A Regenerative Village as a DAO in Portugal (Traditional Dream Factory)
You can find the video version of the interview here where I've cut the interview with some film I took while at TDF.
In this episode I spoke to Sam Delesque (@samueldelesque), founder of Traditional Dream Factory (TDF), a regenerative village based in Abela, Portugal that is blending crypto with permaculture and community. TDF is the first village part of OASA, a Swiss non-profit to help regenerative villages turn into community land trusts.
During the interview we discussed we talked about Sam's vision for TDF and OASA as DAOs, our time there during ReFi Week, and how they are regenerating the land. If you have the opportunity I'd recommend going to TDF in Portugal and seeing it for yourself by booking a stay. If you support the vision then you can do a donation subscription here.
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Transcript
And we're going. Alright. Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. This time, I'm doing a little bit of an experiment and I'm doing also recording the video of my conversation. And for today, I'm gonna be talking to Sam D'Lesque, who is the founder of Owasa and Traditional Dream Factory or TDF, which is an eco village based in Portugal that I was recently at where we did a bunch of really cool things, including planting, I believe it was over 700 trees, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me here.
Yeah. Of course. Thanks for coming. Yeah. So I was in I was at, TDF. What was it now? Like, about a month ago, and I wanted to do an interview with you, but do video because I just bought a camera. And I'm trying to, like, figure out how to do more video stuff, but I'm kind of still, still figuring it out. And I completely, like, completely fucked up and realized that my, flight was a day earlier than I thought it was. So I had to, like, in a rush, just kind of leave, the village late at night so I can make my flight the next morning. I made my flight, but I was still late to the place I needed to go to because the first flight was delayed. It was a mess. But, anyways, yeah. Maybe, Sam, if you want to give a bit of an introduction before we get into what TDF is, and we will talk about that in a bit. And I'll show some clips of kind of, like, my and our experience, being there. Yeah. Who are you and what got you to this point to, to found something like TDF?
Oh, thank you. So, yeah, my name is Sam. I'm French and Danish originally. I grew up in South Of France, And then I I moved to New York, just after my studies, and I lived in New York for, like, seven years. And, basically, I come from a tech background. I worked about ten years, different start ups, corporates, and so on. And, yeah, I grew up in a national park in the South Of France, so nature has always been those in my heart. And, and I've also I still did photography, when I was younger. So I also had a little stunt in in the photography industry, but didn't really find my ways there. And so, yeah, basically, I combine yes, an interest in technology with nature and arts, and this is a little bit what I've been working in the last few years, trying to create spaces for for digital nomads and for humans in general to be able to thrive, while being, while leaving a positive trace on nature.
Nice. Which which national park was it? If I if I can ask. I've I've been through the South Of France a bit, and the the the national parks there are incredible.
It's, in, Lausaire. It's North Of Montpellier in the South Of France.
Okay. Haven't been there. Yeah.
It's a beautiful, chestnut forest.
Cool. Nice. So, yeah, I I thought, you know, when we were speaking in, at TDF, it was really interesting to hear about your, like, kind of trajectory and experience having worked in tech in a place like New York, which I in a, you know, having a a corporate life as some people may have had or may have now, and then choosing to essentially get away from that and move towards something that you felt was more, I guess, meaningful for your for yourself and and and aligned with with what you wanted to do. Mhmm.
Yeah. I mean, it's, I I, yeah, I realized quite quickly when I was in New York that I wanted to closer to nature, and, also, I I started just working remote about, around 2017. And so I had the freedom to live wherever I wanted to. I was working remotely for a company in Boston, and so I just started traveling around and kind of living that digital nomad life.
Before it was And
yeah. One of Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess it started a while ago, digital nomadism, but it definitely started a bit before COVID. Mhmm. And, basically, starting that lifestyle and living in places like South Africa and, what Portugal I visited and Latin America and so on. I mean, it's a rich life to be able to to have that freedom to choose where you want to work from and where you want to to live. But, also, you're a little bit at the mercy of the the short term real estate market because, yeah, most likely, branding spaces on Airbnb and so on. And so first of all, like, you're the mercy of this market in terms of economics, but also in terms of ecological footprint. Like, you're not able to decide how sustainable you want to live and so on. And in general, I think, real estate has been detrimental to to nature so far. We have, like, a lot of, like, shitty real estate developments all over the world where we're just completely destroying nature and putting up condos and putting up golf courses and rental estates and so on and so on. And so I really wanted to try to reverse that and to see how we could actually use real estate as a force for goods. And that's, I mean, that's what crypto is doing was, with refi. It's like, we use crypto as a force for good. But I was seeing, like, real estate as in, tolls around the world. It's, like, the biggest market pretty much, I think. And, and so how can we actually leverage this rental market to actually funnel funds towards conservation? So I got really interested in concepts like community land trust and how can we actually put something into the commons, distribute access access to it, and actually being able to leave a positive trace for future generations. Yeah. And and then I I went down that rabbit hole around five years ago, and and it's only going deeper.
