ColivingDAO Insights: The Web3 Path for Regen Living

Regenerative Capitalism: Blockchain and Impact Investing with Ishan Dan

• Daniel Aprea & Gareth Thompson • Season 2 • Episode 38

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Unlock the secrets of regenerative finance with Ishan Dan, the visionary CEO and founder of RegenX, as he shares his journey from a stockbroker in Australia to a trailblazer in climate-positive investments. Discover how blockchain technology is revolutionizing the investment landscape by making sustainable investing more transparent and accessible. Learn about Ishan's innovative solutions to the limitations of traditional finance, and how he harnesses blockchain to democratize impact investing, making it efficient and open to everyday investors.

Explore the groundbreaking concept of asset tokenization and how it's reshaping opportunities in ESG investing. We're tackling the barriers that traditional investors face, from the high entry costs to outdated systems, and revealing how blockchain can streamline processes and build investor confidence. With major financial institutions like Blackrock moving into this space, we're on the brink of a new era for regenerative finance. Incubators such as Refi Talents are at the forefront, fostering innovation poised to transform global financial systems by 2024.

Look into the future of sustainable investing as we highlight the potential "triple win" of financial, social, and environmental returns. Ishan discusses diversifying into renewable energy projects and the evolving investor attitudes driving this shift. As we embrace the concepts of green and regenerative capitalism, we're redefining how capitalism can integrate environmental considerations without sacrificing returns. Examine coliving communities as a model for amplifying the benefits of regenerative finance, and consider the possibilities of interconnected communities working towards a sustainable future. Join us to enrich your understanding of this transformative movement.

Daniel:

Welcome everyone to yet another episode of Coliving DAO Insights. This is your co-host, daniel, and I'm joined today, as usual, by my co-host, gareth, as well as our special guest of the day, ishan Dan. Ishan is the CEO and founder of RegenX, developing a direct investment platform that makes it easy to invest in climate positive projects. Ishan, great to have you here.

Ishan:

Likewise, it's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you, guys.

Daniel:

Brilliant. Great to have you here, Gareth, as well.

Gareth:

Yeah, great to be here, Great to see you, dhan, and really excited to hear all about your project. Yeah, likewise.

Ishan:

Thank you, gareth, and yeah awesome.

Daniel:

So, gareth, I know you prepared a couple of questions for ishan as well. There's so much I want to find out as well about region x and what is doing. The topic of investing in climate positive projects is very dear to our hearts, as everyone knows in the audience already, so I'm very excited about this episode. So, ishan, just the way we like starting generally is we'd love to find out a little bit about your story. What got you to the place you're in? So it's not obviously founding a region investment platform or climate positive investment platform something everyone thinks of immediately. So there must be something in your life journey that brought you to this point. So please tell us a little bit more about your background and how you came up with this idea in the first place, why it's important to you and how this is all taking place.

Ishan:

Yeah, yeah, definitely, and thank you guys. So I guess my story starts 18 years ago. I used to be a stockbroker now a wealth manager, it's called and I started off raising capital for mining company, in Australia that is, and along my path as a stockbroker, I did that for about 10 years and then I became a wealth manager. I realized, you know, I had a passion and I realized that you know, raising capital for mining companies. I wanted to give back to the planet and I wanted to. You know, I realized that regular investments weren't really making the kind of positive change I wanted to see, especially in Australia. So I've always cared about the environment and I thought there had to be a better way to align investments with climate friendly projects and in Australia, when I mean climate-friendly projects, I mean like clean energy projects. But when I tried to really invest in these kinds of projects, I found it really difficult.

Ishan:

I mean, if you think about it, how do you impact invest? You've got the share market and you can invest in shares, but what really are you investing? You don't really know. You're investing in a company. See, and most of the shares on the Australian stock market that are considered green companies are actually mining companies that are also investing some of their operations into clean energy. So it's not really.

