By 1860, the United States had 8,000 different currencies in circulation. Towns, churches, railroads, and corner stores all issued their own money. Medieval Europe ran on hundreds of regional coinages — every jurisdiction from duchies to free cities minted its own. Pre-colonial West Africa used cowrie shells, iron bars, cloth, and salt, each serving different functions across different scales. Bernard Lietaer documented over 2,600 community currencies operating worldwide by 1999. Today there are more than 4,000.
For most of human history, money was diverse, local, and adaptive. It worked like nature — many specialized instruments coordinating through relationships, each serving a purpose, each adapted to its context. The monoculture — one nation, one currency, enforced by law — is barely 150 years old.
And the 150-year experiment in monetary monoculture coincided with the greatest destruction of natural capital in Earth's history. That's not coincidence. It's a design consequence.
the landscape
A growing number of projects are building financial instruments for nature — currencies, credits, certificates, tokens, fund units, vouchers. The field is broader and more diverse than most people realize.
| Project / Approach | What It Does | Key Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Open Earth Foundation | Central bank digital currencies backed by natural capital as a reserve asset | Nature-rich nations should mint money against their ecosystems, not debt |
| Grassroots Economics | Community Asset Vouchers representing pooled local capacity — skills, labor, goods | Communities have abundance; they lack currency, not resources |
| Kolektivo | GeoNFTs representing ecological assets, backing local community currencies | Regeneration needs location — local instruments tied to local ecology |
| Regen Network | Ecological State Protocols measuring soil carbon, biodiversity, water quality; issuing verifiable credits | If you can measure it, you can credit it |
| Biodiversity credits | Standardized credits for verified biodiversity outcomes (Cercarbono, Verra, Biocarbon) | Stacking vs bundling: multiple benefits from the same land |
| Tokenized nature assets | Blockchain tokens backed by forests, marine systems, agricultural land | Digital rails for analog assets — but rails alone aren't enough |
| Institutional nature funds | SPV structures consolidating land title, issuing units to institutional LPs | TradFi structure applied to natural capital — but access-gated |
| Carbon credits | Sequestration sold as tradeable offsets (Verra, Gold Standard) | First mover, but a derivative of registry decisions — not the asset itself |
Each gets something right. None gets everything right.
Carbon credits proved you can create a nature-adjacent financial instrument — then proved it's fragile, politically contingent, and prone to repricing overnight. Biodiversity credits are earlier-stage versions of the same architecture. Tokenization projects solve for digital rails without solving for measurement or legal structure. Institutional funds solve for structure but gate access and centralize control. Community currencies solve for local participation but struggle with scale.
The pattern: every project nails one or two dimensions while missing the rest.
the question is backwards
Every project in the table above is trying to financialize nature — turn ecosystems into something finance recognizes. Make nature legible to Wall Street. Fit the biology into the spreadsheet.
But the consistent failure pattern suggests the question itself is wrong.
We are not financializing nature. We are naturalizing finance.
The real question isn't how to make nature a financial asset. It's how to make financial instruments behave like nature — diverse, adaptive, self-sustaining, place-specific, interconnected, and resilient.
This isn't a metaphor. Look at what the intellectual traditions are actually saying:
Bernard Lietaer (monetary systems theory): A currency monoculture is as fragile as an agricultural monoculture. Diversity creates resilience. The WIR Bank has operated in Switzerland since 1934 — over 50,000 members, 1-2% of Swiss GDP — because complementary currencies smooth the business cycles that national currencies amplify. Finance needs biodiversity too.
Kate Raworth (doughnut economics): Economic instruments must operate between a social foundation (nobody falls below) and an ecological ceiling (nobody overshoots). Finance must respect the same boundaries that ecosystems do.
John Fullerton (regenerative economics): Eight principles of a regenerative economy — right relationship (reciprocity, not extraction), holistic wealth (not just financial), empowered participation, robust circulatory flow. All derived from observing how living systems work. Finance should follow the same patterns as life.