Yeah. Yeah. When when you say that, it kinda makes me think it's it's like, maybe a subversion of the current rental market to kind of that people do want to, I mean, have some amount of freedom of being able to move around and stay in places. But, you know, the kind of privatized approach that is most common is kind of like one that has oftentimes, if not most times, caused some amount of environmental damage or damage to, like, the locality in which it exists in because of, like, privatized housing.
Yeah. Yeah. So, like, the two big, well, two of the big, contributors to climate change is, construction in general and also agriculture. It's like the separation from the places where we get our food from and the fact that we have to ship it so far and the the the loss of topsoil that modern farming practices are generating. It's like all of these practices, cumulatively, just mean that we are living in a degenerative civilization, and that has to come to an end if you want to have future generations being able to thrive on this planet. And, yeah, it was it is kind of trying to look at the real estate model and see how can we actually turn this around and make this a force for good rather than a a force for more destruction, more extraction. And and with that, it's like, yeah, how can we actually measure this impact, and, like, how do we actually do that? And that's a little bit what gathered me back into crypto originally back in New York. I wasn't completely sold on the idea of using crypto for my project even though, the idea had been floated. But, initially, I just saw that it added, like, too much complexity on top of something already complex, like building a village, which already has a lot of components from, like, permaculture design, construction, engineering, social coordination, like, all of these different layers of things that you need to to do well. But in the end, I think crypto can also well, it has proved, like, with a refined movement that basically can be global too for coordinating for and for actually leaving a positive trace. And so, yeah, I think what we're all building here together is how can we create this nature backed economy. And the interpretation of ourselves is is how can we create regenerative real estate that actually leave a positive impact on the land. And so reversing this effect of, like, let's destroy a piece of virgin forest in order to put in some condos. But instead of saying, how can we actually take this piece of virgin forest, actually implement a economic model that still makes it attractive and viable, but while conserving it for future generations and so actually being able to preserve all the ecosystem benefits that are stored in this ecosystem.
Yeah. We'll we'll we'll definitely talk more about OASA and kind of, like, the the grander vision, of this. So I thought maybe we can talk a bit now about, TDF, traditional dream factory. So, yeah, would you want to maybe give us a little bit of, introduction to what to what TDF is?
Yeah. So TDF, is, is the first prototype that we're building. It's a regenerative village in Portugal. It's, set on an old poultry farm, chicken farm, that was built in 1970. And it was used for about thirty five years, and then it was abandoned. And then for fifteen years, it was just used for for town parties in the town where we were, and it just was this big abandoned building. And so we came in in, yeah, twenty twenty twenty twenty, and decided to it was it's a perfect place to basically also create an a template for regeneration for this specific area. And so how can we repurpose something like this old agricultural building that's just been sitting abandoned that has more of a negative value than a positive by by sitting there, and trying to create something really positive around it. So trying to imagine the circularity aspect of creating a regenerative village. How can we actually influence, positively the the whole village and neighborhood that we are sitting within? I'm trying to look at the different scopes of regeneration and how can we build more capacity for regeneration. And and then in the particular context of TF, it's, so it's 25 hectares of land. It's two properties we acquired. The first one was a building, and then the second one we have the option to buy. We're hoping to to to do that, early next year so that we can start basically the bigger farming operations and start to expand into a full on village. And the vision for it is, we have the the poultry farm, which is turning into co living space for around 30 people more or less. And then on the expansion lands, we have 10,000 square meters urbanizable, which means that we can build 10 to 20 houses. And on top of that, we have, like, different also kinda accommodation and so on. And the goal is to basically build a whole village, so including an orchard, regenerative farm, cohousing developments, some tiny houses, a democratic school, also teaching around permaculture and so on. And this, academic space, which includes wellness and, work facilities to be able to stay productive with, co working spaces, but also makerspace and industrial kitchen, being able to transform food products on the ground, and try trying to have all the tools available to bring the circularity to be able to launch new products, from the from from the things that we've grown at land. And, yeah, and just creating an environment that induces more human creativity and more collaboration, and and some experiments. And we are also experimenting with, tokenizing, time share access to real estate, And and with that tokenization also comes governance. So there's quite a lot of pieces that we're prototyping out with. But the main things is, like, how do we live together? How do we grow food together? And how do we create an environment that encourages for more human creativity?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that was, a pretty comprehend comprehensive, a summary. I think maybe to, maybe to, like, to share with people who are listening, like, I stayed in one of the, I guess, a tent. I wanna call it a yurt, but I think it's a tent, technically. Yeah. It's a glamping tent. Yeah. A glamping tent. I stayed in one of the tents that was, like, inside, you know, this big building that I assume was, like, wherever they stored, like, grain or something like that. It looked like a grain storage type of building maybe in the past. And, yeah, I was there for about a week, and we basically did a bunch of, tree planting. We did a bunch of and then as well at the same time, we did a bunch of, conversations and talks and whatever else on on refi, on regenerative finance, and sort of related that to kind of broader missions that various people had who were there, during the week long events, which I think was about maybe, like, say, like, 50 people, I wanna say, more or less.