Ishan:

I guess you know you don't get the full green transparency. So you can invest in shares, you can invest in ETFs, and then the other option is investing in either green bonds or a managed fund. But the problem is when you invest in a managed fund, there are only a small handful of managed funds. The minimum investment amounts are something like 500,000. And most opportunities are either locked away for big institutions or super funds. You've got high costs and they weren't very transparent. Greenwashing is involved and if you're investing into a unit trust, you can't sell out for 10 years. So it's not easy for the common, the everyday investor, to get direct exposure into impact assets. So blockchain really caught my attention because of its digital ledger technology and also because of my passion in diversifying investors clients money into direct impact investments. Blockchain keeps it honest and open. So, yeah, I hope that sort of brings you up to speed with what regen x is about.

Gareth:

The main thing there is that I sought to create a direct investment platform using digital ledger blockchain technology that would solve this problem awesome really good and and you kind of answered our first question already, Ishan so you kind of started in mainstream, a more mainstream investment space, and you actually examined all those traditional investment options for impact investing and you found them that they were lacking and wanting and that's why you made the transition over.

Ishan:

Yes, it's funny because, see, I guess my background is traditional finance, so it's all I know and everything I deal with is above board regulation, financial product, and so that naturally meant that whatever I was going to create, it was going to be, you know, to help solve the traditional finance funding gap with, you know where, you know, wholesale investors, their pain points and their needs. And so that's why I, you know, automatically looked at solving a problem using, you know, cutting edge technology into traditional finance, which hasn't been easy, I can tell you that much.

Gareth:

Yeah, absolutely, and you know so. There are some digital kind of web to investment options, right, so you have some investment platforms that are running on Web2. Did you have you know it'd be good for the listeners as well, just to walk us through that logical leap of going from traditional investment to, okay, maybe looking at the Web2 solutions and Web2 for everyone? Listening, obviously, is just, you know, standard apps and the internet as of today. But then you jumped, you made that quantum leap into blockchain technology. The blockchain, yeah.

Ishan:

Well, what's interesting is see there are a lot of web 2, as we call it apps out there, and a lot of them are, well, you've got your equity-based ones, which are like your share trading apps, like your Robinhood or Stake, and what they do is they fractionalize ETFs and create shares, but it's already, everything is already. What you're doing is you're digitizing companies right. Then there are other more like semi-institutional type platforms. There's ones that actually they're not digital, but they have a dashboard that allows a wholesale investor to invest in a managed fund type, managed investment scheme type structure or it's a special purpose vehicle type structure, but it doesn't give you the flexibility of what a proper digital platform does.

Ishan:

So at the start, when I made my venture into blockchain technology, I partnered up with the Australian Stock Exchange, who were developing a blockchain digital ledger technology-based platform, and I've been in consultation with the. It's called ASIC. They're the regulator for Australia. So at the start it was really hard because when I followed it, like a lot of other blockchain based startups, when pitching to investors they mentioned you know, you'd mentioned blockchain everywhere, and I got a lot of kickback right at the start from potential investors that were just too scared to even consider blockchain, as me, to digitize their solar power operations. But they raised questions.

Ishan:

Like our institutional investors, they don't want to open wallets. Why should they? They want to play using US dollars and Aussie dollars If they're paying for arguments like half a million or a million in one hit. They don't want to be mucking around opening wallets and using stable coins. So I had to tailor the whole platform to suit you know bringing a third party payment provider and to suit, you know, a lot of these clients, so that things were above board. So it's been an interesting journey and it's still going. For that matter, yeah, especially the tokenization space, yeah.

Daniel:

Brilliant. Yeah, it definitely sounds like a great journey, and one that is yet to deliver a lot of fantastic results and experiences. I can immediately relate with the disadvantages of traditional investing a very, very large initial capital that is needed from a lot of investors, and also some systems that are not really efficient or optimized. One of the reasons we're in this space is largely because we want to give people a better way and an easier way, easier access to opportunities, especially ESG opportunities, and so I can definitely relate a lot with what you're saying.

Daniel:

What I'm curious to hear a little bit more about is what do you think is needed to really help investors whether it's institutional investors, whether it's private investors, even just regular people that have some money to invest? What is needed for them to understand the advantages of blockchain and the potential drawbacks, but how those can be mitigated let's say, the risk or the uncertainty can be not just mitigated, but reduced and also managed can be not just mitigated, but reduced and also managed, and how much of that is on their side meaning, okay, they'll need additional education, additional learnings and so on? How much is on the platform side or the investment opportunity side, talking about easier on-ramp, easier user interface. I'm sure you've already done a lot in that sense, and what else do you think is needed to really favor this process of spreading awareness that this is an opportunity to invest and it's viable and it has a lot of advantages?

