arbitrage abundance

Every arbitrage in history works the same way: find a gap, exploit it, deplete the underlying.

Chop the trees. Suck the oil. Kill the animals. Extract value until the gap closes—because the thing being arbitraged is gone.

What if closing the gap created more of what you were valuing?

what ensurance protects

Natural capital: the stocks and flows from natural assets.

Stocks are the assets themselves—forests, wetlands, watersheds, coral reefs, species populations. Flows are what those assets produce—clean water, pollination, flood control, climate regulation, habitat. The 24 ecosystem services that underpin all economic activity.

Ensurance creates instruments—coins and certificates—that let any actor express what they value and fund its protection. Markets for what matters.

the value gap

The real gap isn't financing. It's value recognition.

Water filtration from a forest? Markets price it near zero. Flood control from a wetland? Near zero. Pollination, climate regulation, coastal protection? Near zero. Not because these services are worthless—they're essential to human survival—but because no instrument existed to express their worth.

The spread between market price (near zero) and functional value (everything depends on it) is the largest mispricing in economic history. We call this the value gap.

Priceless at zero laid out the paradox. This post addresses what to do about it.

Natural cap rates—ecosystem service value divided by acquisition cost—range from 131% to 766%. A beaver riparian complex producing $6.1M in annual ecosystem services costs ~$800K. These aren't projections. They're measured values from real assets.

The value gap isn't subtle. It's structural. And it's open.

three mechanisms

certificates: issued on value, priced on cost

Certificates are ESV made tradable. Face value = $1 of ecosystem service value. Market price = based on cost.

The exchange (coming): Certificates swappable 1:1 regardless of market price. Smart investors will arbitrage price discrepancies across the collection.

coins: price discovery on what matters

Coins don't track ESV—that's what certificates do. Coins are pure price discovery.

Price discovery as recognition—surfacing what has value but whose value was invisible. Making it seen. Markets can finally express what actually matters.

The mechanics: Fair launch (99% LP, 1% to agent), bonding curve discovery, shared liquidity across Balancer/Uniswap, $ENSURE as bridge currency.

liquidity: yield from activity

LP providers earn fees regardless of price direction. You're betting on activity, not direction. The more trading, the more yield—independent of whether prices go up or down.

arbitrage as stabilization

Arbitrage creates stability.

As prices are discovered, value established, and liquidity deepens, arbitrage opportunities change form. Early arbitrage captures mispricing. Mature arbitrage maintains price coherence. The same mechanism that profits from gaps eventually prevents gaps.

Speculation can still fuel stewardship—but the system becomes more stable as prices converge on agreed value. This is how markets mature.

the anchor

Regardless of mechanism—certificates, coins, LP—the underlying is always the same: natural assets and the actors and agents who care for them.

Hard to argue with infinite NAV. Not infinite in the "number go up" sense. Infinite in the "remove this and everything collapses" sense. The economy depends on clean water, breathable air, stable climate. That dependency is the floor. Everything else is upside.

relational, not absolute

Value is relational. Subjective. What matters to you may not matter to me, and vice versa.

Ensurance doesn't impose a single hierarchy of worth. It creates a space where any actor—person, organization, AI, collective—can express their values through capital allocation. Markets for what matters. Plural. Dynamic. Like nature itself.

Will the value gap ever fully close? Probably not. And that's fine. Financial value is one dimension among many—ecological, cultural, social, spiritual. The instrumental serves the intrinsic. We don't need markets to capture all of nature's worth. We just need instruments that make enough of it visible to fund protection.

instruments, not substitutes

Ensurance is a dynamic plural system—much like nature itself.

These are instruments. Tools. They support and bolster natural assets—they can never take their place. We are not financializing nature; we are naturalizing finance. The instrumental layer serves intrinsic value. Coins and certificates protect what matters—they don't define what matters.

The gap will close—either through crisis (scarcity forces repricing) or through foresight (capital recognizes value). Arbitrage abundance captures the gap while creating more of what's being valued.

→ Ensurance coins — price discovery on what matters

→ Ensurance certificates — ESV arbitrage through natural cap rate

→ Speculation as stewardship — how trading funds protection