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Setting the stage
This changes also the dynamics and the current thoughts of our current economic system. And that’s, I would say, the commonalities changed the game to really create equity, inclusiveness in a world that really has massive problems today.
JANE
I’m Jane McConnell and welcome to Imaginize World. Today, we need to focus on the future for new generations. What kind of world do we want them to live in and how can we help them build it? Greetings. Today, I am talking with Alex Prate, a venture builder and entrepreneur. One with major areas of activity is focused on regeneration. On one hand, he works on using DAOs to change how we create and manage energy. He also works on regenerative finance through DAOs, what he calls changing the game by changing money. He also works in a third area about how we can create greater self-awareness through an AI app that helps us see ourselves better, but at the same time respects our privacy. Let’s hear what ALEX has to say. Well, hello, Alex, and welcome to Imaginize World.
ALEX
Thanks so much, Jane. Thanks for the invitation.
Alex, venture builder and entrepreneur
Well, I’m just delighted that you have the time to talk to me because I think you’re doing some very interesting things that require a lot of imagination, and so you really fit the theme of imaginize the way the world can be. And one thing I’d like to do, I ask all my guests this trick question and I never warn them in advance, and that is how would you describe yourself in one sentence? If I were to say to someone, “Oh, I met this guy, Alex, and he’s a…” How would you want me to finish the sentence?
ALEX
Yes. So I’m passionate about one thing, which is to make the world a better place, more regenerative, more equitable. And what I am, I think is a global venture builder supporting this effort, enabling the collaboration at a large scale.
JANE
A global venture builder, I like that because it’s not a common phrase that people use. It’s not sort of a knowledge management specialist or the kind of stuff we hear all the time. It’s different. What I’d like to do is, I mentioned to you before we actually started here that I interviewed Joachim Stroh, whom you know. I realized because he recommended you. And so, we did a whole episode on DAOs and he gave us a great illustrated explanation of what they are. I wanted to talk to you about a very specific, very interesting example, which is managing energy. And if you want to say a couple of words at the beginning about what a DAO is, because that makes more sense. I will also on the web page link people to Joachim’s interview. So you don’t need to go into much detail. So my question to you is how can DAOs… How are they what you say they’re revolutionizing energy management and they’re increasing local independence. So could you talk to us about all that?
Hypha DAO and third generation human first
Yes, definitely. So at Hypha, we’ve been indeed working on the third generation human first, inspired by nature DAOs, and that offers the possibility to create use cases and verticals. So that’s what we are doing with Hypha Energy, which we are launching. And it’s about local renewable energy production by energy hubs and energy communities. So that’s an interesting trend in Europe because the European Union is really pushing for local energy production with this ambitious objective to have 50% of the energy produced locally by 2035.
JANE
By 2035?
ALEX
Yes-
JANE
That’s like in 10 years. Wow.
ALEX
Exactly. So we will see the emergence of this energy hubs and communities, a really fast expansion, and it’s anticipated that 200,000 energy hubs will appear in the next five years.
JANE
Wow.
Revolutionize energy production, increase local independence
And this energy hubs will need tools, methodologies, blueprints to operate. And that’s what we are doing with this vertical, Hypha Energy, leveraging the distributed governance of a DAO as a core piece of the architecture. And it all starts with this idea of shared energy production with the communities, the hubs and different people and stakeholders inside the local environments, purchasing an energy production capacity and sharing the energy together.
JANE
When you say local, how far do you extend local? I live in a village of about a 1,000 people. Would we have a hub?
ALEX
You would, yes.
JANE
Really?
ALEX
Yes, exactly. So that’s really the idea of staying as much local as we can so that we can benefit from this proximity for energy sharing and using the secondary level of grid and avoiding congestion in the grid itself. So that’s really interesting as a project because it involves solar, wind, water, and we can really see the creativity of these hubs and communities emerging and being empowered by the fact that they now control their own energy and they can really define the way they want to govern it. It can be, for example, socially oriented.
If the community needs certain households in the community, for example, don’t have access fully to energy or have difficulties to pay the bills, the community can say, we are going to allocate the surplus of energy to these households. On the opposite, it can be more about purchasing power and they can optimize, if you like, the production of energy for rewards to come back and value to come back to the members themselves. So we see all kinds of flavor of these communities and hubs. But what is really interesting is that it’s renewable energy and strongly starting the transition to renewable energy.
Distributed governance and community hubs
So let’s take my village as an example. Imagine that there are some people who want to do this, they hear about it, they find it interesting. Concretely speaking, what do they do?