Ishan:

Yeah, so it's the hardest thing with traditional finance at the moment. Well, depending on what country you're in, but Australia is a highly regulated and it's probably the same with micro regulations in England and in Singapore regulated, and it's probably the same with with micro regulations in england and in singapore. Australia is highly regulated to protect, you know, consumer, especially so that you can wake up in the morning and know that your money is still remaining in your bank account. So what? The first thing, what it will take is in australia, that is is, for at the moment, blockchain is still, uh, very gray and it's still in its infancy. So there there's no concrete regulation, especially in the US, that governs and protects consumers from tokenized products, tokens itself. In Australia, they've laid the groundwork for it and it is coming and you know, I dare say, within the next six months to a year, there will be a framework put in place. But that's the first thing, because then, after regulation, comes into play.

Ishan:

Then, number two, confidence, and at the moment, after the FTX collapse, it was a massive change. Confidence just disappeared. No one I mean VCs especially did not want to touch blockchain-based company startups at all because of what happened. So that confidence now is slowly returning, and it's a good thing. And once that confidence returns, then startups will start to start to. You know, you'll see startups popping up everywhere. But what is massive and what I've seen and I saw this three years ago and that is the asset tokenization space. And there was a company that I that I dealt with in my previous role I hadn't even started my startup and that was Callistone. They're in UK and Callistone they're a huge financial, the fund manager actually, and they use asset tokenization. And three of the two of the actual Australian banks, along with the Australian Stock Exchange, you know, started using asset tokenization and digital ledger technology three, four years ago. So they're still it's happening and it is happening little by little.

Ishan:

How does that affect the consumer? Or, and at the end of it, I think, the way blockchain and digital ledger technology will affect? I mean, obviously there are so many benefits for the end consumer, but I think it's a process that will happen without them knowing. Do you know, bank bills or bonds as a tokenized product onto the trading platform that already exists, without clients, even you know knowing it'll be just an automatic process that'll happen in the background. I think that is what's happening at the moment, like the australian stock Exchange, when they look to transfer their entire share market system onto blockchain. They were doing that in the background and that was happening already.

Ishan:

So I guess this process is is already underway and and the asset tokenization space is growing bigger and bigger. I think, like that big move by BlackRock, and when that happened, that set off a chain reaction and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, there are a few other players and they're all jumping on board. Once that becomes mainstream and then some of the bigger financial institutions start to jump onto asset tokenization, I think then the regulations will be there and then it follows through. So it all happens together with the big banks and the regular and regular um, the regulators, and then they lay the, found the groundwork and then startups coming after. I think that's, um, yeah, that that's.

Daniel:

That's what we're seeing here brilliant and, yeah, definitely this year 2024. It's been a big milestone for all this.

Daniel:

First, we've seen blackrock not just blackrock, but multiple other institutions as well issuing issuing first bitcoin etfs, then later on there's been other digital assets etfs and they talk a lot about tokenization tokenizing real world assets. So when it's not just the general people saying that, but when it's big institutions talking about that, definitely that's the chain reaction. So we're literally witnessing this as it happens. So it's a great moment to be alive. But what I'd love to hear as well is if we go even more in depth on regenerative projects like tokenization, as we said so far, it definitely helps investments in general. There's a lot of advantages for investors. How specifically is this even more pronounced, possibly, when it comes to regenerative opportunities?

Ishan:

Yeah, yeah, definitely, so I'm doing. I've joined an incubator run by a group called Refi Talents and they're in Europe I think Frankfurt and it's a really I think it was the first time it's been run and there's a fair few startups that are on there and we meet every Monday and Sunday night and there's assignments that are set out and we basically all of us have regenerative finance projects. So, for those that don't know what regenerative finance is, it's an alternative financial system that promotes and restores environmental, social and financial stability, along with monetary gains, using blockchain technology. So that's a whole lot of gobbledygook there, but what that means basically is say, Regenexx Regenexx, based on blockchain technology. It helps climate positive projects that want to deliver not just a monetary gain but also a measurable positive impact, and using blockchain technology, we were able to measure that impact and attach it to the smart contract process. So that's something that's never been done before, and so every week that we meet, we learn different things from each other, and I think this space it's growing week by week.

