TreeLeaves Helps Small Landholders “Leaf” Their Trees Alone

Another Story from the Near Future, by ConsenSys Web3Studio

(All Web3Studio stories are fiction…until they’re not.)

The problem with a lot of so-called blockchain token offerings is that they don’t have good, for lack of a better phrase, economic circuit design. Many rely on the rising speculation bubble to power the token’s value without designing in how the business activity, which the token is supposed to facilitate, will fund and support the value after bubbles burst.

This is especially evident in token offerings (and their related decentralized organizations) that aim at hacking social causes, like getting people to stop chopping down rainforests.

But TreeLeaves is different.

The organizers of TreeLeaves are connected to two key groups. The first is a set of global land developers that have an incentive to show that their activities support the environment. They fund the TreeLeaves token and receive, in return, a branding badge that shows the level of support they offer to ensure that natural resource areas are preserved. (This is the first group of funding entities, but TreeLeaves plans an expansive market for this.)

The second group TreeLeaves works with is a vast network of satellite and other geo sensing sources that collect verified data on things like the health of a given hectare of land, anywhere in the world. This is now being supplied by investment from the Chainlink network.

With these two groups working in tandem via the Ethereum mainnet, here’s the TreeLeaves scheme:

It turns out that much of the endangered rainforest in Africa, Asia and South America are held by small landowners. And they are cutting down the forest at an alarming rate. TreeLeaves gives these landowners a blockchain-secured title record to their land, and a digital identity tied to a blockchain wallet. That wallet will automatically receive TreeLeaves tokens as long as the landholder owns the land and as long as GroundTruth sensors show that the land is producing readings consistent with healthy rainforest. In fact, if the readings — oxygen production for starters — goes up, they get more tokens. If it goes down, less tokens. Result: incentive for the landowner to not only not cut down the trees but to invest in their health.

Already, the TreeLeaves token offering has gone through the roof with accredited investors ramping the price. But this time, that’s all about people wanting to chip in and add heft to the incentive rather than pure speculation as with some token offerings in the past. This is great for those landowners…and the trees. (Rich people don’t tend to cut down rainforest to buy food.) But even if the speculation bubble bursts, the organic token funding from builders and land developers seeking brand enhancement—and sometimes even genuinely wanting to support the environment—will keep the monetary value to these small landowners flowing.