--- title: "what do you want to ensure?" canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure.md subtitle: not a product menu. a living thing you can name. category: ensurance --- # what do you want to ensure? *not a product menu. a living thing you can name.* What do you want to ensure? The question is answered by naming one living thing, and then saying whether you mean the place itself, the people who keep it, or the purpose it serves. A creek. The crew that clears its culverts every spring. The cold water that the trout and the town both need. Pick one and say it out loud. Everything else in [**ensurance**](/?from=guide) follows from that sentence. A trail, a creek, a reef, or a herd already exists and already works, whether or not anyone names it. Ensurance is how the thing you name gets funded to keep working. It is not the thing. :::johnson **name the living thing first. the instrument follows.** A place, the people who keep it, or the purpose it serves. Say which one, and the account, the certificate, or the coin is already chosen for you. [see what the thing you named connects to →](/explore?from=guide) ::: ## the question is not a product menu A lot of market-led nature finance starts from the instrument and works backwards. Land trusts, agencies, and the people who already keep a place mostly do not, and this post is on their side of the order. Someone has a credit to sell, a fund to fill, a bond to place, and then goes looking for a forest or a wetland to put under it. The place is cast in a supporting role in its own story. It becomes "the project," and the project is sized to the instrument, not the other way round. The question *what do you want to ensure?* reverses the order. It does not ask what you want to buy, hold, or report. It asks what you want to make certain keeps working. *Ensure* is a verb before it is a product, and the verb takes an object. The object is always a living thing, or the people who tend it, or the work it does. Take the creek above a mountain trail. People love the trail because it is cool in July, and it is cool because the aspens along it are pulling water out of the creek and breathing it into the air. The creek is fed by snow on a ridge most hikers never see. Two earlier posts walk that chain, one from [the person who stops on the trail](/guide/this-place-matters?from=guide) and one from [the creek and the snow that make the trail possible](/guide/no-place-is-self-made?from=guide). What matters here is the shape of the answer. Nobody says "I want to ensure a certificate." They say "I want this creek to keep running cold." ## three kinds of thing you can name Whatever you name will turn out to be one of three kinds. Not a taxonomy for its own sake. Three kinds because three different kinds of thing can hold an account. | you named | what it is | a live example | |---|---|---| | a **place** | a point, a reach, a parcel, a watershed, a basin | [crystal-river.basin](https://ensurance.app/crystal-river.basin) — a tributary reach in the Colorado basin | | **people** | a person, a crew, a land trust, a town, a company | [tmo.earth](https://ensurance.app/tmo.earth) — a people account, one person's | | a **purpose** | a species, an ecosystem service, a condition, a cause | [water-abundance.ensurance](https://ensurance.app/water-abundance.ensurance) — the water a place can hold and release | The three overlap on purpose. A watershed is a place that serves a purpose and is kept by people. A species is a purpose that lives in a place. When you name the creek, you have also named the trout and the crew, and you can open an account for any of the three, or all three. The protocol does not make you choose a lane. It asks you to say which end of the relationship you are standing at today. Purpose accounts in the protocol's own namespace are named for the fifteen ecosystem types and nineteen ecosystem services the protocol classifies, so "clean water," "pollination," and "risk resilience" each have an address already. The list is on [the natural capital page](/manual/natural-capital?from=guide). ## why the order matters When the thing comes first, four things follow in a fixed order, and none of them is a sales decision. The thing you named gets an **account** addressed to it. An agent, in the protocol's word: an onchain account that can hold, receive, and act, run by a person who signs. The account is the address, and not the only one: several accounts can serve the same creek, and opening one does not make you its voice. Without an address, money meant for the creek has to land on a nonprofit, a contractor, or a grant program, which is how most conservation money lands today. That is not wrong. The account still pays those same people to do the work. What changes is that the payment is addressed to the creek first, can repeat, and can be seen. If the thing can be named precisely enough to have one account, it can have one **certificate**: a recorded share (a record of funding, not equity and not title) in the funded condition of that one named thing. Every certificate belongs to exactly one account. A theme can also have a **coin**: a currency named for it, whose trading funds protection indirectly. Pollination has both, a purpose account and a coin. A theme too diffuse for anyone to sign for, like the Anthropocene, is a coin only. Then **proceeds** route what comes in. From the coin's trading to the accounts it names. From a town's account to the creek's account above it. Along the relationships you already know exist. That is the whole machine, and the thing you named sits at the bottom of it holding everything up. Reverse the order and you get a product with a place attached. Keep the order and you get a place with the plumbing it needs. ## the rest of the answer The one-sentence answer is enough to act on. The longer answer is five more posts, each one a lens on the same question. **The thing you named is usually a relationship.