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 thousands.
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.
Throughout that history, monetary systems have been anchored to whatever a society valued most — or could extract most efficiently. Spice, gold, slaves, coal, oil. Each era's currency reflected its economy's relationship to the material world, and most of those relationships were extractive. The financial systems we inherited are built on depletion.
Nature is already financialized — has been for millennia. Every cotton shirt, timber frame, grain harvest, and pharmaceutical converts ecological value into economic value. The question was never whether nature would enter the financial system. Finance was built on nature from the outset — mostly on terms that deplete it.
What would a financial system look like if it were based not on extraction but on abundance and renewal? One anchored to functioning, thriving ecosystems?
We are not financializing nature. We are naturalizing finance. — Jeff Stephens, BASIN, 2022
the landscape
A growing number of projects are building instruments that connect ecological and social value to economic systems — currencies, credits, certificates, tokens, fund units, vouchers.
| 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 can mint money against their ecosystems, not debt |
| Grassroots Economics | Community Asset Vouchers representing pooled local capacity — skills, labor, goods | Communities have abundance; they lack instruments, 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 |
| Natural Asset Companies | Legal entities owning rights to ecological services of defined land areas | Structure as ecological container — the market wasn't ready (NYSE, 2024) |
| Biodiversity credits | Standardized credits for verified biodiversity outcomes beyond carbon | Ecology is more than carbon — valuing the full web of life |
| Tokenized nature assets | Blockchain tokens backed by forests, marine systems, agricultural land | Digital rails for ecological assets — necessary but not sufficient |
| Institutional nature funds | SPV structures consolidating land title, issuing standardized units to LPs | Capital structure discipline applied to natural capital |
| Carbon credits | Sequestration sold as tradeable offsets (Verra, Gold Standard) | First mover — proved a nature-adjacent instrument could exist at scale |
| Community currencies | Local exchange systems (WIR Bank, Ithaca HOURS, Bristol Pound) | Local economic resilience through monetary diversity |
Each addresses a different dimension of a large, unsolved problem. Carbon credits proved a nature-adjacent instrument could exist and scale. Community currencies proved local participation doesn't require institutional permission. Biodiversity credits are expanding the aperture beyond a single metric. Natural Asset Companies showed that legal structure matters — and that political durability matters just as much. Tokenization brought digital rails and fractional access. Institutional funds brought the discipline of capital structure.
The recurring pattern: each project advances one or two dimensions while others remain unaddressed.
what could naturalized finance look like?
Most of these approaches share a common orientation: make nature's value visible, and translate the invisible — the work of stewards, communities, and ecosystems themselves — into something economic systems can recognize and respond to. Every project in the table above is contributing to that work.
Five traditions converge on what comes next — monetary diversity, social boundaries, regenerative principles, measurable scale, and polycentric governance.
Bernard Lietaer showed that monetary diversity creates resilience the way biodiversity does. The WIR Bank has operated in Switzerland since 1934, serving over 50,000 businesses — proof that complementary currencies aren't experiments but infrastructure.
Kate Raworth framed economic instruments as needing to operate between a social foundation and an ecological ceiling — the doughnut. Below the floor, human needs go unmet. Above the ceiling, planetary systems break.
John Fullerton derived eight principles of regenerative economics — right relationship, holistic wealth, empowered participation, robust circulatory flow — from observing how living systems actually work.
Robert Costanza valued global ecosystem services at $33 trillion/year in 1997. The number demonstrated the scale. It also showed that aggregate valuation alone doesn't create usable instruments — you need mechanisms, not just measurements.
Elinor Ostrom proved that communities govern shared resources effectively through polycentric, adaptive institutions — not centralized control, not privatization.
The pre-industrial currencies that worked for millennia were already naturalized — diverse, local, adaptive, purpose-built. The monoculture was the departure.
Below is one framework for what naturalized financial instruments could look like — a work in progress, not a final answer. What's missing? How would you frame it differently? We'd welcome the conversation.
ten characteristics
1. ecological ground truth
Value derives from measured ecological condition — not political markets, not registry decisions, not the next renewal cycle. If biology degrades, value reflects that. If it thrives, value compounds. A healthy ecosystem supports more financial value than a degraded one of the same type and area. The instrument encodes this directly.