Robert Costanza (ecological valuation): In 1997, Costanza estimated global ecosystem services at $33 trillion/year — more than global GDP at the time. The number was directionally right but the approach was incomplete: valuing nature in aggregate doesn't create instruments anyone can use. Valuation without instruments is academic. Instruments without ecological grounding are speculation.
Elinor Ostrom (commons governance): Communities manage shared resources effectively without privatization or state control — when institutions are designed right. Governance must be as plural as the ecology it protects.
The pre-industrial currencies that worked for millennia were already naturalized — diverse, local, adaptive, purpose-built. The monoculture was the departure from nature, not the other way around.
So what does naturalized finance actually require?
nine requirements
1. ecological ground truth
Value must derive from measured ecological condition — not political markets, not registry decisions, not the next renewal cycle. If biology degrades, value degrades. If it thrives, value compounds. This is biological compounding: the capacity of a living system to grow its own value through time, independent of any counterparty.
A 10/10 ecosystem should support more financial value than a 3/10 ecosystem of the same type and area. The instrument must encode this relationship directly.
What fails this: credits whose value depends on a buyer's willingness to pay, not the condition of the ecosystem.
2. specificity
Nature is non-fungible. Every watershed, every species, every hectare is irreducibly unique. But financial instruments need fungibility to flow. A single instrument type forces everything into one mode.
Naturalized finance spans the full specificity spectrum: non-fungible identity (this specific place), semi-fungible instruments (certificates tied to that place, but divisible and interchangeable), fungible currency (liquid across all of them), and a connective bridge between layers. This mirrors ecology itself — individual organisms are unique, populations share traits, and energy flows fungibly through the whole system.
What fails this: any single-instrument approach — one token, one credit type, one fund unit.
3. self-generating liquidity
An instrument that can't be traded without external market-makers hasn't solved the liquidity problem — it's outsourced it.
In nature, organisms don't find favorable conditions — they generate them. Cyanobacteria manufactured the atmosphere. Forests pump their own rain. Root systems irrigate their own soil. Naturalized financial instruments should do the same: produce liquidity as a byproduct of participation, not as an afterthought dependent on someone else making a market.
What fails this: institutional fund units with no secondary market. Credits that trade through brokers in thin bilateral markets.
4. universal access
If only institutional LPs can participate, you've rebuilt extraction with a green label. The same instruments must work for a community in Nairobi pooling labor commitments and a sovereign wealth fund deploying billions.
This isn't idealism — it's the doughnut economics requirement. Below the social foundation, you haven't fixed anything. Grassroots Economics has demonstrated that 60,000+ small businesses in Kenya can coordinate economic activity through community instruments. Open Earth's nature-based currencies are designed for nature-rich but financially poor nations. The access question isn't optional — it's structural.
What fails this: instruments sized for LP mandates with six-figure minimums and accredited-investor gates.
5. agency
Nature has no voice in human economic systems. Ecosystems can't sign contracts, file suits, or execute trades. Naturalized finance needs actors — not just instruments — that hold assets, execute transactions, and route capital on behalf of places, species, and purposes.
Without agency, instruments sit waiting for humans who are too slow, too distracted, or too far away. The cognitive and institutional latency of human decision-making is fundamentally mismatched with the speed ecological crises demand.
What fails this: every instrument that depends entirely on human intermediaries to function.
6. plural coordination
One fund, one originator, one allocator is the monetary monoculture Lietaer warned about. Nature's economy runs on millions of organisms coordinating through relationships — symbiosis, food webs, nutrient cycles — producing emergent properties no central planner could design.
Naturalized finance mirrors this: many actors, overlapping mandates, no CEO of the forest. A water-cycle coordinator and a watershed coordinator can both direct capital to the same river. That's not duplication — it's resilience through redundancy, the same pattern every healthy ecosystem runs on.
What fails this: centralized originators who decide which land, which ecosystem, which investment gets included.
7. transparent flows
Every split, every recipient, every distribution must be visible and auditable. Opaque fund structures reproduce the trust deficit that created the $1 trillion biodiversity funding gap. If capital holders can't see where value goes, they won't send enough of it.
In nature, nutrient cycles are visible to anyone who looks. Naturalized finance should be the same — value flows traceable from source to destination.
