamless as possible, but also as useful as possible for the stewards. And then to connect it to an API that allows it to go into digital products. But, again, also to be frank, it really we are not ultra sophisticated in that. Everything at the moment is done manually in many ways. We work very closely with and with the partners that we work with, everything is tailor made. So we have no automation processes in there. But the hope is to build towards that, and that's also where we think that the term protocol comes from. Yeah. We can speak later maybe. I mean, there is a part to the protocol that we have not developed, which revolves around the idea of a treasury and revolves around the idea of trying to bring biodiversity stewards together in something like a DAO so that they could make decisions about this pot of funding that is put together so that it's more of a collective organization rather than individually. At the moment, every time we have a project and we finished it, the money is being paid out to the city steward right away. And so the idea of, like, potentially developing a a treasury that can have different purposes, that can have something like a basic income payout to all of the participants, but also where you could have proposals by different stewards and so on. So there are a lot of things that are flying around there. And just to maybe land on this one thing, why I think that's relevant to say that that's part of the deep protocol is that I think one of the things that we are seeing in the green tech, green finance space is that it's almost like closing in and squeezing out anything that is alive. So I think nature finance is constantly asking, how is nature doing? Like, give us a status report. How is it doing in order to have a carbon credit, in order to have a biodiversity credit? No. You have to there's this obsession of saying, how is it doing? So we can create risk scores. We can create value scores that are in accordance with that question. And the question ideally should be answered by some synthetic technology, be it remote or be it, in the soil or wherever, that can just permanently constantly say, this is how nature is doing. This is how nature is doing. And it should ideally, the startup input should make an immediate risk metric. So it's a complete autopoietic system that doesn't need anything anymore. I think that's a bit what what is going on in many ways and where all really the expropriation of data from the local communities is facilitated through technology and through sensing technology. And so for us, we want to, like, put a wedge into that where I think this is a closing door, and we want to put a wedge into it and say, no. There are communities and stewards on the ground. They are the antennas in the mud. They are extremely important in order to have any kind of assessment of what is going on. And so they need to, also, I think, come together in some form of organization, of some form of unionization, if you so wish, in order to, push back against this pressure of using all sorts of sensors and all sorts of sensing devices that very often then come with the deal that the data is being owned by the corporate, by the tech company, and not anymore by the steward. In agriculture, this is already established business. So there has moved much faster in in a different universe. For biodiversity, it's much more still malleable and not clear quite clear. There's not much data. But I think so that vision where we think bringing biodiversity stewards together in one way or another to really increase bargaining power is part of the proposition of the long term proposal.

sister space in many ways. I mean, many collaborators, many fabulous people who are, I think, working in that and and pushing really the needle in many directions. And I think that in in in many ways, we are rightly, associated as a refi project to a certain degree. I think one of the things and as you said already, Julia, I think one of the things in which we come from a different direction is what I mentioned already before. So we are trying to move away from this idea that you value the natural object so that somehow, you know, the tree has a dollar sign flying above it. That's that's what we are not trying. That's what we are trying to stay clear from because close to the ecosystem services, it's close again to the speculative finance and so on. So how how are we trying to stay clear from that is precisely by saying it's the eco data that has a value in the digital economy. So what's the value? It's not the value of the lion that is being assessed. It's the e code that is produced as a derivative in a sense. It's an e code derivative that has the value there in the digital economy. So that's one of the conceptual markers, I think, where we are trying to steer in a different direction. I don't know how successful we will be with that, but I hope that we will be successful in that sense because it also, in a sense, all of the corporate social responsibility work, to a certain degree I mean, I really have to say, I have to give it to the EU regulators. They are producing this new corporate social responsibility directive that is gonna come into force at the end of the year for certain big corporations and so on and so on. And they have done really, a fabulous work in in foregrounding in so offsetting as meaning you do damage here and you just plant a couple of trees and you're done is really something that doesn't slide under this directive. So they are really forcing corporations to show how are they changing their supply chains. Like, how are they making it so that their actual supply chain changes? And that is one term of what you can call that is insetting. And so I think to a certain degree, what we are trying to push for is with these digital products is a form of insetting. So you make this eco data part and parcel of your project. You can't have a product sorry. I mean product. You can't have this digital product without having this eco data being part of it and without having buy that paid into this community that keeps maintaining the ecosystem. So in a sense, I think we are aligned a bit with the EU regulator, as odd as it sounds. The most funky, things happen. But, specifically, because we were circling the credit space and what does it mean and how does it go. And, really, you have an offsetting proposition with credits that is kind of part of the gig, and it's really problematic proposition in many ways. I mean, we have seen it in carbon for so many reasons that it doesn't work, not the least that it's really not a market. I mean, most of these markets are subsidized markets by the government. I mean, it's really not that they are just stand alone market. So there's many, many, many problems with that, and that's why I wouldn't say that further down the line as I said as as you also said, Juliano, if and if and if and if and if and if, then I think, yeah, let's see where we go. And I think for us, for SNI, the way that we see our own work there is to say that we have these human sensors. So, you know, like, that often tends to be forgotten. You want to have all of the sensing through technology, but human sensors are the ones that are doing the work on the ground every day. And how you show that is also something that I think is paid way too little attention to. So the whole reporting is always done oh, this is like and if if you wish in some qualitative report that no one wants to read. And this is also something that we have taken to heart very significantly with SNI. So we developed this interface, which we call real. And there, you can see on the real interface, you can see what digital product, the the digital product and the dataset that it's connected to, the amount of money that was generated through that. And so we have a seed there, which is really purposefully a video feed where the biodiversity steward every so often post an update talking about what they have been doing with this money. Now you can say, well, how are you gonna prove that? Well, not at all, but it's a different kind of engagement that just shows people at work and speaking about what they have been doing. And so this this expression of quali qualitative expression of the value of the work that is being done is something where I think we really don't know exactly yet how that can go, but it's not something that has made its way into the discussions around biodiversity credits or financialized market or anything like that. It's really opposite and squeezing it out. So we're trying to