I was thinking on average, we had around 50 people. Yeah.
And, yeah. But we but I think what was really interesting about that experience for me at least was that not everybody was, like, a crypto person. Not everyone was, like, a crypto geek, and, like, our conversations were not, like, I felt not, like, circular that sometimes kind of crypto things can be. And instead, we had a lot of people from the outside that that I think were already at, TDF, who will help you in the the actual permaculture parts in the, like, planning for, the architecture, for engineering, the people who who also cooked. They're all part of, like, the conversations. And then kind of, like, broadly, crypto was, like, something on the side that maybe we thought about as something to help coordinate all these things, but it wasn't sort of, like, maybe the the only thing at the very least that we were focused on, which I really appreciated.
Mhmm. Yeah. I guess TDF kinda bring this plan of, like, regenerators or naturalist people that are into land, and together with the crypto people, engineers, the data scientists, and so on, and also the artists and so on. And so, yeah, it is kind of this convergence of of different profiles of people. And, yeah, I really love the refi week for that because it's, it was actually putting refi in practice and, actually, planting. It's like you said, we planted 700 trees that week, which helped, like, setting up all of our, wind breaks and, like, turning the the market garden that we have into forest. And, yeah, I mean, that's really kind of the the tech section that we want to be in, like, to create this kind of playground that, whether you are a crypto nerd and you wanna, like, create some kind of protocol and coming with some digital tools, you can come and you can actually see it in action in in the real world, where yeah. Like you said, I think a lot of kind of crypto project projects tend to be a bit stuck in maybe, designing systems rather than seeing what actually look like in the real world. So, yeah, that was definitely a beautiful moment to getting together and, yeah, having different perspectives on what those regeneration mean and how can we work together.
Yeah. Yeah. And just to give maybe some extra context just, like, to imagine, for the listeners as well, and I'll put some video. But, you know, you the, TDF is, it's like it's an ecovillage essentially with, you know, the type of toilets where after you do your business, you know, you gotta put in you gotta, is it sawdust, I think, that you put it into into the into the bowl, I guess, into the hole. And, yeah, you're kind of very you're pretty exposed to nature, more or less, and I think which is, for, I guess, maybe the average kind of, digital worker is not something that you're normally exposed to or is not something that you, like, think about a lot because maybe you are in the office or you're at home, protected from the elements. Sometimes I think we kind of forget that weather is happening outside and you have to adjust for that. And, like, yeah, it rained a little bit at a certain point, so things were a bit muddy. But it was all, like, it was fun. It was being, like, being able to, like, I don't know, have both, like, highly, technical conversations and, like, digital things about digital topics while also, like, being like, I don't know, for being crude, like, being like a caveman and being, like, exposed to the elements at the same time. You know?
Yeah. It was definitely a a rainy week. So you had, like, the most rainy week, and and it was cold as well. In Portugal, you have this, phenomenon where it kinda gets cold around the time, and that was, like, the time when we had a lot of rains. And then, actually, after this, it became beautiful weather. We had all the sun, and now it's kind of nice. But, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a place. It's still a village being built, so we don't have the full, fancy accommodation that we have in the plans yet. We do have all the architectural and engineering plans to, yeah, to have everything that you would expect from a, like, a modern co living space, coming soon. So we're hoping to raise, some capital here in q one to be able to start the execution of that. But, basically, yeah, at this point, it's glamping tents with, well, some indoor glamping tents, some outdoor glamping tents. We set up a kitchen and all of these things, but in the future, this could be, like, full on, like, suites and studios and houses and tiny houses and, pools and so on. So there's a lot more infrastructure to be built, but, right now, it's still, like, in the early days and kind of in the builder phase, so it's it's I guess, it's also nice to be being able to see it from a perspective because then when you come back in a few years, oh, yeah. This is how you see and so on. So
Yeah. Yeah. It's getting there. It's getting there. That's right. It was interesting talking to a lot of the people who have been helping you over the past at least the past few months, I guess, on, like, building out the plan for, the garden that we were also helped with and the food forest. And, as well, I spoke to the guy who helped, like, set up, like, the Internet, system. So yeah. So it was very interesting to have those types of conversations that were not, like, token related, I guess. But so TDF, it's situated in, you know, this village or, like, you know, TDF is a village, but then it sits within this Portuguese village of, I believe, it's Abelas.