Gareth:

Fantastic and you know, in the regenerative finance, but this is something that's very close to our hearts at CoLivingDAO. And, of course, the ReFi Talents Program is how we met and we're benefiting from that, and it was really good to make that connection across startups that are doing very different work. And to go back to asset tokenization, ishan, when we talk about real world assets, this makes things literally a bit more real. Right, because you get your. You know there's plenty of sort of crypto. You can invest in cryptocurrencies. You can invest in meme coins, which have you know very little underlying foundational structure. People love them because they're just fun, but real world assets.

Gareth:

Yeah, you've got something that is in the real world providing a benefit, and in Regenexx's case, these are climate positive projects, right? So you're not just buying a meme coin, you're not buying some crypto. You're actually putting an investment into something that's helping the planet and, you know, ideally, if things things go well, then you get a return as well, and that's what we mean by regenerative finance, right? So, on the real world asset side of things, can you help explain why impact investors should invest in those real world assets? What's the benefit? And from your point of view.

Ishan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, um. So I guess, first of all, I wanted to make a bit of a. I guess I want to distinguish the difference between real world assets and digital asset tokenization. There's a bit of confusion there. What I see real world asset tokenization it's it's the process of digitizing off-chain assets that are not digital at the moment, like real estate, renewable energy assets such as solar or green hydrogen and infrastructure. So what you're doing, to break it down, you can't digitize a physical product, but you can digitize the way that that product is recorded. So let's say, for argument's sake, a solar farm. It's held in a. The actual physical solar farm is held in a special purpose vehicle fund. So what we're digitizing and tokenizing is the fund structure and what we'll do is we'll tokenize that. So one token will represent that fund and then we'll fractionalize and divide that token up into a million tokens and then we'll try and sell those million tokens and they'll have direct ownership structure into that actual fund that owns the solar power project. So the regulations have to be in place in the specific country that you're at so that this ownership holds true, um, so that if someone wanted to sell, you know, say, if they bought 100 of the tokens, then they could effectively own the entire you know solar power project and it's theirs. So then there's another um and I think people get this confused digital asset tokenizationization. On the other hand, this is creating tokens backed by native blockchain assets, such as NFTs, digital collectibles, cryptocurrencies. They're already digital as it is. There's no physical aspect of it and they don't link directly to physical assets.

Ishan:

So, getting back to your question, why should, I guess, investors invest in real world assets? I think what I've found is it's a generational thing as well. I've found that, as you look at the emerging affluent and the emerging investor class, people are now becoming more aware of um, climate change and and what's happening, and they're becoming more aware of what they invest in. They want to know that their hard-earned money is not invested in companies that are damaging the planet. You know and after seeing you know what's happened in the past with greenwashing and mining companies that trust is somewhat eroded. Exactly 100%, with 100% transparency, that my funds are invested directly into either a project or a company. That is 100%, you know, green.

Ishan:

So I think it's the easiest way, the easiest way to, I guess, to gain exposure diversify your portfolio away from stocks and bonds, you know, into a completely new asset class. Because I, I think this is a new asset class because if stocks and bonds move one way, I think this asset class doesn't get affected by the stocks and bonds. So, um, real world assets, things like solar farms, wind turbines, green hydrogen plants, reforestation, um, you know, I, um, um, I can keep going, you going. These are real things that you can see and touch, that help the planet. Investing in these kinds of projects not only helps the environment but it also gives you a steady, you know, financial return, depending on the project you're investing. And I think that is really the third missing thing missing, I guess, feature of investing at the moment, if you can call it green capitalism. That's the missing part and I think that will come into it very soon.

Daniel:

That's great, and it's very interesting that you mentioned this particular expression green capitalism because if we look online discussions or even offline, so to speak I've noticed that a lot of people discuss OK, why is this happening? Why are we destroying the planet? And a lot of people point the finger to money in general or, more specifically, a type of investing that prioritizes financial capital over different types of capital. On the other hand of the spectrum, we have people that say wait a minute, I'm putting my money in something to get my return first and then we'll see if it also benefits the planet. Great, but I can't really prioritize other things.

