ReFi Movement: Helping People and the Planet
An introduction to the ReFi movement with John Ellison on what is ReFi, origin and how he's building the movement
So far trading has been the core narrative around crypto, a place to make a quick buck flipping NFTs and tokens. This is mostly done under the DeFi banner which is short for decentralized finance. But did you know there is a whole new movement in the crypto world that’s growing fast and focused on doing good. It’s called ReFi or Regenerative Finance.
ReFi is about using blockchains and web3 tools for meaningful projects that regenerates the earth and the people.
I spoke to John Ellison who wrote the initial essay on ReFi which led to the birth of the regenerative movement.
The first time I heard about ReFi was around the time of the Celo Conference (April, 2022). There was a big spotlight put on ReFi and a strong push to brand the summer of 2022 as the ReFi Summer from both the Ethereum and Celo communities.
To put this naming in context the DeFi Summer took place in 2020 and was marked by a period of spectacular growth.
The ReFi summer 🏝 is taking place now and I’m totally feeling the vibes as I notice the sudden explosion of regenerative activities and interests in crypto as compared to even the start of this year.
Every time I asked about ReFi on crypto Twitter I was directed to @climateXcrypto aka John Ellison.
So here we are. John Ellison was kind enough to spend some time chatting with us about the ReFi movement 👇
What is ReFi? How do you define it? And I’d love to know the origin story
I didn't coin the term ReFi. I think it was probably Gregory Landua of Regen Network and possibly Raphael from Toucan.
I wrote an article called what is ReFi, where I've really felt like there's sort of three main trends. One is people trying to stabilize the climate using carbon markets. The other is people trying to restore ecosystems and protect the ones that we have like clean water, clean air, bio diversity. And the kind of natural progression as you move from climate consciousness to ecosystem awareness, you recognize that we as humans are just a part of this fabric of life. And so social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion suddenly become interwoven within the fabric of regeneration. And you recognize that you can't actually address climate change without healing the way we treat humans.
I think that's sort of the scope that I see ReFi undertaking at this stage.
So ReFi is not just climate projects but anything that has positive impact in the world?
Yes, we've centred the mission statement of ReFi DAO as accelerating impact for people and the planet. So it' very much kind of a new consciousness that sees those two things as intermingled. We can't live without the earth. The earth could live without us, but we're humans and this is the only planet we have right now.
Is Regen the same as ReFi? Crypto folks use the word regen a lot?
I think ReFi is to Regen as DeFi is to Degen. Degen can have a bit more of an edgy connotation, but Regens are the people working in ReFi typically.
You recently founded ReFi DAO?
Yes and it's not really a DAO. It's just the name, it's an aspiration to become decentralized overtime.
Could you share a bit about the origin and your transition into this space?
I started with building the list of web3 climate projects. That was really the beginning of my exploration into crypto in a meaningful way. I came into DeFi looking for the greatest point of leverage to enact climate change in a positive way in the shortest amount of time. And I was just curious about who's doing what, where at the intersection of climate and web3 and I found the Regen Network. I found Celo. I found Nori. I found like 15 or 20 others. You know searching in earnest and then I found Klima DAO, and I was like this is it. And I went down the Klima DAO rabbit hole and discovered there were other people in Klima creating lists.
And I kind of took those lists and made it public. And every single time I saw new ReFi project come on Twitter, I would add them and let them know that we've added them and basically celebrate the fact they've been added. After the Klima DAO launch, I was pretty put off by the community and the energy and the money and the dynamics for a variety of reasons.
I basically reached out to the folks at Toucan because they were the ones who innovated. Klima was a fork of Olympus DAO backed by a carbon asset that was truly innovative. BCT was one of a kind first carbon commodity asset, permissionless, tradeable into a pool.
I really liked the Toucan guys. They were speaking about work in a very mindful and compassionate way. Whereas that was totally absent in the Klima community. I started doing some workshops with Toucan around ecosystem growth and development from a behaviour lens. And then they asked me to join the leadership team and help fill a gap in their team around growth, community ecosystem, storytelling, content production basically. And so I was like, yeah, let's do it. And it was amazing for a time. But it was just too much.
I was working like 14 hours a day, six days a week at some point, and I needed a more balanced and regenerative life. If I was going to do this long term, which is my aspiration. So I left Toucan.
And that was my day to day work. But in the evenings I was basically doing, and also in the day doing ReFi podcast to make sense of this movement, trying to talk to the top people that I found on the list. Then I started ReFi Roundup, which was just you know a curation of all the different content that was coming into the space. And then what started happening was we just got loads of very early stage founders reaching out to us on looking for connection and advice. Around that time I came across a gentleman named Darrell whose a social entrepreneur turned coach focusing on founders.
And I proposed to him the idea of running Founders Circles which is the heart of Refi DAO.
We opened Discord as a space for people to come into, knowing that this movement was gonna explode. We wanted it to be technology agnostic, geography agnostic like this is for everyone.
