GainForest: Equitable nature finance with regenerative intelligence

Indigenous and local communities steward much of the world’s biodiversity, yet ecological evidence is extracted into platforms they cannot control. What would it mean for a community to own the canonical record of its work while joining an open, verifiable data commons? Drawing on GainForest field deployments, I trace our move from smart-contract-first tools to ATProto and Hypercerts: signed impact claims and media on community-controlled servers; open indexing without making the indexer authoritative; portable verification labels; and funding that references evidence without putting sensitive data on-chain. This technical case study includes why immutable-by-default can violate consent, why wallets exclude users, and why open data can expose sensitive knowledge. Attendees leave with a capture-resistant pattern: separate custody, discovery, verification, and settlement; make revocation first-class; and let communities exit an application without losing their history.

Speakers: David Dao

Track: Rights, Freedoms, and Governance