Abela. Yeah. Abela?
So yeah. And I was just wondering how do you guys kind of go about engaging with, the community of Abela since it was previously, like you said, it was, like, the the place where they partied since it was abandoned. So
Yeah. I think that's one of the most recurring questions. One of the main ways, I mean, this was, yeah, to basically preserve this cultures that they had. Like, they they do a lot of, like, big town parties and so on, so we try to to keep that. And so we throw events once in a while that are targeted towards the locals. And so we where we host the local and we bring the local musicians to play, and sometimes we we also dance and stuff for them. And then what we we did this year is we had we built an outdoor cinema, and so we're hosting movie nights every week. That was also quite popular, and that was bringing more of the use as well from from the village. One of the ideas that we have around how do we actually, broaden our impact is, like, yeah, by instead of, like, telling others how to do things, we really want to be able to lead by example. So that's why we're not really, going out there and doing too much integration with the local farmers because we first want to prove it for ourselves and to be able to have something to show. But they're already starting to take notice. And so, for example, the first year, we were growing potatoes in a very permaculture way with a lot of mulching and so on. And our potatoes were growing and thriving, and our neighbors were growing it in very traditional Portuguese way. It was exposed topsoil and all the potatoes fried, and so the local, town party. Like, the the locals were asking us about it, and I think this is just, like, a nice example of how we can create more integration in terms of how do we actually work to land together, like, taking into consideration all the knowledge that they have from all the forms of farming that has been norm of the last century. But at the same time, we also have to move towards something a little bit different. We have to move to farming that includes much more agroforestry, having many more trees to retain more water in the soil. But, yeah, for example, we have a a shepherd, who is taking care of sheep on on the rest of the lands, as well, and been there for generations. Like, he lived in Abela his whole life. He's managing 300 hectares around the town of Abela. He has, I think, 300 sheep. And yeah. And he basically also built a couple of, lakes, water retention lakes, and this is exactly what we want to build next year. So it was kind of funny to find that out back in September. So we went out and visited his lakes with him, and you have just this kind of nice integrations around how can we actually optimize for water conservation, how can we actually get more out of the land and put more back into the land. And I think, yeah, as we will be scaling up the farming operation over the next year and really bringing, like, a full full fledged orchard and good forest, as an example, really become an inspiration point for a lot of locals, and, hopefully, we'll see them starting to replicate the systems on their own lands.
What I, yeah, what I appreciate about this kind of approach is that you are, integrating into kind of, like, the the community rather than being a kind of, like, I don't know, invading force that, hey. We're buying this land, and we're going to make it our own little, I don't know, digital nomad bubble that, you know and then, like, not sort of engage with with the wider community. And so one of the things that, you've mentioned before is this concept of a community land trust. So community land trust. But I was wondering if you can maybe explain a bit what that is. To me, it feels like a kind of, a serious alternative to sort of standard, private property ownership of of land or of real estate.
Mhmm. Yeah. For sure. So, I mean, a community land trust, or, like, land trust in general, it it's a way to basically put land into a legal vehicle that has a mandate to have certain conservation values on it. So if you look at Central Park in New York, for example, that's a well functioning land trust that's been established hundreds hundreds of years ago, and which is still standing because it has a strong legal recognition and a strong protection of it. Land trusts don't exist everywhere. It doesn't exist in Portugal. So what we tried to do was Canada emulate a structure of a land trust. So we have a Swiss based nonprofit, which basically serves as our land trust. It's the ultimate land owning entity. Although the the land in Portugal is owned through an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, which is a company in Portugal. But then this company is then owned by it's a nonprofit in Switzerland. And so by by enforcing certain principles on the land, like, in our case, we brought, the regenerative land stewardship principles that you can find on the OASA website, And, basically, it gives us some kind of framework for within which we want to live. And I think this is really quite critical to think about when we're thinking about how we actually, preserve lands for the future because it's not about preserving it for, say, one month or one year. It's like it's really long term processes. And if you chop down a forest, it's gonna take centuries before this forest would be back to its original capacity in terms of carbon sequestration, water sequestration, and so on and so on. So we really have to work with legal systems that can stretch over a longer period of time. And so I think, well, land trust is one of the most interesting structures to be able to do that. There's other forms of legal ways that you can get around it and that you can do it. In some places, you can put in easements directly on a land deed, so that you can put in certain ecological conservation measures. But the general idea is that, yeah, basically, you create some kind of, land protection rules that you enforce on the land and that these rules will stay for the future regardless of how you organize, let's say, what you're building on the land or, like, who the people are on the land and so on. The idea is that we can enforce these rules to generations. And, so within our OS and land stewardship principles, for example, we have rules like 50% of the land is to be re rewilded. Why do we do that? Well, one of the aspects of climate change is, we we are seeing a massive biodiversity collapse. We already lost 70% of all mammals over the last forty years, and it's even worse for when you look at insects and so on. But so there's a movement for the half earth movement, and, the idea is to preserve 50% of the globe as nature because this is what's required to actually being able to maintain the level of biodiversity that we have today. And so it's just a little bit of an urge to that. And some of those principles that we have is no single use plastic, no no tilling, and all these kind of best practices, that you would