ALEX
Yes. So we will provide the onboarding process, the community engagement logics, tools and blueprints for the initiator of this project because there will always be one or several initiators to actually rally and call the other participants, the community members to participate in this project. And the benefit for them is quite straightforward because it’s a saving of between 50% to 80% of their energy bills.
JANE
Wow. And this is all happening online? I mean, the management of the whole hub is happening online?
ALEX
Yes. So we are using digital tools, indeed, but we are anticipating that there will be a lot of in-person onboarding as well. And the beautiful thing with those projects is that it can create bonds also within the community because they are now sharing this purpose of producing energy together and sharing the value that they can produce together. So this kind of projects can extend to community prosperity and the enhancement in the community using this value being created by the collective.
JANE
For example, the people who decide that they will use solar energy. And so, they get solar panels and they do the different things that one does to use solar energy, and then they no longer need as much electricity from the major electricity provider. Is that right?
ALEX
That’s exactly right. And we can have also institutional stakeholders taking part into this project. For example, municipalities that would see benefits in participating to these projects. We can see also investors, local or external investors supporting this community, for the economic equilibrium to occur for this initial investment, of course, of the solar park. But then once it’s in operation, the idea is that each of the community members will own a share of this energy production for their own consumption and the surplus, because we’ll be able to create energy saving and optimize the repartition and the sharing of this energy, they will be able then to share the surplus and the value created.
Primarily a grassroots initiative
A big energy provider, let’s take EDF, one of the biggest in France, can they become a member?
ALEX
So in local energies, the energy companies are not necessarily involved in this kind of projects. However, they can facilitate the access. So if we talk about the grid, for example, the access to the grid can be facilitated by these big industry players to transport energy. But that will be really a grassroots movement. And also, there will be hubs that will be industrial commercial as well. Think of a shopping center, for example, where they could produce… Use the roof surface to install solar panels and then distribute this energy amongst the different shops and companies that are in the shopping centers.
JANE
So these initiatives are not grouped together on a national level or a regional level.
ALEX
That’s where the DAO comes in. And that’s really interesting because with Hypha, we have this concept of ecosystem, think of each of these hubs as being a DAO, an autonomous group able to govern to make decisions together and to choose how to optimize this energy production and how to allocate the treasury, the budget, and the value that will be created out of that. So each of these communities will be a DAO, but then we have this construct of an ecosystem of DAOs, meaning that everybody belongs to the same space, this energy ecosystem space. And they can share knowledge, they can share blueprints, they can share recipes that work for them to encourage others to actually form a community as well. So it’s really integrated and the Encore DAO, as we call it, the collaboratory, if you like, that will orchestrate this ecosystem, will deliver all the essential services that the communities need, whether it is tools, education, blueprints, as I was saying, engagement mechanisms.
JANE
This is relatively new, isn’t it, in energy initiatives?
ALEX
There are already 9,000 energy hubs in Europe.
JANE
Do you have any idea what proportion of them are in France? Selfish question since I live in France, but I’m very curious.
ALEX
I’m French too, so I understand the question. But yeah, it’ll be difficult for me to do a breakdown, but probably a good proportion as well.
European Union promotes local energy production
Well, maybe this is something, no matter what happens in the European legislation and the elections… Well, the elections have taken place, hopefully these initiatives will still be encouraged and sponsored.
ALEX
Oh, definitely. There’s a huge push from the European Union as I was saying before. So, yes. So this projection of 200,000 hubs in five years I think are completely realistic in Europe. And to completely answer your question, the current hubs are not fully mature in the sense of they don’t necessarily have the tools to govern themselves. So for most of them, they are still trading on the markets and using the grid and the energy markets. What we want to do is to minimize this and to really focus on the local environment, and that’s what the DAO and the solution that we are providing will allow them to do because they will be able to really organize the flow of energy inside their communities.
JANE
Alex, do you have any idea if initiatives like this are happening in Africa?
ALEX
Sure, yes. There are projects all across the globe, yes, but we are focusing on Europe because there’s definitely this fertile ground, if you like, with the European Union really pushing them. But of course, our project is global. I mean, Hypha has been global from day one, and that’s what we want to do as well. There’s definitely interest already in South Africa, for example. So yes, we are expanding.
SEEDS and regenerative finance
Very interesting. I’ll see if people who listen to our conversation later have any other questions which they will be encouraged to post. Second topic I wanted to talk to you about is what you call SEEDS. Is that what we call, or can that be called regenerative finance?
ALEX
Sure, yes.
JANE
Which is a new term for me. Could you talk about that?
