the source, not the derivative

We might be part of the problem.

Not intentionally. But every dollar spent building infrastructure about nature — monitoring, measuring, tokenizing, crediting, verifying, disclosing — is a dollar that doesn't reach nature itself.

Nature tech attracted $2.1 billion in 2024. Carbon credit infrastructure. Biodiversity credit standards. Geospatial AI. Disclosure frameworks. Meanwhile, the annual gap between what ecosystems need and what they receive sits somewhere north of $700 billion — a number this audience already knows. We've documented it exhaustively.

The question we keep avoiding: what if the instruments themselves are the problem?

the abstraction tax

Conservation capital passes through layers before it reaches dirt.

Carbon brokers capture 3-7x markups. Conservation NGOs spend 10-30% on overhead before a dollar touches land. Land trust transactions cost 15-25% of project value in appraisals, legal fees, surveys, and assessments. Nature tech takes its $2.1 billion and builds dashboards. Disclosure frameworks generate reports.

And the credits that do reach projects? Less than 16% represent genuine emission reductions. Some categories show 0% effectiveness.

This isn't corruption. Each layer was built to solve a real problem. But at some point, the infrastructure becomes its own industry — one that consumes resources without proportional outcomes.

the math that should embarrass us

Direct investment in natural assets isn't just simpler. The economics are staggering.

The natural cap rate expresses ecosystem service value relative to acquisition cost — the same concept commercial real estate uses, applied to nature:

A critical distinction: these rates express total value — the sum of economic value (public goods, non-market benefits like flood protection and water filtration) and financial value (direct income from compatible uses). Markets see only the financial slice. The natural cap rate reveals the full picture. And the model doesn't require capturing all of this value as financial return — it only requires enough premium flow to service the investment and move the asset toward permanent protection.

Commercial real estate delivers 5-8% cap rates on financial value alone. Nature delivers 15-150x higher yields when you account for total value.

Apply this to the $2.1 billion spent on nature tech in a single year:

One year of nature tech funding, redirected to acquisition, would protect $6-16 billion in ecosystem services — every year, in perpetuity.

And as holding costs approach zero — no debt to service, no rent to extract — the value approaches infinity. That's not poetry. It's the mathematical consequence of perpetual flows on a depreciating cost basis.

$2.1 billion buys dashboards. Or it buys $6.3 billion in ecosystem services, every year, forever.

why "just buy the land" isn't simple

So why doesn't everyone do this?

Because direct acquisition is genuinely hard — and genuinely capital-intensive.

Minimum check sizes. A single watershed protection project might require $10-50 million. A meaningful portfolio of natural assets: hundreds of millions. This isn't like buying a stock. Most participants are excluded before the conversation starts.

Transaction friction. Land trusts spend 15-25% of project costs on overhead before a single acre is protected — appraisals, environmental assessments, title research, legal fees, surveys, government relations. They incur expenses without guarantee of success.

Illiquidity. Land doesn't trade on an exchange. Entry is slow. Exit is slower. Capital is locked for years or decades.

Perpetual stewardship. Acquisition is day one, not the finish line. The land needs management forever — invasive species removal, fire management, monitoring, enforcement against encroachment. This requires perpetual funding that one-time capital doesn't provide.

Coordination failure. A wetland might protect a city's water supply, reduce a utility's treatment costs, lower an insurer's flood claims, and store carbon for everyone. Getting four beneficiaries to co-invest in one asset is a coordination problem that conservation finance keeps failing to solve.

These barriers are real. They're why the abstraction stack exists — not because people love complexity, but because direct investment has genuine friction.

The stack was built because direct investment is difficult. The question is how much of that difficulty is inherent — and how much we've manufactured.

the real estate trap

Here's a problem nobody in conservation finance talks about: the investment models we inherited were designed for extraction, not protection.

Traditional real estate operates on a few well-worn models:

Every model requires the land to produce — income, rent, appreciation, commodities. A shopping center produces rent. A ranch produces beef. A timber lot produces lumber.

A wetland produces clean water, flood protection, biodiversity, carbon storage, and aesthetic value. But it doesn't produce income in any sense a bank will underwrite.

The result: natural assets get trapped in extractive cycles. Debt requires income. Income requires extraction. Extraction degrades the asset. Degradation reduces value. The cycle demands more extraction to service more debt.

Traditional appraisals reinforce this. They ask: "What's the Highest & Best Use?" — meaning maximum economic return. Under that metric, an apartment building beats a wetland every time.

But what if we asked a different question?

"What's the Higher & Better Use?" — maximum holistic value across ecological, cultural, social, and economic dimensions.

Natural assets aren't bad investments. They're the oldest and most stable asset class humans have ever known — we've just been valuing them extracted (dead timber, caught fish, mined ore) rather than alive. Under the Higher & Better Use metric, the wetland that prevents $15,000/year in flood damage per acre, filters municipal drinking water, harbors endangered species, and sequesters carbon is the highest-performing asset in any portfolio. At a 493% cap rate, it outperforms every commercial property in existence.

