Out on a Limb: Community Supported Forest Farms on the Blockchain

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is still searching for its killer application. The fundamental value of DLT's are: soverignty of ownership, audibility of immutable transactions, and the tokenization of assets with low cost of exchange. Most businesses built around blockchains stay within the digital realm. The danger is that DLT applications become to meta-centric to digital assets and transactions. To help raise the profile of DLT technology to the mass public, physical assets need to be tied to the blockchain ownership. This requires levels of trust and guaruntees that the physical asset exists underownership of the DTL contract that represents it.

The idea of planting trees is not new to the cryptocurrency community. Two projects; Carboncoin and SolarCoin have made efforts to tie living trees to the blockchain. To date niether has been elevated to a thriving DLT community that is delivering on its main goals. The Carbon Cap and Trade market is only suitable for governments and large orangizations that exude large quantities of CO2. A tree planting DAO does not need a dedicated distributed ledger.

Trees are most valuable as timber, food and energy sources. Regarding carbon sequestration peat moss boggs do a better job at than the healthiest old growth forests. An oversupply of monoculture treefarms will most likely see market collapse like the poplar farms of India.

In many economically depressed parts of the world, small plots of trees are a bankable commodity. Uganda has been providing grants to farmers who maintain sawlog quality trees who are then also able to collect some profits from selling the tree through the grant program.

WePower is an innovative model to finance renewable energy projects that profits on arbitrage of selling pre-whole sale market energy from the financed projects. Such a finance model could easily be applied to tree farming.

The ideal forest is made up of native over and under-story plant life that best supports native animal life while providing valuable materials to the regional population.

The premise of is simple: CrowdFund a small sized sustainable timber tree farm on the blockchain. The goal is to develop standardized DLT mechanisms for communities to transparently develop, own and manage valuable trees through smart contracts.

Potential Benefits:
Certified Sustainable Trees
Community Owned and Managed Profitable Forests

Potential Downfalls:
Auditability of Forest Resources

If you are interested in or already working on this concept please leave your commentary below.