Blockchain, Digital Twins, and Global Brain Economics – Part III

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – Packy McCormick, a16z’s advisor on web3, wrote an article sponsored by a DeFi platform called Celo, which contains a ton of information about the project’s origin, goals, investors and applications built on top of it. It acts as an argument for the ReFi ideology, and specifically cites a paper written by Jonathan Lageard, a member of the World Economic Forum, for the Brookings institute. 

The core argument posits that we are in this global mess because global finance does not price nature correctly, if they could just get the right price for ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’ such as biodiversity, clean air/water, happy soil, ect, then we can save the world. 

Titled Interspecies Money. He states that the core problem of the market economy is that it does not price natural capital correctly. To ameliorate this, he proposes an idea that the crypto community has pursued for sometime now: tokenize everything.

“It is proposed that the Bank for Other Species (or, more likely, its private sector settlement agents) will create a digital twin for other species that will serve as their identity online. In practical and legal terms, it is the digital twin that holds the value—the equivalent of a few cents, a few dollars, or even a few tens of thousands of dollars in LM (rare life-forms may hold sums equivalent to a rare Rolex watch). Computational and human proxies will allow the nonhuman to express simple preferences. Money will be spent or invested based on these preferences.”