Bitcoin is down 50% from its peak. Solana hit two-year lows. The crypto obituary writers are warming up their keyboards again.
Right on schedule.
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." — Nicholas Klein, 1918
A line often misattributed to Gandhi, but the pattern is older than either of them. And it's playing out in real time.
the question nobody's answering
While crypto critics take a victory lap, a simple question goes unasked:
If the current system is so good at financing nature, health, and wellbeing — why are we losing on every front?
The numbers are staggering:
- Biodiversity funding gap: $942 billion and widening. The world needs $1.15 trillion annually to reverse the crisis by 2030. It's spending $200 billion.
- Climate adaptation gap: Developing countries need $310 billion per year by 2035 to adapt to climate impacts. They're getting less than 10% of that.
- Nature-negative finance: $7 trillion flows against nature annually — a 30:1 ratio of destruction to protection.
Here's the thing most people miss: these aren't separate problems. Nature is the most cost-effective climate adaptation infrastructure we have. Wetlands reduce flood damage. Forests cool cities and prevent wildfire spread. Mangroves protect coastlines cheaper than seawalls. 71% of peer-reviewed studies find nature-based solutions consistently cost-effective for hazard mitigation — and they deliver ecosystem services on top.
The adaptation bill is coming whether we pay it or not. The question is whether we fund nature to handle it proactively, or pay 10x more cleaning up after disasters. FEMA already gets this — they now actively fund nature-based hazard mitigation. The finance system hasn't caught up.
Traditional finance has had decades to solve this. It hasn't. Not because the people in it don't care — but because the infrastructure isn't designed for it.
Grant cycles run 3–5 years. Ecosystems operate on timescales of centuries. Conservation easements cost $500k minimum and take 18 months. Carbon offsets have declined 53% since 2021. Only 7.7% of financial institutions have board-level oversight on biodiversity.
If the old system worked, we wouldn't need a new one.
while they laugh, the money moves
Here's the thing about "crypto is dead" — the people saying it aren't the ones building.
The ones building:
BlackRock launched BUIDL — a tokenized Treasury fund onchain — now holding $1.75 billion across seven blockchains including Ethereum, Optimism, and Solana. The world's largest asset manager didn't go onchain because of vibes. They went because the infrastructure is better.
Stripe and Paradigm built Tempo — a payments blockchain valued at $5 billion — with Deutsche Bank, Mastercard, UBS, and OpenAI as design partners.
Klarna — 114 million customers, $112 billion annual GMV — launched its own stablecoin on Tempo. The first bank-issued token on the chain.
Stablecoins processed $46 trillion in 2025. More than Visa. The GENIUS Act made them federally regulated. Almost overnight, stablecoins went from suspect to legitimate.
JPMorgan. Deutsche Bank. UBS. Mastercard. OpenAI. These aren't crypto-native companies. They're pillars of the existing financial system — and they're building onchain anyway.
If crypto is so bad, why are they all here?
what onchain offers that traditional finance can't
The naysayers treat "crypto" as a monolith — either it's all speculation or it's all scams. But onchain infrastructure offers specific capabilities that traditional finance either can't match or can't deliver without decades of institutional friction:
| Capability | Traditional Finance | Onchain |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | T+2 settlement, weeks for cross-border | Minutes, globally |
| Transparency | Quarterly reports, audited annually | Real-time, publicly verifiable |
| Accountability | Trust-based, intermediary-dependent | Code-enforced, cryptographically verified |
| Composability | Siloed systems, custom integrations | Interoperable protocols, permissionless building |
| Modularity | Monolithic institutions | Stackable, swappable components |
| Governance | Board rooms, shareholder votes once a year | Programmable, continuous, participatory |
| Duration | Fund terms, policy periods | Smart contracts that run for 512 years |
| Plural value | Single-metric (dollars) | Multiple value types, multiple token standards |
| Cross-domain | Finance talks to finance | Bridges ecology, biology, real estate, art, culture, science, tech |
| Programmable routing | Manual allocation, annual budgets | Automated proceeds to the right place, at the right time |
| Parametric triggers | Months of claims processing | Real-time payouts based on environmental conditions |
This isn't theoretical. These capabilities exist today on public blockchains.
Ensurance proceeds — onchain vesting streams — release funding across preset intervals from 3 months to 512 years. No fundraising. No grant applications. No institutional dependency. The streams are flowing now on Base.