The problem isn't the asset. It's the metric — and the models designed for extraction.

Nature needs the opposite of what real estate finance provides: access without debt. Stewardship without extraction. Permanence without flipping.

everyone's circling the same destination

Strip away the instruments, the acronyms, the standards bodies, and the revenue models. Every conservation finance mechanism is trying to reach the same place.

Chestnut Carbon sells carbon credits — but owns 60,000+ acres across eight states. The credits are the funding mechanism. The land is the asset.

EIP raised $1.5 billion to acquire land and restore wetlands. They sell mitigation credits. But the credits are the revenue model. The land is what gets protected.

Ecuador's $1.6 billion Galápagos deal converts debt into a permanent endowment generating $12 million annually. The debt conversion is the mechanism. The marine protection is the outcome.

Ducks Unlimited figured out that hunters are some of the best conservationists — they'll pay to protect habitat because they want something to hunt. Working ranches prevent development even without formal protection. Land trusts hold fee title or conservation easements. National parks have government ownership. Indigenous protected areas have community stewardship.

Carbon credits. Biodiversity units. Nature equity. Fund shares. Mitigation banking. Debt-for-nature swaps. Ensurance certificates.

Every single one is trying to get to the same place: land that stays land.

The instruments differ. The destination doesn't.

fractionalize the source, not the claim

The stack solved the fractionalization problem — letting people invest in nature without buying an entire forest. That's real. Capital intensity is the barrier, and fractionalization addresses it.

But what did we fractionalize?

A carbon credit gives you exposure to a claim that some project will sequester some amount of carbon, verified by some registry, with some probability of being real — an 84% probability of being worthless.

Fractional interest in the land gives you exposure to the thing itself — and everything it does. The carbon. The water. The biodiversity. The flood protection. The existence value. Forever.

One is a bet on a claim. The other is a stake in the source.

certificates: natural capital value, fractionalized

Ensurance certificates do this. Each policy is tied to a single natural asset — a specific wetland, watershed, or forest. Certificates are issued based on the asset's ecosystem service value and priced at acquisition cost.

Scarcity encourages uplift. A degraded ecosystem with fewer certificates and higher prices creates economic incentive to restore — improving condition increases the supply of certificates and the total value simultaneously. The instrument rewards what nature needs: better ecosystem health.

Each certificate carries pro-rata claims on the ecological data and MRV from that natural asset. Own 10% of a watershed's certificates, claim 10% of its monitoring data — biodiversity surveys, water quality metrics, carbon measurements, ecosystem health indicators. The data isn't a subscription. It's an asset right.

Within a single policy, certificates are semi-fungible — each tied to the same natural asset but potentially varying in price as condition and demand change. Across the protocol, certificates become fungible through the exchange and arbitrage mechanism — 1:1 protocol shares where smart investors arbitrage price discrepancies across the collection, creating price coherence and deep liquidity for natural capital as an asset class.

This is the source, fractionalized. Not claims on what nature does. Shares of what nature is.

what if the instrument was a currency?

Credits are accounting units. One ton sequestered, one unit retired, one credit consumed. They exist to be destroyed. Their value depends on scarcity manufactured through retirement.

What if the right instrument isn't a credit at all — but a currency?

Not a currency backed by debt (like the dollar). Not pegged to extraction (like petrodollars). Not speculative on nothing (like most crypto). A currency whose value is grounded in what living systems continuously produce — the 19 ecosystem services that underpin every economy on Earth.

What if money itself was based on the value of living systems and the wellbeing they provide to all beings? Not growth measured by extraction. Not wealth accumulated through depletion. A monetary system where economic participation funds life — and life funds economic participation.

When you trade an ensurance coin, trading fees become stewardship funding. Market activity becomes ecological investment. Speculation becomes stewardship.

$WATER ABUNDANCE. $SNOWPACK. These aren't just trading instruments. They're the early vocabulary of a monetary system grounded in what's alive — not what's extracted.

Credits are one-time claims on one-time outcomes. Nature-based currencies are living instruments that fund living systems continuously. The ecosystem services that underpin civilization become the basis for economic participation — not an externality to be offset, but the foundation of value itself.

What if the currency was the ecosystem? Not a derivative of it. Not a claim on it. The thing itself — represented and funded through every transaction.

the property system we inherited

The reason we need any of this — credits, currencies, instruments, protocols — traces back centuries.

Before enclosure — the process by which shared land became exclusively owned — commoners held overlapping use rights: fishing, grazing, foraging, gleaning. Multiple people benefited from the same land simultaneously. Rights were continuously negotiated, revised, and enforced by communities. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize documenting how commons managed this way survived for centuries.

After enclosure, property became exclusion. Blackstone called it "sole and despotic dominion... in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe." The anonymous verse captures it:

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.

Ecosystem services don't fit this model. They're non-excludable and non-rivalrous — public goods that benefit everyone whether they pay or not. Markets designed for private goods can't price them. Costanza estimated ecosystem services at $125-145 trillion per year — more than twice global GDP — almost entirely outside any market.