Darrell interviewed hundreds of founders. He’s literally spoken to everyone.
So out of nothing there were 45 people meeting regularly who hadn't launched yet and were working together to, you know, build protocols, raise funding, find founding partners, all this stuff.
Can you state the timeline of how things evolved?
So I started building the list of climate projects in August 2021. I said I was gonna do the podcast in like October. I recorded the first episode in December, and then we opened the Discord maybe early December. And then the first Founders Circle formed in February 2022 and they've kind of come to their like full circle now and we're about to go through a new kind of formation of Founders Circles. April 2022 was my last month at Toucan.
What are some of the activities ReFi DAO is undertaking to build the movement?
We have ReFi Spring Events, which is basically a distributed network of local events supporting marginalized communities to create ReFi kind of startup clusters. That's kind of a sub DAO of ReFi DAO but it's actually becoming quite amazing in that there's 25 startup communities about to launch with like ReFi Peru, Bogota, San Paulo Nairobi. Like there's all these communities that are about to launch with events and regular meetups off the back of ReFi spring. And really the focus is, you know, definitely supporting people who otherwise wouldn't have access to these networks for a variety of reasons.
The Founders Circles is the heart of Refi DAO that meets regularly. It's been kind of organic and unstructured, but we're about to go through a cohort based process where founders can join in circles over a 12 week period, following the Gitcoin grant round up into the next round and basically push their projects forward alongside a bunch of people who have similar goals with the help if advisors.
And then we're starting to basically build Investors Circles as well. Who are conscious capitalists committed to supporting ReFi ventures and Refi founders at an early stage.
Would you also be having a storytelling side around ReFi projects?
Yes. We've got a grant from climate collective to do 46 episodes for ReFi podcast. So that will re-launch shortly. And then we've also got the blog which is doing deep dives with the protocols, weekly updates, retrospectives and those are kind of the main things.
We're about to announce eight week ReFi Fellowship for 150 different people who basically have a strong climate science fundamental background and would like to get into web3 and it will basically provide an open source curriculum to support those people to get into the space.
How big is the ReFi landscape right now?
There are 358 projects on our list. At ReFi Spring we're gonna do 50 different communities in the next 12 months. So we've already got 25 of them and we haven't even launched yet. It's just sort of cooking away in the background.
How do you fundraise for your projects?
ReFi Spring is like a sub DAO of ReFi DAO. We got funding from climate collective (Celo) and Regen Network for our events initiatives. And then for ReFi podcast which is like connected to the DAO but isn't like governed by the DAO we got a grant from climate collective.
And other than that ReFi DAO has had no funding except from Gitcoin Grants. So this is all like just bootstrapped and volunteer run.
How do people launch ReFi Spring Events? What kind of support you offer?
We've got grant funding for people who’d like to organize events locally. The grants are small. They're like $750 to 2000. But we're trying to just make it super easy. So it's like here's a chunk of cash go book the venue, market and promote it. We'll give you marketing templates, mention it in our newsletter. Here's a way to sell your tickets and we'll just shout it out to our community. We'll host Twitter spaces with you. Like we just really try and help them basically bootstrap their community on top of ours.
So if I want to do a ReFi event in Vancouver you got us covered 🙂 ?
Yes and let me just tweet this out as we speak to get you started
Summary
Well that’s John Ellison for you, highly passionate and a friend to all in the ReFi space. He cheered our Impact DAOs Study project and Gitcoin grant. Gave us a shout out on Twitter and got us on the Regen Network Twitter Spaces. He did all this without us even asking him for help.
He’s genuinely supportive and wants the movement to grow. I love his distributed, open source, collaborative approach to building the ReFi movement where everyone feels included and supported.
As for the term ReFi I believe it has roots in the carbon credits but has evolved overtime to include web3 projects that have positive impact on both the planet and the people.
ReFi DAO website that lists ReFi projects and links to their movement building initiatives.
📣 Update on Impact DAOs study and Gitcoin grant
The Gitcoin grant round has completed - 144 people from all over the world supported our project which signifies the importance of our work and that the Impact DAO book is very much needed. How much we’ve raised is still to be known as Gitcoin is currently ratifying every transaction. But in the last couple days of the campaign every $1 donation to the project was getting us $150+ in quadratic matching
As for the study we are moving at a lightning speed, we’ve shortlisted the DAOs and have started interviewing multiple builders per DAO. Over the next couple weeks we’ll be sharing a lot about this exciting Impact DAO space, the future of social good. We have a dedicated space on CryptoGood Substack to showcase all the learnings.
We are also attempting to stream the conversations with Impact DAO builders as a Podcast. We are currently looking for podcast editors, visual illustrator (for the book cover and an NFT piece) and content publishing partners to share our content under a CC license.
If you can help out with any of the above feel free to reach out here or on Twitter or email impactdaos@gmail.com ✌️