find in a organic farm, but also taking it way further in terms of actually creating production rules that, yeah, that just a bit more pioneering and that they're more based on nature as something that, that deserves to have its own right rather than something that we're just trying to extract from. And so by creating this kind of baseline of land protection, then we can then organize a human that come on top of it and then want to live within this context. But because you already have this kind of base land protection, now what you have to agree on is more like things that actually matter to you as a human directly. So you when you buy the token, you you abide by the land stewardship principles, and then you get access rights to be able to live on those land and to be able to take part in that ecosystem. But you don't get the right to, for example, chop down the forest and put a golf course. That's not something that's part of the, of what you're what you're allowed to do. So, yeah, it's kind of shifting this idea of ownership as in, the the sense of ownership actually comes from from the Roman law, and it's a right to use, the right to get the fruit of, and the right to destroy. That's literally how you describe ownership, and that would apply to anything that you own. So back in the days when you had slaves, you had the right to do whatever you wanted to them. You could kill them. The same kind of applies to land today. I mean, there's there's certain things that national governments impose on your land in terms of what you can and cannot do. But largely, you are able to do whatever you want to do, and you're able to extract the value from it to cut down all the trees and sell the timber and to just leave a desolate place. So it's, yeah, it's like this idea of how can we actually change the the structure itself so that it leaves a positive trace and so that it's not just all about extraction, but, actually, we're trying to leave something more positive for the next generation. So, hopefully, over generation of token holders that will be accessing the TDF lands, you'll see actually the land improving quality, improving in biodiversity and water retention, in food production capacity for humans to thrive and for nature to thrive as well.
Yeah. That was, well said. I think, yeah, to me, community land trusts are just, I mean, it's a type of solution that that is interesting that there are allowances for within the already existing legal system or in some legal systems. It seems like you guys are able to kind of, kind of almost use regulatory arbitrage, but in a way to be able to create a community land trust rather than for, like, not paying taxes or something like that. We'd have it normally used. But, yeah, it is something that I think when we're talking about the the climate crisis is one of the, like, potential, tools and a suite of tools that we can sort of use if we want to kind of, start to create solutions ourselves or just, like, take the resources that we already have and just begin implementing them and start doing them in practice. So that's something I I, yeah, as well, I I appreciate. And then I think from what it sounds like to me when it comes to, community land trusts, what potentially crypto brings, is this mechanism or a platform or medium, a substrate, a protocol, how whatever would you prefer to use, but a way to kind of, like, govern, how you would use this this amount of land, this community land trust, since, it is something that, perhaps not every legal system is always able to, like, encompass every single potential, like, form of social organization that you may want, which can then if you're always trying to do something within, like, legal boundaries, there may not be an amount of space for you to do the thing that you want to do. And so perhaps it sounds to me that, crypto is something that brings, a certain it it brings something innovative in in that space as far as governance and as as well thinking about a world that is, that includes people who are digital nomads or who are more nomadic and who do want to, like, move around a bit. We live in a globalized society. That it allows for a certain amount of, maybe we can say liquidity for people to be able to, like, choose to govern or when is it, like, appropriate for them to govern or not to govern that isn't so rigid?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think, like, basically, what crypto enables you to do is to encode certain utility. And, I mean, when we talk about, like, we created a utility token because what the token gives you access to is actually the ability to book nights of stay, so the ability to spend your time, the ability to actually live at TDF. And so create, like, a direct, like, representation of this benefit, like, living at TDF. We could have created the token for, say, the utility of eating at TDF or whatever else that kind of services that you would want to consume within this ecosystem. But because the utility is what we're tokenizing that enable us to take away this kind of broader sense of, ownership which come with extraction and all all these other things. So, basically, by by encoding into a platform the the utility of, like, being able to live there, which is to us, like, primary reason that you should want to come to the place anyway is, like, we want you to be able to come and spend your time and to have great time and to have access to all the means of production, access to high quality, well well nutritious food, and so on and so on. But that's kind of how we decided to to divide up the value of the space, so based on actually time spent in the space. And then, obviously, that comes with the second benefit, which is, yeah, crypto enable us to, also fundraise for for this project. Right? The that is by by in this token, we can now issue some form of values that gives you an access, right, within the space, and then we can actually sell these rights and being able to raise the funding to develop the place or maybe to acquire more lands and so on and so on. And this is very much a pioneering concept and something that hasn't been done at least like this in the past, and some things that we really wanna pioneer and get more people to be onboarded with and to replicate. And this is a model that we're also encoding, into the the tech platform that we're building called Closer, which enables any regenerative village, coliving developers, and so on to being able to distribute access and governance rights on chain to their projects while still being able to maintain this, legal ownership in whatever forms that makes the most sense. So whether it's a community land trust or other shape. And, yeah, I think that's, like, that's that's really, like, the the core ideas that we're trying to put, push for is that we can use technology to coordinate around getting access to these spaces and how do we actually live in it, while being able to enforce certain, rights for the land itself as well.