ALEX
Yeah, sure. So we started in 2019 with SEEDS with a view to create a regenerative economic system and a planetary constitution for regeneration as well as a community. And when we started, I think it was in February 2019 with preliminary work in 2018, but really starting the project, then we presented the first version, if you like, of SEEDS in an event called New Frontiers in New Zealand. And the enthusiasm was so huge in this event that we had to continue. People were really excited with this idea of reinventing money for purpose, because as I think a lot of people know the current economic system and the monetary system is leading to degeneration, as in most of the assets are still invested in activities that are not serving the people or the planet. And the intent of SEEDS is really to redirect this purpose to regenerative activities.
JANE
And how does it work?
ALEX
Yes. So it’s about incentivizing regenerative activities at the local level. So what we realized, and that’s a little bit of the story of Hypha, when we started, we got so much energy around SEEDS that we needed to organize ourselves, and that’s where the DAO was born and all these iterations that followed the DAO.
JANE
You mean the DAO was born from the work around SEEDS?
ALEX
Yes, exactly. We started with SEEDS and then the community grew so fast that we needed to create the tools. So we’ve started with an application called the SEEDS passport and the SEEDS wallet. Then in parallel, we also worked on these DAO constructs, and now already, we have actually merged Hypha technology inside the SEEDS ecosystem. And now SEEDS is a collaborative DAO and using the Hypha tools to organize itself. So that’s the genesis of Hypha, if you like, really taking our roots in regeneration and really having a technology that mimics nature that takes into account the recipe of nature for collaboration, for expansion and organic growth.
SEEDs – a currency that incentivizes regenerative activities
So what does a person do with SEEDS? How does it work from an individual viewpoint?
ALEX
Yeah, so SEEDS is a currency that can be used as a means of exchange like any other currencies. But the difference is that it’s acknowledges and awards regenerative activities. So let’s say you have a land-based projects as we call them, which is a group of people acquiring land to steward the land and to regenerate the land, working on the soil, on regenerative agriculture or permaculture, fruit forests, etc, different types of projects. And the idea is that the SEEDS ecosystem will acknowledge and incentivize these kinds of activities. So we went through a complete first iteration over the last five years, and now we are entering the second iteration of SEEDS, which is a more mature model where we have this idea that each community, each village farm land-based project will create impact and will be able transparently with the blockchain to measure this impact. The impact will then convert it into value so that those village farms can continue delivering good activities around regeneration.
JANE
How do you measure the impact?
ALEX
So what Hypha is doing is to tokenize the impact, the holistic impact, social ecological impact. And the way we can do that is by using this framework at the ecosystem level. So SEEDS will say these are the activities and the metrics that we want to follow up and we want to reward as an ecosystem, as a collective. And then each village farm land-based project will decide their focus and will subscribe to this focus, to this impact that they want to create. And after verification, it’s called MRV, a verification locally with external experts and also technology, IoTs, for example, and different technology available to measure the progress and the metrics that are being improved. So it can be the quality of the soil, the quality of water biodiversity. So there are different elements.
JANE
Very tangible elements.
ALEX
Very tangible in elements and measurable and going far beyond just the carbon sequestration and being holistic in the way of capturing impact and measuring impact.
JANE
And how is SEEDS doing? You said it’s so popular that it led actually to the creation of Hypha, but in terms of its own financing now, how is it advancing?
ALEX
Yes. So as I was saying, we are entering this second iteration to really execute on the learnings of the five years, because as you can imagine, it’s a big endeavor to create a new economic system. So we went up to 11,000 people in the community in the first iteration. But we realized that we didn’t have fully the tools as I was saying, and now we have merged Hypha and SEEDS in terms of having the technology of Hypha inside SEEDS. Therefore, all the conditions now are met to restart in this second iteration. So like nature, we are going through expansion phases, contraction phases, and expansion again. So I think we are starting this second expansion phase now that these conditions are met.
JANE
It’s all very interesting and I think it must be a challenge to make it concrete to people.
ALEX
Oh, completely.
Transacting in SEEDS for the global humanity
It has an abstract feeling to it when you hear about it at the beginning. And that’s one reason I’m pushing you a little bit on the individual. What does it mean for people?
ALEX
So for people, imagine you have a wallet with SEEDS inside your wallet and you can purchase goods and services with this regenerative currency. And doing so, you are serving the planet because this currency is fully regenerative. It’s not used for activities that will hurt or harm people or planets. And therefore, by transacting, you are delivering a common good service to the community and to the global humanity, I would say.
JANE
Now, can you use it to purchase goods from merchants and sellers who are part of the system?