Daniel:

So here at Cold Living Down, we fully believe in non-zero-sum solutions. We talk about the triple win people, planet and profit. So we fully believe that once we start addressing things as forms of capital and financial capital being one form of capital, just like social capital or natural or environmental capital once we do that, we realize okay, how do we get the triple win? How do we get the best possible solutions to really maximize every type of capital? I know that there's challenges with that, especially when it comes to social or general understanding of people and even investors thinking okay, if I maximize one, it means I'm really compromising another one, so I still want to go with one and so on. So how do you think the investment world first of all can adapt to this and shift the mindset First of all, do you think it's even possible to achieve a triple win, and how can that triple win happen and how can people understand and see a clear path towards that, so that the world stops thinking in terms of dualism either or and starts thinking in terms of non-zero-sum solution?

Ishan:

Yeah, well, I think it's already happening. I mean, if you look at capitalism, what happens is in Australia, that is. I mean, we had a massive mining boom and our country was. You know, some of the biggest exports in Australia are gas and coal and iron ore. But what's happened is because of ESG regulations, because we've signed the Paris Accord, because the government has made a decision, and also investors don't see coal companies in good light anymore. Investors started to pull out of coal companies and oil companies and you can see the share price. So this cycle automatically happens and what you'll see is that companies that are investing in, you know, renewable energy, like green hydrogen is, which is big in Australia, they're they automatically that their cost curve comes down and then they automatically their share prices start to go up. So these things that are happening already down, I mean, and the thing is there's a funding based on the Paris Accord.

Ishan:

Australia alone, by 2030, has something like $1.2 trillion per year. No, sorry, it's $130 billion funding gap shortfall by 2030, that comes to about $1.2 trillion that it needs to invest in order to meet its Paris net zero targets. So that money that has to come in in order to because our cities at the moment are run by gas and coal, so that needs to stop. So in order for that to stop, companies need to obviously produce green hydrogen, and so that will already, on its own, set about a chain reaction that changes the dynamics and investors will start to change the way they invest. You know, institutions will change the way they invest, and that will already happen.

Ishan:

But in the interim though think in australia, that is every company now I think the larger companies has to meet esg standards, and that is carbon credits or whatever it is. So investors now are fully aware of companies that have bad esg ratings and they actively pull out there. There's a lot of funds out there that don't invest. So I think these things are already set in place and I think they're happening without you know, capitalism's, the share market's, main motto is maximize shareholder profits or shareholder returns, maximize share. That's the number one rule. I think now the second bit will be maximize shareholder rules, but, you know, not at the expense of the planet. So the planet comes first by hand in hand. They come both hand in hand, and I think you know, as long as um companies are um not harming the planet, um, investors will invest.

Gareth:

Yeah, beautifully explained and you know it's great to hear that this is moving at pace in Australia. But of course, we're very aware that pace around the world needs to accelerate, right, and you're playing a role in that by making it easier to shift to much more regenerative forms of investment, which is fantastic and a non-zero-sum solution, as Dan said. So, yeah, we need to go faster, right. I mean, we need to really accelerate the paradigm shift to even meet the paris climate agreement goals, which are very, very aggressive, and so, yeah, very interesting, and I would say personally, it's beyond green capitalism. You know where we're. Where we're moving is regenerative capitalism. It's really a leap into the unknown. It's much more powerful. That's the next capitalism. You know where we're. Where we're moving is regenerative capitalism. It's really a leap into the unknown. It's much more powerful that's the next.

Ishan:

Yeah, you're right, that's the next. Um, that's that even talks about going ahead of just, you know, just doing the bare necessities. But yeah, regenerative is yeah, and I think in europe that's already happening yeah, and, and you're, and you're a part of that too, right?

Gareth:

I mean, this is kind of the beauty of what you're doing. It sounds to us like you're making this accessible and you're translating it the way you explained it so beautifully, explained the real world, asset tokenization of a solar farm and how that works. But then, you know, making it seamless for the user, making it just another. It's another asset class. It's another asset class that you can invest in as part of your portfolio, which is what people want to hear, right? They want to hear an easy way in.