And how do you kind of think about the bridging between the the, like, the physical space of of TDF and, like, digital tokens that exist, you know, in the the digital ether? So I imagine that's, like, not a, not necessarily, like, a simple bridge to gap.
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, we kinda came up with this, very simple representation of one token being one night at TDF per year forever. So it created this, like, easy bridge between the the digital token and and its representation in the real life. Mhmm. It's still not super, super easy to understand, and, like, we're really used to you know, I just own this plot of land. So so everything that government allows me to do, I can do it on this land. It's a it's a bit of a shifting in mentality. And so I think we have a lot of education to do around that, around actually valuing this, valuing time in a in a nature conservancy, while being able to to yeah. Still being able to demand all of the the things that you would want. Like, you probably want hot showers and toilets and co working spaces and restaurant, kitchen, like, all these kind of things, which I don't think we need to go back to to to Cayman. I think you pointed to that at some point. I think I think we don't really have that choice. No one is gonna make the choice tolivecom completely carbon free by just not taking part in the global economy. I think we have to provide the tools for global citizens to being able to take part in our economy that's actually nature positive while still providing them with, competitive, amenities. Like, so the goal is to compete with an apartment in the city or whatever other kind of lifestyle you're coming from, but being able to prove that we can actually provide you with that while giving you, while preserving nature in in the process.
Mhmm. Yeah. I it's like the, I mean, the, the token as, like, one day or one night, you could say forever is an interesting it's like it requires a need to a bit break down what makes up property ownership as we conceptualize it generally, which, like you said, it's, you know, it's usually, like, you know, the ability to, to destroy, the ability to profit from, and I'm forgetting the third one now. To use. To use. So, like, yeah. So it's the, this idea of, of use of of being able to, like, that you don't actually own something, in perpetuity, like, kind of like the the platonic ideal of private property ownership is a very silly one because, you know, when you die, you are not going to, like, your your things don't go with you into, into the afterlife or whatever. It it still exists in the world. And so there's a need to kind of, yeah, to separate kind of, like, the separate rights that are included in private property ownership. And one of those rights that I've heard, I believe it was David Graeber mentioned mentioned, but, is is rarely mentioned when thinking about private property is, like, the right to care for something. That that is something that is often, sort of left out. But so this, model perhaps brings, an alternative to something that is, like, pure private property ownership or the flip side of, like, just rent and, like, paying rent to, like, live somewhere. It's somewhere somewhere in the messy in between of of of those things.
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we we define stewardship as the the right to to care for and the right to get the fruit off. So so you can still, get access to the space, like, all of these kind of things. Like, you can still benefit from it in in some ways. It's just that letting go of the ideas that I have the right to destroy it. That's the main thing that we want to get rid of Yeah. That we don't identify with. And, also, like, the side of the curve, coding actually, like, a certain culture and a certain, let's say, values in terms of how do we want to actually, make this land more beautiful and more more, more able to serve life in general. So that that kind of becomes encoded in the platform. Right? And, yeah, that's, I think that's the beauty what what crypto can bring to this product is that it can really encode whatever value you want behind these digital assets, much more granular than just ownership, in itself. And yeah. And in in our case, we basically built a technology that enables you to transition from ownership into stewardship.
Mhmm. Yeah. And so I think of TDF as, like, one of these there's, like, an ecovillage. Sometimes the kind of, stereotype that I've heard about some ecovillages is that they're very, I guess, to put it like crudely, like anti tech or like the it's like a space where they don't, no phones, no computers, no internet, you know, leave that all behind. We're all going to like return to the land and like, whatever. TDF, I think, proposes, slightly differently where we are instead, like, consciously trying to choose how we use technology or use it specifically for, like, the the purpose of the of the goals behind, behind TDF, essentially, which is to regenerate the land and using whatever technology is available to be able to to accelerate that process. And one of the things that you guys are doing as far as, the use of technology and especially, like, advanced technology, is to measure the impact of the regeneration that you guys are working on at TDF. Mhmm. So do you wanna talk about, a little bit about that and how how you guys are approaching it?