ALEX
Yes, exactly. So we will see if this second iteration delivers its promises, we’ll see marketplaces at the global bioregional level where you will be able to purchase goods and services. But also in the local communities, each project, as I was saying, farm, etc, can accept this currency in exchange for food or for any of the needs that the community has.
JANE
I don’t know if there’s going to be an endpoint that you reach or will you just simply get closer and closer to a more regenerative world?
ALEX
Yeah, there won’t be any endpoint if it’s a success because it’ll be ongoing. And this currency will go on.
JANE
That’s what I was thinking.
ALEX
Yeah, we’ll go from an alternative currency to a very well recognized currency to potentially a primary currency. So that’s really the evolution that we’d love to see. And yeah, the idea is really to… Through this motivator, if you like, that is money to rally also people and to educate around regeneration and to really organize this progressive transition to models that are actually superior in every way, but still not well understood by the mainstream population. So I think it’s an extraordinary powerful education tool as well. So if anything, we will have realized that by creating those big networks and this energy between people to really talk and share around regenerative practices.
JANE
Yeah, very interesting. We’ll have to come back and talk again in about a year.
ALEX
Sure, exactly.
JANE
And you can give us an update.
ALEX
Mm-hmm.
Realifex – real life experience and well-being intelligence
Now, I found something else about you online. I found I was really intrigued and I’m very curious to know more about… Do pronounce it Realifex?
ALEX
Realifex, yes.
JANE
Is that the right pronunciation? And the website is so inspiring that it makes me to be honest, skeptical about it. I hope you don’t mind sharing-
ALEX
Of course.
JANE
… my first reaction because it was so you talk about you create human connections and you deepen the moment I’m quoting from the website, you inspire change and you build trust. I think that last point is very important and so many people are trying to build trust in different ways. Can you talk about Realifex and explain what it is? I looked at the screenshots of the app. It’s pretty interesting, I must say. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
ALEX
Yeah, Realifex stands for real life experience and the concept is well-being intelligence. And we were if not the first, one of the first really exploring this field in 2014. So it all started with a map which captures moments. So if you think of a moment in our lives, that’s something that is reproducible, that can be aggregated and that can be consolidated through your entire life, right? It’s your memory and your life flow, if you see what I’m saying.
JANE
I do, yes.
ALEX
On each moment what this technology allows to do is to capture your well-being in the moment and to capture also all the contextual data that were there in this very moment. If you think about it, the moment is universal and you can associate with this moment all the contextual data that exists in the world. Now that we are talking about AI and all this general intelligence, the idea of this technology is to really bring that back to a moment of the life of an individual. And why are we doing that? Is to give really unprecedented insights to people on their own existence. So by capturing these moments, they will then see dashboards and a reflection of themselves on what gives them positive well-being and positive impact in their life and what on the opposite is naturally helping them in that direction. That helps people, if you like, to make good decisions for themselves and with all these insights at the end to make these informed decisions.
JANE
And this data, it sounds to me like it’s very personal. How is the data protected? Where does it stay? Where does it live?
ALEX
Yes. So the data is completely encrypted and only available to users. So it’s not shared. And in the terms and conditions, if you like, of the technology, it stipulates that they will never be sold. So there’s no risk that can occur. Now, we use the development of Web3 technology, it’s even more true because you can protect your personal data with signatures on chain and really keep your data private only for you.
JANE
Some of the examples I looked at involve the fact that you’re offering this to companies who want to improve the experience of their customers. So how does this relate to customers of an enterprise?
ALEX
Yeah, so there are many applications actually, whether it is in financial services, for example, for a concept that we’ve called financial well-being, which is this idea that you can empower people with financial security by bringing them this clarity on what they want to do in their life and therefore, matching the financial capacities and capabilities that they will acquire during their life and optimizing this to match actually to their expectations.
Empowering people to make good decisions for themselves
So a financial services provider would offer this to their customers and wouldn’t the service provider see the data in order to be able to make an appropriate proposal to the client?
ALEX
They would only see the data that they need to execute the service. But the consumer is holding the data, if you like, so they decide to share or not share depending on the type of relationship they want to have with the company. So its reverse is completely the relationship we have with companies today because currently it’s quite the opposite. Your data is actually fetched and pulled into the different systems of companies that you are interacting with. In that case, it’s the other way around. So the consumer decides what to share and when to share it and when to stop sharing it just for the purpose of the service because there are, of course, some information that are required to deliver the service to optimize finances. But that’s the extent of the sharing.