Ishan:

Yeah, so that's the thing. I guess I understand what investors look at and I guess what their needs are, and unfortunately, their number one need is whatever they invest in has to make money, has to have a return. Unfortunately, it'll always be that case. They will prioritize whatever they invest in needs to generate money. So what I've developed with Regenexx is a financial product that is listed as a financial product, that it's two parts, so I'll just go into it.

Ishan:

So for argument's sake, let's say a solar power project needs to raise 10 million. What we'd do is we'd tokenize the ownership of the solar power project and we'd issue out 10 million shares at $1 each Now these are digital shares or tokens, whatever you want to call it and at $1 each now these are greenfield digital tokens. So what we'd do is for two. It roughly takes about.

Ishan:

Say, it takes two years to build a solar power project. They're issued at a dollar. We'd have four milestones construction milestones and after each milestone 25% of the funds required gets released and then at the end of the two years that dollar buying price might be $4. And then the original investors in the primary issuance might be able to now exit. Then what happens with the solar power project is for the next 25 years. A solar power project is like a bond, basically it doesn't appreciate in capital up or down price, but it returns possibly 12% for the next 25, 24 years in regular payments and then after that it tapers off. So that's sort of the and now. That is quite an attractive investment.

Gareth:

Yeah, absolutely, and getting a financial return is a good thing, because this is what people are looking for and you can see it, you can see that and you can check up and you can see the live data.

Ishan:

One thing that we've sort of we've IP'd here is and it's unique to Regenexx is an impact investment score, and we do that for every project, where we give each project an impact investment score based on how well it's achieving the SDG goals and a few other unique properties about the project. So then investors, when they look at this financial security, they know, okay, there's the yield, there's the potential capital gain, there's the price and that's the impact score.

Gareth:

Awesome. And then you get, you know, you get your triple win yeah that's it, it's all there.

Gareth:

It's all there to see. So what we're doing here at Co-Living Dalish is we're creating a blueprint for a federation of co-living communities and we're putting in some of these regenerative finance principles or deep in the DNA of it. So you know, to make it real and make it simple, if you imagine a building there was a co-living community, people are running on our blueprint residents, when they pay their monthly rent, they get some equity shares in the community company and as a part of the legal foundation, the community is obliged to restore green and blue spaces. So you know trees, biodiversity, water spaces and having nature as a stakeholder and building up natural capital, so that an investment in co-living DAO communities then enables that triple win. And not only that if they're interconnected there's lots of communities interconnected and we are the enabling company in that federation Then you know you get that benefit multiplied over the network, over the federation.

Gareth:

How do you see that? Yeah, cheers, thanks. And how do you see that in relation to what you're, to what you're doing? Because what we're looking at is a kind of real world asset tokenization. But it's more than that right, because it has the natural capital piece embedded in it as well as the social capital piece to get that triple win.

Ishan:

Yeah, look, that'd be awesome and I love the concept as well. Unfortunately, in Australia it's just barren land, so that's sort of that. But I've spoken to a few people because I presented up in Money 2020 in Thailand and I had a chat with a few people because I presented up in money money 2020 in thailand and I had a chat with a few uh, regenerative um, uh, there were land restoration companies that were sort of doing something similar um, but they weren't using blockchain, though. Um, and the idea is great and um it. I mean, we could very easily um partner up and do something similar.

Ishan:

But essentially, what you're doing, um, do the uh, do the investors receive ownership in just the? Is it a if it's a fund structure, or is it? Do they receive ownership in like a, like a? I know what someone was doing. They were doing like a little block, like a meter by meter block, and then the tree was planted on that and they receive, um, you know, token ownership of the, the trust that held that little space. But one thing you'd be able to do is you could actually even show the progress of the tree to the investors and the carbon credits that it's generating. So I mean, yeah, the endless possibilities, but it's a great idea.

Gareth:

Yeah, thanks, great idea. Yeah, yeah, thanks. And, and just to clarify you know, investors could invest in one co-living community as an option, all right, or they can invest in in co-living dial as the enabler company to get the benefits of the federation investment and and does the dow allow sort of certain rights or memberships or rewards of some sort?