Yeah. For sure. I mean, like like you said, yeah, I think the equivalent movement as a whole has kind of been a little bit against technology and sometimes, what do you call it? Like, killing the baby in the in the baby Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah. Exactly. And so it's like when and and the thing there's a, generally, the same concept with money. Right? That's when the hippie movement from the sixties kind of broadly just declined money as, like, something that that had, like, value because, like, money was evil and technology is evil. But when you just label it like that, you're just cutting yourself from society. And so instead, what we're trying to do is to say, well, these things exist, and they're not gonna go away. The only way to change, influence in the world is to actually lean into it and to try to change what they actually mean. And so and that is a promise of of refi as a whole. Right? Is we're trying to change what does money mean from something that's just about creating more growth into some things that's actually creating more nature. At least that's what I would like to see with with refi. And so yeah. The one of the things that we're doing is we're tracking the growth of our natural assets. So, for example, we planted over 3,000 trees on the property. 2,000 of them are in our reforestation project. That reforestation project is being monitored by Open Forest Protocol, which means that we have a field agent that goes into the field, takes some photos of the trees, measures how the trees are growing, and then Open Forest Protocol connects that with data companies that have satellite providers and so on, provide them data so they can actually verify the works that we're doing, and so that we can actually get a quantifiable number of how many tons of biomass are growing on our land, which means that we can know how many tons of carbon sequester it from the atmosphere. And so that that means that now we can actually measure our impact. We can know how many tons of carbon we're storing. We also want to slowly add biodiversity tracking. We're talking with companies like Simplex DNA, where we can take some water samples from the land in order to be able to see all of the species that are interacting with the the space that we are creating. And, yeah, the the dream is that over time, we can prove that we're actually leaving a positive trace, that we're actually regenerating that land. And in doing so, we want to be able to create an economic stream from those activities and being able to sell that impact to companies that have ESG requirements or whatever other kind of carbon markets, biodiversity markets will emerge. It's still quite a nascent, market opportunity. Like, biodiversity credits don't even exist yet. Water credits don't exist yet, but that is the work that we really see us doing because we see the village as being the right ecological and economical unit to actually do regeneration, because we don't believe in natural asset companies just traded on on Nasdaq and that they're just gonna own the whole forest around the world and extract the profits from forest doing their thing. But we see the villages where the stewards live and where the the villagers the the stewards can eat and where they sleep, and can actually have the cultural and the the skills and knowledge to be able to care for land, and also the the knowledge and and so on about how do you actually track that impact and what does the land need and what does it mean to have a positive impact. And so by starting to track these metrics, carbon capture, biodiversity, water, and so on, we can start to create basically, yeah, a model for Aboriginal village. And that does set us apart from, also ecovillages and so on because we will actually have tangible data and can, at some point, go up to institutional investors or municipalities or governments and say, hey. We we build this village. We actually like, this is how much biodiversity we created. This is how much carbon we stored and so on. And then that becomes a leverage point to be able to drive more funding into this kind of technology enabled regenerative villages.
Mhmm. So it's also, like, by using, these kind of, like, newer, or, like, maybe more, technologically enabled ways of measuring impact, you're able to perhaps, prepare yourself for the potential future that, there is going to be maybe some type of market or some desire for people to be able to, like, want to fund these types of regenerative projects and practices. So you will be able to show, like, good data. I know there's I believe it's called MRV, measuring, reporting, and valuation. Is that right? Yeah. Validation, which is basically the practice of people, like, saying, like, hey. We planted whatever this many trees, this place, and we believe it's going to, sequester this much carbon, type of thing. So you can, like, so that people who maybe who want to support these types of projects can be more sure that the money that they're putting towards towards you is something that, like, has proven results, for.
Exactly. And yeah. And, I mean and you you can invest in reforestation project and all these kind of things all around the world. I think the specificity of what we're bringing is, first of all, we're bringing a legal model to put land into conservation, which means that that is conservation for many decades, maybe centuries or millennials, who knows. And it's really trying to look at this kind of long term impact, and basically aligning our interest with that of nature and trying to create a market that can benefit the development of these type of regenerative villages in the future.
Yeah. Fair. And so, Owassa is kind of like this just to make the connection, like, Owasso is kind of like this entity that then is whose purpose is to steward multiple villages who all want to, do similar things to be able to push that kind of general, to make to make it not a one off, I guess, we can say, to make it something that is easy for plenty of other villages, or or just groups and collectors of people who want to do this type of work that TDF is kind of experimenting with, you say.