What fails this: fund structures where distributions, management fees, and beneficiary allocations are buried in quarterly reports.
8. composability
Closed systems are monocultures. Open systems compound. Naturalized financial instruments must compose with existing infrastructure — DeFi protocols, traditional banking, community currencies, sovereign instruments — without requiring everyone to adopt one proprietary platform.
The edge effect in ecology: where two ecosystems meet, diversity peaks. The same applies to finance. Open, composable instruments that work across systems create more value than walled gardens, no matter how elegant the garden.
What fails this: proprietary platforms that only work within their own ecosystem.
9. permanence
A financial instrument for nature that requires perpetual renewal is a subscription, not protection. There must be a path to making the underlying protection irrevocable — converting managed risk into permanent security. Otherwise, every generation renegotiates whether nature gets to exist.
Healthy ecosystems build toward climax states — stable, self-sustaining, resilient. Naturalized finance should do the same.
What fails this: credit markets that restart from zero each vintage. Policy-dependent instruments that evaporate when governments change.
where things stand
No single project passes all nine. But the test isn't pass/fail — it's a compass.
| Requirement | Most Common Gap |
|---|---|
| Ecological ground truth | Value tied to markets or registries, not biology |
| Specificity | Single-instrument approaches (one token, one credit) |
| Self-generating liquidity | Depends on external market-makers |
| Universal access | Institutional gates, high minimums |
| Agency | No autonomous actors, human-dependent |
| Plural coordination | Centralized originators |
| Transparent flows | Opaque fund structures |
| Composability | Walled gardens |
| Permanence | Perpetual renewal cycles |
Community instruments (Grassroots Economics, Kolektivo) excel at universal access and local coordination but struggle with liquidity and institutional scale. Institutional approaches (nature funds, tokenized assets) excel at structure and scale but gate access and centralize control. Credit-based systems (carbon, biodiversity) have the broadest adoption but fail on ecological ground truth, liquidity, and permanence.
The projects that will matter most are the ones designing for all nine from the beginning — even if they haven't perfected each one yet.
what ensurance is building
Ensurance started with the same question everyone in this space is asking: how do you make nature investable? After five years, the answer turned out to be bigger than the question. Not a single instrument — a relational value system designed to naturalize finance from the ground up.
Coins (ERC-20) provide fungible, protocol-wide liquidity. Certificates (ERC-1155) provide semi-fungible instruments tied to specific natural assets — each certificate ID preserves the specificity of a place while making units within that ID interchangeable. Agents (ERC-721) provide non-fungible identity for places, people, and purposes — each with its own wallet that can hold assets, execute transactions, and route proceeds autonomously. $ENSURE bridges all three layers into shared liquidity.
Ecological condition governs certificate supply: a natural asset at 10/10 ecosystem condition supports far more certificates than one at 3/10. Scarcity tracks ecology. Value compounds as ecosystems improve. Entrust makes the underlying permanent — irrevocable protection, not perpetual renewal.
Liquidity is self-generating — built into the bonding curves and automated market-making of the contracts themselves. Proceeds route transparently through onchain splits where every recipient is visible. Anyone can participate — from a $1 certificate to an institutional vault managing hundreds of millions. Syndicates coordinate across species, themes, places, and threats without centralized control — water-cycle.syndicate, elk.syndicate, wildfire-resilience.syndicate — each defining its own scope through identity, not hierarchy.
It doesn't meet every requirement perfectly. Nothing does yet. But the architecture was designed for all nine, and this test is what we hold ourselves to.
explore ensurance coins · see ensurance certificates · meet the agents
the bottom line
For most of human history, money was diverse, local, and adaptive — it worked like nature. The Swiss WIR franc has operated alongside the Swiss franc for 91 years. Grassroots Economics has 60,000 businesses trading in community instruments across Kenya. Cowrie shells served West Africa for centuries. The monoculture was the departure.
Nature doesn't need to become a financial asset. Finance needs to become more like nature — diverse, place-specific, self-sustaining, interconnected, transparent, and permanent.
Naturalizing finance isn't radical. It's a return.