Indigenous land tenure — recognized in 104 national constitutions — offers a counter-model: overlapping use rights, collective stewardship, inherited relationships to place. Not "primitive." Sophisticated. And proven.

Every conservation instrument we build — credits, currencies, certificates — is a workaround for a property system designed for exclusion, not interdependence.

The question is whether we can design something that works within existing property law while moving toward a better endpoint.

entrust: nature owning itself

This is where ensurance diverges from every other mechanism.

Most conservation finance ends with ownership that still operates within extractive logic. A fund owns the land and must generate returns. A trust holds the easement but needs perpetual endowment draws. A government maintains the park but depends on annual budgets. The property relationship persists. Someone owns. Management requires perpetual funding. The land serves the balance sheet.

Entrust is a different endpoint entirely — one where the protocol essentially becomes nature owning itself.

Some entity still holds legal title — the existing property system requires it. But the deed, title, or easement restricts what can happen: the land cannot be put at risk, cannot be collateralized, cannot be developed for uses beyond what the agreement specifies. The underlying natural asset is permanently protected.

What makes entrust unique is that every natural asset can have its own customized governance structure — shaped by the specific place, the people connected to it, and the circumstances of its protection:

The key: the underlying natural asset is permanently secured. Everything else — governance, access, funding, use — is customizable, adaptive, place-based. A wetland in Louisiana will have different governance than a forest in Oregon or a coral reef in Palau. Each reflects the people, the culture, and the ecology of that specific place.

The Rights of Nature movement has established legal frameworks for nature as a legal person — rivers, forests, and watersheds with standing. Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and dozens of other jurisdictions recognize this. Common Asset Trusts manage resources for current and future generations along ecological boundaries.

Entrust can mean:

• Land back to the indigenous community who stewarded it for millennia
• Common asset trust with community governance and ecological boundaries
• Rights of Nature deed where the land belongs to itself
• Public trust expansion where the land returns to the commons
• Customized stewardship with unique access, funding, and governance per asset

The instruments can trade forever. The protocol can run forever. But the underlying is protected — and the land is no longer subject to the extractive cycles of debt, forced sale, or development pressure.

the bridge

How do you move land from enclosed and debt-laden to entrust?

The ensurance model uses two types of investors:

The real-asset investors finance acquisition. They earn yield during the ensured phase — priced on cost, valued on ecosystem services. The natural cap rates mean these yields can be compelling while moving toward permanent protection.

The risk investors pay premiums. Not charity — cheaper-than-alternative risk management. A utility paying to protect its watershed spends less than building a filtration plant. An insurer funding forest resilience is reducing claims, not making donations.

Neither pays into perpetuity. The real-asset investors earn yield and exit at entrust. The risk investors pay premiums during the ensured phase, then receive ecosystem services with ongoing cost reduced or eliminated once land is permanently protected. Proceeds from instrument activity continue to fund stewardship.

The land moves from enclosed → ensured → entrust. From extractive → protected. From debt-laden → free.

what this means practically

For investors: Before buying exposure through credits, tokens, or funds — ask whether you could invest closer to the source. The cap rate math might surprise you. The further you are from the underlying asset, the more intermediary margin you're absorbing. And unlike credits, the asset doesn't expire, get retired, or turn out to be ineffective.

For landowners: Your land may be worth far more as a natural asset than as a development project — if valued correctly. Highest & Best Use was designed for extraction. Higher & Better Use accounts for what the land actually produces: ecosystem services worth multiples of the acquisition price every year.

For foundations: Before funding another platform, ask what direct protection the same capital would achieve. Catalytic capital that moves natural assets to entrust — permanently protected, adaptively governed — compounds forever. Dashboards depreciate.

For corporations: Before purchasing offsets, ask what actual risk reduction the same spend would accomplish. Your supplier is the ecosystem, not the registry. Disclosure without investment is just documentation of decline.

For governments: Direct infrastructure investment in nature — no new taxes, no new debt, no new bureaucracy. The mechanisms exist. The instruments exist. The coordination structures exist.

the honest conclusion

We're arguing against ourselves here. We build instruments. We create markets. We write about mechanisms.

But if we're honest, the best possible outcome isn't a thriving ensurance market for its own sake. It's protected ecosystems governed by the people closest to them, funded by instruments that run as long as they need to — onchain infrastructure that adapts and persists, not scaffolding that gets torn down.

"We always said if BASIN does our job right, we'll be out of business by 2050. But the natural assets live on in perpetuity."

Maybe it's more accurate to say: the protocol keeps running, the instruments keep trading, the proceeds keep flowing. But the underlying — the land, the water, the life — is no longer at risk. That's the point.

Natural assets are the original alternative. The oldest asset class. The source of every service that makes civilization possible.

Every instrument we build should be tested against one question: does this move land closer to entrust, or does this sustain the instrument for its own sake?

If the answer is the latter, we're adding friction to a simple transaction. And the simplest transaction in conservation hasn't changed in ten thousand years.

Protect the land.

Invest in the source, not the derivative.

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