The gap: instruments whose value depends on a buyer's willingness to pay or a registry's renewal cycle, not the condition of the underlying ecology.
2. multidimensional value
Ecological value is never singular. A healthy watershed simultaneously provides water filtration, flood regulation, habitat, carbon sequestration, cultural significance, recreation, and aesthetic value. These dimensions exist before and independent of any financial instrument — they are intrinsic.
Naturalized finance recognizes this multiplicity rather than collapsing it into a single metric. Stacking multiple value streams from the same place isn't double-counting — it's accurate accounting.
The gap: instruments that reduce ecology to one metric and ignore the interconnected web of value the system actually produces.
3. 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, this species, this purpose), semi-fungible instruments (tied directly to a specific natural asset but representing shares of the whole — specific ensurance, commons shares), fungible currency (liquid across all of them), and a connective bridge between layers. This mirrors ecology — individual organisms are unique, populations share traits, and energy flows through the whole system.
The gap: single-instrument approaches — one token, one credit type, one fund unit — that force nature into a single fungibility mode.
4. self-sustaining
A system that depends on external market-makers for liquidity or external grants for operations hasn't solved the sustainability 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. Naturalized finance operates the same way: instruments create their own liquidity through participation, and proceeds fund the system's own operation — protection, stewardship, measurement, distribution — perpetually. Not a project with an end date. A system that creates the conditions for its own continuation.
The gap: instruments that need external market-makers to trade and external funding to operate.
5. universal access
If only institutional investors can participate, you've rebuilt extraction with a green label. The same instruments should work for a community in Nairobi pooling labor commitments and a sovereign wealth fund deploying billions.
This is the doughnut economics principle applied to instrument design: below the social foundation, you haven't addressed the problem. Grassroots Economics has 60,000+ small businesses in Kenya coordinating through community instruments. Open Earth's nature-based currencies are designed for nature-rich but financially poor nations. The access question isn't aspirational — it's structural.
The gap: instruments sized for institutional mandates with high minimums and accredited-investor gates.
6. 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 can hold assets, execute transactions, and route capital on behalf of places, species, and purposes.
Without agency, instruments wait for humans who are too slow, too distracted, or too far away. The cognitive and institutional latency of human decision-making is mismatched with the speed at which ecological conditions change.
The gap: instruments that depend entirely on human intermediaries to function.
7. resilience and redundancy
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. Resilience comes from redundancy at every level: multiple species performing similar functions, overlapping root networks, parallel nutrient pathways.
Naturalized finance mirrors this with polycentric coordination and plurality across every layer: many actors with overlapping mandates. Many instruments — fungible, semi-fungible, non-fungible — serving different functions for the same natural asset. Many agents with distinct purposes operating across the same geography. Many mechanisms routing value through different paths. A water-cycle coordinator and a watershed coordinator can both direct capital to the same river. That's not duplication — it's the same structural redundancy that keeps ecosystems functioning when individual components fail.
The gap: centralized originators deciding which land, which ecosystem, which investment qualifies — and single-instrument approaches that create single points of failure.
8. verifiable
Claims and evidence must be distinguishable at every scale — what's declared versus what's verified. Every split, every recipient, every distribution traceable from source to destination. Opaque structures reproduce the trust deficit that contributes to the $1 trillion biodiversity funding gap.
In nature, condition is observable. Naturalized finance makes the same commitment — from agent identity to ecological condition to the destination of every dollar.
The gap: systems where ecological claims are self-reported and financial distributions are buried in quarterly reports.
9. composable
Closed systems are monocultures. Open systems compound. Naturalized financial instruments 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. Open, composable instruments that work across systems create more value than walled gardens.
The gap: proprietary platforms that only work within their own ecosystem.
10. permanent
A financial instrument for nature that requires perpetual renewal is a subscription, not protection. There must be a path to making protection irrevocable — and that path requires three things in coherence: legal structure (land use law, conservation easements, trusts), perpetual funding (the self-sustaining system feeds permanent protection), and ongoing stewardship (governance that outlasts any individual participant).