Yeah. Super. I'm happy to to give another example. I mean, one of the collections that I like the most is called the Sound waves collection, in which, basically, we work together with WalletConnect, which is a crypto wallet provider. And they were preparing the launch of a new, feature in their product, which is called the Web three inbox, which is like messaging from web from a Web three wallet to a Web three wallet. So from address to address, it's like an email address, but you don't need the email address. You basically can message from the crypto address to the crypto address. Okay. So WalletConnect already has a big user base and is a product provider. And in order to launch this new feature, they they made a waiting list. And everyone who signed up for this new feature in the waiting list was promised to be to receive one of these Soundwave Collection NFTs. And the Soundwave Collection NFT is, generative art visualization from a phenomenal artist who we work with, Aria, a friend of ours, who makes this beautiful this this beautiful art. And so it's a a generative art piece that takes the clipper of the whale sound as its basis and produces a certain form of a swirl. You can go to the real interface to see it. It's hard to describe how it looks, but it's really like it takes the dataset from that sound, the bioacoustic sound, and turns it into a visualization. And so each person on the wallet connect subs subscriber list receives that Soundwave's NFT and can now go onto the real interface and connect their wallet and will see their visualization. And we'll also see the funding that has been generated for the for the conservation organization we worked with, in that case, Aquasert, which is a marine biodiversity conservation organization, and can see how much money went to AQUASERCH and can also see then this video feed from the AQUASERCH team that speaks about, hey. With this money, we were able to do at y zed and so and so and so. Yeah. So that's that's how how a project looks like.