Yeah. And so the the goal of OASA is to have a network of villages around the globe, around 10 to 12 villages. But that each of these villages is actually sitting within the context of a nature conservation that would be on much larger areas. So the goal is conserve around a 100,000 hectares globally. That would be stewarded by OASA. So it's not like a a one legal entity to to fit all, but it's the idea is that we can create the first model. Other people are gonna replicate it. Hopefully, this has become the trend. Oase is valuing its natural asset on its land, and it's enforcing, decentralized governance of those spaces, empowering, like, a grassroots kind of village builders to be able to, to run, operate, co own, cost you with the villages, the spaces that live, the spaces they work, the food they eat, and everything in between.
Yeah. And so maybe to since we're, nearing about the hour, we had a refi week, which was, a week long event where we talked a lot about refi and the different goals that, different people in their projects had. I'm curious if you have any thoughts that you wanna share or any hot takes that you have about, refi or regenerative finance, the current state of it, and where you hope it goes to in the future.
Yeah. I mean, it's been a very tough year for Refi. It's been a tough year for for us as well as a as a product. It was tough for crypto, but I think even more so for Refi because carbon markets got slammed and crypto got slammed. And, yeah, it's just been difficult. But at the same time, if we look at, like, longer term, like, 2030, 2040, 2050, I don't really see a world in which refi is not gonna play a role. Like, we need to coordinate around these issues or whether it's gonna go extinct within, the next couple generations. So, yeah, I think it's quite inevitable, and the interest is there. Like, everyone, if you want this to happen from national governments to companies to all the consumers, everyone knows that that has to be the the norm. And so, yeah, for me, it's, like, just, yeah, really interesting and fun to be playing on this frontier edge. And, you know, during every five week, we we minted Hypersets. So, basically, it's like storing this proof well, this this trace on chain, saying what impact we we left. And so we said, okay. We all of these people, who put in their wallet, who said, okay. They were part of the TDF repay a week. We planted 700 trees, and this is all the data that you can actually go and and and look at it. And and this is basically leaving a trace for the future so we can go back retroactively and we can say, oh, actually, like, this is all the impact that's been done in the past. And this is quite a change from current, say, carbon market and so on where a lot of it is basically bullshit. Like, a lot of it is the carbon credits currently that go to companies that have the ability to, for example, log entire forest in the Amazon because you need to have a real threat to the system in order to be able to claim the credits for it. So I think being able to store those little pieces of data on chain just about the impact that we are leaving all around the globe. And as that scales up and as we get more and more blockchain systems to track, that more and more AI system to verify these things, that opens up the space for actually a nature backed economy where we are rewarding retroactively and also, like, in real time, hopefully, stewards for the cares that they give to the land and for the ecosystem services that that land can provide back to us. And, yeah, hopefully, being able to create an economy that's producing more more more nature.
Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think refi will have to start to contend with is the kind of, I think, failures of current models for carbon markets. You had, Zavera, I think, should have the scandals. Something like 90% of their carbon credits were were bunk. That is something that, of course, refi has been, you know, as it exists so far, has largely been kind of, like, hooking on to the carbon credit markets, which is kind of one of the things that I wish they would not have, but I can see why they did because it's it already exists. And so it's easier. There are already, like, whatever APIs or something you can you can do, with it. But there's, like, a very serious need if we want to take the the the question of climate change very seriously that there has to be something else that is not, like, these carbon markets because clearly they're they're not working. But yeah. So I I I think I I look forward to there being more projects that are taking kind of, like, the, the reins in their hands and just starting to, work on the Earth directly, where they can. And so maybe just to to close it off, would you like to share with people how maybe they can get involved with TDF and, yeah, can can they go there? Can they show up and and begin planting trees if they want to?
Yeah. For sure. We're we're looking for residents for next year. We are doing months long, climbing residencies from March to June. Hoping that we're gonna have a refi months, actually, maybe in May, still to be confirmed, still to be discussed. Yeah. And, yeah, working with partners like Regions Unite and and so on and so on. And we can have a bunch of different events around those topics. We're planning a thing at Microforest in March. We're doing, cooking classes in April. So, basically, every month is gonna be different little activities and ways that you can come and engage. And, yeah, we have availability, so you can just go to to our website and, and also feel free to reach out to me on social media if there's any questions.
Cool. Sure. And I'll put I'll put some of those links in the show notes. Yeah. Cool. Thanks a lot for coming on. And, yeah, I had a really nice time at TDF. It was very nice to get away from my, my bubble of my computer and the digital world and be exposed to the elements for a bit and get my hands dirty. So I definitely recommend if you have the opportunity and you have the chance to go check out TDF. And you could also I think maybe another thing maybe to add is that people can support you guys, directly on your websites by, having a subscription donation, which is what I did, so I can support the project.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Those subscriptions really help us to kinda keep the ground running, as it was a really hard for crypto. There was, now the user's here to launch our token, and now we are, into raise some some funding in q one from more traditional sources. In the meantime, any support is highly appreciated.
Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks a lot.
Thank you so much.