Gareth:

exactly, yeah, every stakeholder gets appropriately rewarded. So you have your residents, which are obviously a big, important stakeholder, arguably the primary stakeholder, and they get financially rewarded for being there and being a part of the community. And then you get your other, you get your standard investors and you can also, in our model, have partner companies in the local community that are supplying services to those co-living communities. They can also get a share as a partner share and then they get some of the financial returns in that arrangement as well. So it's taking care of all the stakeholders in a multi-stakeholder arrangement I see excellent, excellent.

Ishan:

And how does that work? From country to country, or or is it only just based in UK?

Gareth:

So we're going to be international and, as you alluded to before, you know the blockchain regulations are different in different territories. The US is probably the most uncertain at the moment, although slightly to change European regulation is the friendliest area at the moment, and so we're starting in the UK and Europe europe and then we'll go from there and see maybe australia I'll let you know when the aussie, uh, the aussie regulation comes out.

Ishan:

But yeah, yeah, it should be soon awesome, yeah.

Gareth:

So yeah, we're, we're part of, we're part of the movement, we're part of the regenerative finance and movement and we want to, we want to get away from these zero-sum solutions, these, you know, false trade-offs is what we see them as. Why not? You know, we're gonna, we're gonna have a thriving human future. It's gonna be financial, natural and communities and people having, you know, good well-being across all places and all types. So, dan, I don't know if you want to jump in there and and tie it together.

Daniel:

It's a nice way to to bring the conversation to a close yeah, I think it's been great to get um so many insights from from ishan. It's been very inspiring, first of all, to explore this alignment in not just principles but also direction that the world is is taking, and we're part of it, ishan is part of it, and it's great to see that it's not just principles but also direction that the world is taking, and we're part of it, ishan is part of it, and it's great to see that it's not just us, right? There's a lot of other projects and even institutions are taking a similar direction, so we're happy to see that things are going the way we'd love to see them go. What we need to do is make sure that we accelerate the process because, as we've spoken about multiple times, we don't have a lot of time left for some of the things. Right, I mean what's happening with the planet right now. There are some very important deadlines and processes that are actually quite fast and quite rapid. So, for everyone who's listening as well, I hope this resonates.

Daniel:

And if there's anything you can do in terms of personal regeneration, what you can do for the planet, and if you can align that with financial gain, why not? As we said, I don't expect people to say, hey, the planet is in trouble, let's forego all the financial needs. We just do things for nature, out of goodwill. I don't think that's a sustainable system in itself. That's why we really strive to align financial incentives with the natural, environmental, social incentives and so on. So, everyone who's listening, if this paradigm is something you also believe in, you definitely want to stick around and ishan before we completely wrap things up and, as I said, it's been very inspiring to hear all this. Any final thoughts? Anything else you want to add? Anything you want to say to the audience, how they can find you or find out more about your project yeah, yeah, definitely.

Ishan:

Um, one thing I'd like I'd like to say is um, thank you so much for uh, for taking the time to uh, to uh, you know, include me in on your um, your podcast. Um, one thing I'd like to say is the blockchain community is completely different to traditional finance, that sense of community where we're not competing against each other and trying to, you know, outdo each other, but instead we're working together as a community and you use the word community a lot and I like that and the whole ReFi community. I think that's the working together to achieve one sole purpose and that is, to you know, regenerative finance, to, you know, to solve some of the problems that we have at the moment with climate change. I think is a beautiful thing and I, I think, um, you know, we can only grow from strength to strength from here on in. So, thank you so much for uh, yeah, giving me the opportunity thanks, awesome.

Daniel:

Thank you, gareth, for being here as well, and thanks everyone for listening. I hope you found this insightful, as I definitely did as well, and for more of this. By all means, what you want to do is make sure you subscribe to this podcast, if you haven't already, and definitely, spread the world, spread the word. Let everyone know, uh, that we're here coming in with bringing in more interviews and more discussions. So, um, definitely, yeah, and uh, again, thank you so much, um ishan for from region x, ceo and founder of region x. So, um, make sure you check it out as well, if you haven't already, and we will be back very soon, as usual, with more content. So, once again, thanks everyone for being here and see you soon. Outro Music.