The instrument must work across wildly different timescales — from three months to hundreds of years. Ecosystems themselves are never static — they adapt, shift, and respond. The financial architecture should enable permanence of commitment while respecting the dynamism of living systems.
The gap: credit markets that restart from zero each vintage. Protection without funding, or funding without legal permanence. Policy-dependent instruments that evaporate when governments change.
where things stand
No single project has assembled all ten characteristics. That's expected — the field is young and the problem is genuinely hard.
| Characteristic | Where the field is strongest | Where the gap remains widest |
|---|---|---|
| Ecological ground truth | Regen Network ESPs, remote sensing | Most instruments priced by markets, not ecology |
| Multidimensional value | Biodiversity credits expanding beyond carbon | Single-metric instruments remain dominant |
| Specificity | Kolektivo GeoNFTs, tokenized real assets | Most approaches use one fungibility mode |
| Self-sustaining | DeFi liquidity mechanisms, some community currencies | Most need external market-makers and grant funding |
| Universal access | Grassroots Economics, Open Earth NBC design | Institutional funds gate access by design |
| Agency | Emerging (AI agents, autonomous systems) | Most instruments are fully human-dependent |
| Polycentric coordination | Community currency networks, DAO structures | Centralized originators remain common |
| Verifiable | Blockchain-based systems, onchain transparency | Opaque fund structures persist |
| Composable | DeFi composability, open token standards | Proprietary platforms and walled gardens |
| Permanent | Conservation easements (legal), endowment models | Legal + funding + stewardship coherence is rare |
The projects building toward all ten — even imperfectly — are the ones laying infrastructure that others can build on.
A fair challenge: some of these characteristics tension against each other. Universal access can complicate verifiability at scale. Composability can undermine permanence. Polycentric coordination can diffuse accountability. These aren’t reasons to abandon the framework — they’re the design constraints that make the problem genuinely hard. Any system claiming all ten should be specific about where it makes tradeoffs.
If you’re evaluating nature-finance instruments — or building one — score against these ten. Where does it cluster? Where are the gaps? The framework is more useful as a diagnostic than a scorecard.
what ensurance is building
The rest of this section describes how one protocol is attempting all ten — and where it falls short.
Ensurance started with the same question many in this space are exploring: how do you connect ecological value to economic systems in a way that actually protects nature? After five years, the answer grew beyond a single instrument into 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 shapes certificate design in two ways. Policies tie a fixed supply of certificates to the measured condition of a specific natural asset — a 10/10 ecosystem supports far more certificates than a 3/10, and scarcity tracks ecology directly. Lines offer open-ended supply tied to activities, outcomes, or themes — stewardship streams that don't depend on a single asset's current state. Both use ERC-1155 certificates; the distinction is whether supply tracks a natural asset's condition or an ongoing stream of care. In both cases, value compounds as ecosystems improve. Entrust makes the underlying permanent — irrevocable protection backed by perpetual funding and ongoing stewardship.
Liquidity is self-generating — built into the bonding curves and automated market-making of the contracts themselves. Proceeds fund the system's own operation and route transparently through onchain splits where every recipient is visible. Anyone can participate — from a $0.10 certificate to an institutional vault. Syndicates provide polycentric coordination across species, themes, places, and threats — water-cycle.syndicate, elk.syndicate, wildfire-resilience.syndicate — each defining its own scope through identity, not hierarchy.
It doesn't embody every characteristic perfectly. Nothing does yet. But the architecture was designed for all ten, and this framework is what we hold ourselves to.
explore ensurance coins · see ensurance certificates · meet the agents
the bottom line
Nature doesn't need to become a financial asset. It already is one — in every supply chain, every raw material, every built environment. The question is whether financial systems can be designed in service to the living systems they depend on — diverse, place-specific, self-sustaining, interconnected, verifiable, and adaptive.
Naturalizing finance isn't radical. It's a return.
related reading: nature finance: what it is, what’s working, and what’s still missing · nature: sale not required · how to fund conservation for 512 years