And we're just getting started.
programmable routing
Funding directed precisely where it's needed, when it's needed — not by committee, but by code. An agent protecting a watershed doesn't wait for a grant committee to approve next year's budget. Proceeds flow continuously, routed through onchain splits to stewards, restoration crews, and monitoring systems.
parametric triggers
Satellites verify a forest is still standing. Sensors confirm water quality is maintained. Field teams attest that 500 trees reached maturity. When verified ecological conditions are met, funds release automatically — no claims adjusters, no processing delays, no paperwork.
This is what parametric ensurance looks like: condition verified → funds flow. The same infrastructure that powers DeFi lending — oracles, attestations, smart contracts — applied to ecological outcomes.
conditional endowments
Imagine a bequest that funds a watershed forever — but only as long as its ecological health is maintained. Not a trust managed by a board that meets quarterly. A smart contract that checks verified conditions annually and releases tranches to the agents doing the work.
The funder doesn't need to trust a foundation board or a government agency. They trust the code (conditions), the oracle (verification), and the agent (execution). All transparent. All onchain.
accountability by design
Traditional conservation has an accountability problem — organizations make claims about impact, and donors hope they're true. Onchain flips this. Every agent has two layers: what it claims (purpose, mandate, place) and what the world observes (holdings, activity, verified impact). The tension between these layers IS the trust signal. Alignment builds credibility. Gaps invite scrutiny. Nobody needs to take anyone's word for it.
This is what onchain nature finance actually means. Not speculation. Infrastructure for accountability, verification, and perpetual funding at ecological timescales.
the order of operations
Chris Dixon, founder of a16z crypto, wrote this week about why non-financial crypto use cases haven't taken off yet. His answer: the order of operations matters.
The internet didn't begin with social media, streaming, or online communities. It began with packet switching, TCP/IP, and basic connectivity. Only once hundreds of millions of people were online did entirely new cultural and economic categories emerge.
We are in the financial era of blockchains. Wallets are spreading. Stablecoins are regulated. Institutions are onchain. The infrastructure is being laid.
Finance comes first — stablecoins, payments, DeFi — because finance is how infrastructure proves itself. Then other categories emerge on top: media, gaming, AI... and nature.
Nature finance doesn't need to wait for this phase to end. It can build during it — using the same rails institutions are adopting right now.
the messy years
The pattern is always the same. New technology emerges. It's messy. Scams happen. Trust erodes. Critics declare it dead. Meanwhile, the infrastructure matures. Regulation arrives. Institutional capital flows in. And one day the thing that was "obviously a scam" is obviously essential.
Neural networks: first paper in 1943. Breakthrough in 2023. Eighty years.
The commercial internet: 1960s origin. 1990s explosion. Thirty years.
Crypto: Bitcoin in 2009. Stablecoins surpassing Visa in 2025. Sixteen years.
The messy years are what make the obvious years possible.
A market crash doesn't invalidate the technology. It validates the cycle. The people who left during the last crash weren't building anything. The people who stayed built Uniswap, Aave, Base, and the infrastructure BlackRock now runs $1.75 billion on.
so, to the naysayers
If the current system works — why is the biodiversity funding gap approaching a trillion dollars?
If traditional conservation finance works — why have carbon offsets declined 53%?
If institutional oversight works — why do only 7.7% of financial institutions have board-level biodiversity awareness?
If grant-based funding works — why do conservation projects collapse every 3–5 years when the cycle ends?
If the old rails work — why did BlackRock, Stripe, Klarna, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and JPMorgan all go onchain?
You can laugh at crypto. But you can't laugh at the question.
Nature needs funding infrastructure that operates on ecological timescales, routes capital with precision, responds to conditions in real time, and doesn't depend on annual appropriations or grant committees.
Onchain is the only system that can do all of that. Not perfectly. Not yet. But it's the only one even trying.
this is day one
The ensurance protocol is building exactly this: onchain infrastructure for nature that treats ecosystems as real assets, routes proceeds perpetually, and programs funding across timescales from months to centuries.
We're still early. Still messy. Still building.
But the rails are live. The streams are flowing. And while the naysayers write obituaries, the institutions are building monuments.
explore ensurance agents in action — see how proceeds flow — read how 512-year funding works