** The trail is cool because of the creek. The orchard fruits because of the meadow above it. If the value sits between two things, a payment can run between them. That is relational value, and [the next post](/guide/what-is-relational-value?from=guide) starts from the IPBES definition and takes it one step further than IPBES does. **The thing you named has a size, and the size does not change the design.** A coastline gets longer the closer you look. So does nature's value. The protocol's answer is to use the same four parts at every scale, one reach or one basin, and to let you name the grain you can actually act on. [The coastline post](/guide/the-coastline-gets-longer-the-closer-you-look?from=guide) explains why that is a design decision and not a slogan. **The thing you named is not a column in a report.** People, planet, profit are three columns describing one organization. Place, people, purpose are three kinds of thing that exist whether anyone reports on them, and each can be paid. [The triple bottom line post](/guide/what-the-triple-bottom-line-counts?from=guide) credits the report and shows where the account sits beside it. **The thing you named decides the shape of the instrument.** An account, a certificate, and a coin are three different shapes because they do three different jobs. [The form-follows-function post](/guide/form-follows-function-the-agent-the-certificate-and-the-coin?from=guide) lays the three side by side and says what each one purposely serves. **The thing you named is protected by rules the design is held to.** Eight of them, from "the living thing is the subject" to "complex is not complicated." [The design principles post](/guide/eight-design-principles-behind-ensurance?from=guide) is the list, with the lineage of each. ## where this stands Honesty about scale: on 13 October 2026 the catalog held 2,085 active accounts, of which 1,671 are places, 220 are people, 185 are purposes, and 9 are not yet typed. Eighty-six of them have a wallet deployed. There are 191 coins and 26 certificate token ids on the contract. Most of those accounts are infrastructure waiting for a person to stand next to them. That is thin, and it is growing, and it is the point: the address exists before the money does, so that when someone finally says what they want to ensure, the answer has somewhere to land. Nothing in this post is investment advice or an offer of anything. It is the question, and how the protocol is built to answer it. ## what to do with your answer Say the sentence. "I want to ensure ___." Then pick the door that matches the blank. - **You named a place, a person or group, or a purpose, and it does not have an account yet.** [Open one](/agents/create?from=guide). You will be asked what it represents and where. A person signs; the thing gets an address. - **You named something that already has an account, and you want a certificate for it.** [Propose the line](/specific/create?mode=suggest&from=guide). Name the parent account and the condition you want kept. A human reviews it, and the account receives. - **You named a theme too wide for one account.** [Propose the coin](/general/create?mode=suggest&from=guide). Say what it is about. The browsable list of what exists already is at [/general](/general?from=guide). - **You are not sure which end you are standing at.** [Look at the map](/explore?from=guide). Find the thing you named and see what already connects to it. Then pick. If the thing you named has a steward already, a land trust, a watershed council, a tribe, a crew, say so when you open the account. The account is meant to sit beside their work, not in front of it. If you want a person on the other end before you do any of this, [write to us](/contact?from=guide&topic=what-do-you-want-to-ensure) and start the message with the blank filled in. ## frequently asked questions ### what do you want to ensure? The question asks what living thing you want to make certain keeps working. The answer is a place (a creek, a reach, a basin), the people who keep it (a crew, a trust, a town), or a purpose it serves (a species, clean water, pollination). Name it, say which kind, and the rest follows: an account for the thing, then a certificate if it can be one named account, or a coin if it is a theme too diffuse to sign for. ### do I have to choose between place, people, and purpose? No. The three overlap by design, and any of them can hold an account. Naming a creek also names the trout in it and the crew that tends it. You are choosing where you stand today, not drawing a boundary around the thing. An account for a place can pay an account for a purpose, and a people account can pay both. ### what if the thing I want to ensure is already protected? Then someone already did the hard part, and an account sits beside their work, not in place of it. An easement, a land trust, a public budget, or a grant program protects most of what is protected today. What those usually lack is an address for the living thing itself, so a payment meant for the creek can repeat and can come from the places that depend on it. Open the account with the steward named, or [tell us who they are](/contact?from=guide&topic=what-do-you-want-to-ensure). ## the series 1. [what do you want to ensure?](/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure?from=guide) — read first 2. [what is relational value?](/guide/what-is-relational-value?from=guide) 3. [the coastline gets longer the closer you look](/guide/the-coastline-gets-longer-the-closer-you-look?from=guide) 4. [what the triple bottom line counts](/guide/what-the-triple-bottom-line-counts?from=guide) 5. [form follows function: the agent, the certificate, and the coin](/guide/form-follows-function-the-agent-the-certificate-and-the-coin?from=guide) 6. [eight design principles behind ensurance](/guide/eight-design-principles-behind-ensurance?from=guide)