this competitor, I think, is very interesting. And what do you think about it? Yeah. I mean, a lot of a lot of good, a lot of good questions, I think, there, Julia, to to come to. So maybe to to start, from the end, somehow intuitive, this question of, care work and reproductive work and what it means. I do think that one of the things that for me, and this comes more from my academic and other political life journey, So a backpack that I that I'm bringing already to the crypto world is that and especially as a legal scholar and critical legal scholar, the question of recognition is one that is a really difficult question. So in a sense, also if you speak now about rights of nature, for example, now it's a certain mechanism in which the liberal legal system expands itself to bring in more into its realm, but always by the rules that the legal system has defined. So one of the biggest problems in in in legal thinking and legal conceptualizing is always subject object categorizations, and it's really hard to escape that. There are a lot of people who are really pushing pushing hard conceptually to try and think about entangled forms of life and what that means for law. And there's a beautiful project here at Tilburg University constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene where they're really trying to think what could that mean to think of ecology in in legal terms. And so I'm coming I'm going all the way there because I think that recognition and that's basically what always comes when you say no, but you need to see me. Right? You don't see me, but I want you to see me, and I want you to account for me. It's always ask for recognition. And there's this beautiful book by the anthropologist, Isabelle Pavinelli, which has this title which haunts me ever since I said I first saw it. It's called The Cunning of Recognition. And I think it's so powerful because recognition comes at a price. So you want to be seen, you want to be recognized, but you subscribe to the other's terms. Otherwise, you cannot be seen. You can't be recognized. So I think there is a limit to this, and I think we see that limit also playing out in what what is called ecosystem services, now which in a sense says we are gonna use econometric thinking as we know it, and we are going to account for the externalities so that we can put a price tag on it. And both the recognition of rights in law or the recognition of external externalities in economics are very important and useful things. So it's very clear they go a long way. But, conceptually, they also have limits to a certain degree. And so I think that for us, what we were trying to get at or what we were trying to do is really to find, so to speak, another avenue. And to just say there is value here here that you we don't we're not asking for recognition. We are asking for traction in the market that is just gonna do its thing. So the whole asking for please see me, please recognize me, that's exactly what we wanted to move away from and just say, this echo data is such hot shit that everyone wants to put their hands on it. And you can't live with a product in the digital economy without having EcoData in it because that's how sexy and phenomenal and cool it is. So that is a bit the hope that it's not that it's going really through desire and demand side that you can steer through the market. I mean, this is a bit con it's there's still some open and loose end side. And I haven't wrapped it up super fully nicely, but I think that's a bit the direction in in which we are going. And I think then to speak about then exactly because I think it's not an either or. So I'm really the I'm I'm there's nothing worse than the desire for purity when you want to do critical work. It's really the biggest hindrance of all. And so here comes the question. No? Like, where where are you willing to compromise in which ways? How far can you go? What do you take into account? There's no such thing as as clean money. No. All money is dirty in one way or another. Whose money do you take and whose do you not take? I mean, just because all money is dirty also doesn't mean that you can take any money. So it's always in the in between. It's always the pragmatic. It's always these decisions where really, like, the the the really secret sauce and the really difficult ethical questions are hidden. And in refi, I think we see that fully. And I I think that in in crypto, there is I just received another badge of of papers from the summer of protocols. I don't know if either of you are subscribed to the summer of protocols, but really, like, big shout out. I love it. It's so beautiful, and it's such it's such a work of love. You receive a folder and then you receive packages for it, like, in real. Someone wrapped them, put them on the mail. I find it beautiful. So in the last edition that I received, there was a beautiful quote from, Josh Stark in his essay, Adams, Institutions, and Blockchain. And here, he asks something that I think is full on spot on. Where is the hardness in your protocol from which it derives its certainties and constants? What is the source of this hardness? What does it cost? Who pays the cost? So I think he's really asking here, like, at some point, you have to have a hardness. It cannot all be soft and jolly, and there is a demand of recognition. There is a decision maker. There is a code. You know? We too have a code. So taking responsibility for that is is the key, and I think that's where we are sitting with S and I. These are the negotiations that go on. Like, who do you collaborate with? Who can be your core corporate partner? Is there a limitation to it? I mean, of course, all of the digital sphere also creates its own big problems. The question of the material sustainability of the digital economy, we don't even touch, we never mention, we don't speak about. It's not there. It complicates things too much, but we are we are aware it's there. No? But we don't go there because we say we take that. We start from this position that we work in the digital economy, so we follow that, that that is how it works. And more gaming means more gamers, means more digital technology, more infrastructure, more like, all of these things. Now are there problems with gaming? Is it addictive? Who's the target audience? I mean, it goes endless. So finding your way through this, that's where I think the ethical work and the difficult political work is in. So life is not an asset, but, indeed, assetization is part of our life form, and we need to have an account for how we integrate

it. I think that's really interesting. I mean, yeah, it's you bring up a whole lot of questions on, like, basically the the reality of trying to build something even through through a critical mindset because I think, yeah, there is this tendency to be I mean, I mean, particularly on the left, to be very critical, but then, you know, it's easy to end there because I mean or not that it's easy, but that it's, like, it's comfortable to end there because you it's you it's easy to come up with so many questions to doubt your yourselves on, like, what is the next step then? If if we take this systemic approach of where these all these problems that are going on, and we need to navigate it, but then to take the steps to be like, okay. How do we navigate that? That's like a whole other monster to take on that is, like, kind of lacking, I think, in the in the space right now of, like, from from critical theory to critical practice. And I think the the important thing to to, like, keep in mind if you're doing some sort of critical practice is that, like, yeah, perhaps, you know, you won't always have, like, easy decisions to make or there's never, like, this clear cut kind of easy path to take that then you will fix the world by by taking it when you take this approach. I think that's something that I really appreciate. This is not an easy thing to do. It's nice that you take this approach of, like, also taking the hard stance that, like, you know, that life is not an asset because that is also, like, the the easy approach taken by people who are uncritical is is my thinking of, like, we just need to if the economy just had a price for the tree, in which there is already a price for the tree, it's called logging, then somehow we would fix it. But I was thinking what while you were you both were speaking and when you mentioned gaming and its problems,

So I have not engaged with his book specifically, so I cannot speak to the book in in specific this is but I'm afraid. I mean, one of the things that I can say, and I think that goes well with the way that you phrase the question, is in many ways that I think certainly economic structures are in many ways defining and capitalism is not just an economic structure as a cultural phenomenon and, in many ways, not really a defining, a world defining, a world making kind of phenomenon in many ways. So I think that, certainly, the right entity or the right way to look at what is going wrong, I think, must be on that scale. And I do think that, you know, I mean, Marx and Marxism more broadly has brought forward phenomenal critical analytics of how capitalism works, what it does, how it goes, and so on and so on. So I think that for sure this is where we are where we need to look, around for where to go. But I also think that one of the things that has something to do also a bit with the critical spirit and what is the critical spirit at the moment and how do we work with this is a bit the question, how do you then engage with this phenomenon? And do you can say you push back as a metaphor, no, in one way? You could also say you lean in. And leaning in, I think, is something that beside the reference to Sheryl Sanders' not so great feminist, account of, like, some kind of white corporate feminism. Leaning in is also a way of saying that you try to work from within the system. So this idea of pushing back assumes an outside, assumes the possibility of an outside, which I think then again the critical scholarship that has emerged since the seventies, eighties, whatever, is showing so clearly doesn't exist. And to throw in maybe yet another reference, which might which might or might not be interesting is, for me, one of the biggest books that, changed the way that I looked at these things is by a scholar a Canadian scholar called Brian Massumi, and he wrote a book called 99 thesis on the reevaluation of value. And, really, that for me was the moment in which the part of the the critical part connected to something like affirmative critique of post critique of how that goes and specifically around this notion of value and how to engage in this economy. So I do think the question of what's the role of speculation in this economy currently and how do you engage with that? I think we see in the crypto space that people are really longing and craving for some kind of speculative element also because I do think that this promise of future security through education, through a good job is broken. So the question of how do I get a a ticket to living a secured life has really been mashed up and mixed up with ideas of speculation. So I think in crypto, we see this, like, can we build community for the future in which we can hold each other? We are trying, but somehow also this idea of we need to make a lot of money in it so that we can, if things go broke, still make sure that we are safe is is, I think, all there. I think the crypto space is so interesting for that reason. Because at at the end of the day, I do think all that people are after is to feel safe in one way or another. And what does it mean to be safe in this world, and how can you secure your space? You can secure it somehow collectively. You always have to do it collectively, but money is also a really good shortcut. You can do a lot of good things. You know? You can buy health care, buy a house, can do a lot of things when you have money. So this is, I think, where we are at. So I think that capitalist critique in its traditional form, assuming the pushback is not my camp, is not my cup of tea, but I also think everyone should fight their own fight and we don't have to agree on everything. I think I'm more in the camp of saying, like, how can we use these economic phenomena to try and create collectivity and sociality that provides a certain sense of safety and, thus, in a in a sense, limits this idea that you have to do it individually and have to have more and more and more and more and more for yourself so that you can be safe. Yeah. I think that's a that's a very fair point. I mean, what what brought me to crypto in the beginning in the first place was being broke.

So definitely resonates with that. And, of course, it's also hard to be, you know, hard to feel safe as well with if you also know, like, looming environmental collapse being constantly in in the air, you know, as something that, like, as individuals, we simply have very little power to do much about unless we are working collectively with some larger organization and organizational collective efforts. So maybe to to close it off, if you want to share with people what are the maybe, like, upcoming, milestones or things that you guys are working on at S SNI that we can expect in the coming months or so?

Yeah. Thanks a lot. So the latest, great news in the land of SNI is that we we secured big funding from the OpenGov, treasury in the Polkadot ecosystem together with, WalletConnect, the partner I mentioned before, and also Unique, in which the idea is now to develop a multi event NFT pass. So the idea of a bit of a companion that shows where you've been at, what you've been doing, that can be a track record. A bit like, you know, I'm wearing my my bracelet from the Waking Life, festival. So others might want to collect their attendance at a certain event as a memorabilia. And so the idea is to condense that into a dynamic NFT that keeps changing with more events that you attended, with more things that you did. And so it's a bit like your your co pilot, your animal avatar that travels with you and travels with you through Cryptolandia and the events that you go to. And so there again, the funding that we received, the biggest chunk of it goes to our biodiversity steward partner who then can continue working with actually, I mean, the the thing is called Dotfin. So it's a very, like, lame and yet, again, I think, just full on good joke on the the Dotfin that wants to become a whale. And so it's a bit of a of a of a play on that. And so we are developing this together with these partners. We're going to launch it at Decoded in Brussels now in July. That will be the first announcement of it, and it's meant to live for six months. And so we take it from there. I mean, we are open for business. Anyone who has any great partners in the digital economy who would be interested in the EcoData that we have to do things with it, I'd be more than happy to hear from anyone and and try and and put something up. Because as I said, we are really trying to look for partners who can use that, who are interested in engaging with that, and it's not necessarily everyone who is super excited by that. So whoever knows a possibility, get in touch.

Great. Thanks for sharing that, Giulio. I'll have a lot of those links in the show notes in case people want to join for CCG. And, yeah, thank you, Andrea, for for coming on and sharing with us about S and I. And, yeah, we're looking forward to seeing it continue on the commons economy roadmap and to see how you guys develop.

Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. It was wonderful. Thank you very much.