JANE
It’s really interesting. It reminds me, I just thought of it now, a short story by Chen Qiufan, a Chinese science fiction writer, and it’s a story about an insurance provider and a family, and the woman has signed up for everyone in her family to be followed on their mobile devices so that the insurance company is asking for that data saying, if everyone in your family is doing things that are healthy, we will keep your rates low. And if people are doing things that are not healthy, then we’re going to increase your rates. And so, it ends up with the mother putting pressure on the family to sign up for this, to agree to this, to help the family save money and to encourage them to do certain things.
And it gets into quite a complex, but very interesting dilemma in this story. And I just thought of it now because it has to do with data about a person and what they’re doing, what makes them feel… Or they don’t talk about it in the terms you do, but the idea is it’s personal data that’s used by the financial insurance provider, as to how they will then manage the contracts. Now I think what you’re talking about is not that.
ALEX
No, it’s not that. It’s the opposite of that, I would say.
JANE
That’s what I was thinking. That’s one reason I find the story interesting. It’s the opposite of the one I described.
ALEX
Yes, exactly. Because this context of wellbeing is really empowering individuals for real and free choice and really controlling their human relationships, but also with companies and service providers. And as I was saying, they can decide really where they want to interact and why they want to interact because they will see the benefit on their wellbeing. We are measuring actually quantifying the wellbeing, and because it’s a collection of moments, we can aggregate and deliver really unique insights for people to really understand what is beneficial to them or what is not. And I think that can revolutionize the very notion of customer even.
It disappears in a way because the companies and the members of this company, if you like, need to work together to have a fair agreement, which is completely equitable because the company will need to comply with the requirements of human beings that know where they want to go and how they want to do it. So that really changes the dynamics departing from consumerism to informed decisions for your own wellbeing. There’s also an application in health for patients that can then measure their well-being also, and the progression of the disease and the mending process. So they’re many applications. The commonality is really to get to empower humans to really think deeply about themselves, their family, of course, and their purpose in life.
JANE
Yeah, that’s very interesting. And with the problems in many countries about access to medical advice, something like this, if it’s respectful of people’s rights to privacy, because you said people are in control of it, then it can be very helpful to people who want to understand what they can do, for example, to improve their own health.
ALEX
Exactly. And offering other routes, other options, and they can choose. They are really empowered to choose their best ways. We had the honor to be rewarded with global design awards for this work, and-
JANE
I saw that.
Recognition from design awards
… there will awards and different awards for design. So yes, definitely promising. Still, it’s a long journey as well because this, as you’ve outlined, changes also the dynamics and the current codes of our current economic system. And that’s, I would say, the commonalities between all the projects that I’m pushing forward, which is to change the game, to really create equity inclusiveness in a world that really has massive problems today.
JANE
Well, congratulations on your awards. I hope that you can get over what the natural skepticism will be about the privacy and the data. And if you keep on working, keep on communicating about it, especially with people giving testimonials about what their experiences have been. The voice of the customer, that’s the most powerful way you can promote what you’re doing. Alex, do you feel that we will enter an era of regeneration in a more complete way than now? Or do you think the politics and the power and money will continue to block progress for decades?
From individual to common: we need to rethink our systems for the people on the planet
Yeah, we’ve definitely entered the transition phase, that’s for sure. I think everybody can feel this energy and the need to rethink our systems to really take into consideration the people on the planet. Now, the current system is strong and there will be a lot of forces slowing down or preventing this movement to emerge, but the movement is there. It has emerged already and it has been a few years already. It’s just our main challenge I think, in that space is really to surface and to communicate on this emerging movement, telling the stories because we have beautiful stories every day talking which project’s more impressive than the other, ambitious and also not necessarily mainstream and controversial and changing the dynamics. But definitely, all these projects exist. There are emerging everywhere in a decentralized way. That’s also what is really interesting and in connection with Hypha. Every day we have calls from these projects who want to use the technology for their endeavor and really have the purpose first in mind.
We are going from individual interest to common interest, and that’s really the transition that needs to occur from high competition to collaboration because the challenges are so massive, so gigantic that there’s not one company that can solve those problems. It needs to be at the human level in a decentralized way, and with these ideas of ecosystem collaboration, organic systems that can adapt, that can really face this complexity directly in a straightforward way. So yeah, to your question, a lot of forces preventing that to emerge, but I think the opposite force is so strong that it’ll emerge. It has to emerge. How much time it’ll take, that’s the question.
JANE
Yeah, I think the bottom-up movements can be very powerful.
ALEX
Exactly.
JANE
My last question, I’m very interested in education, especially education of children, and I wondered how you think we should be educating children today so that they’re ready for what’s happening now and for their own futures?
Education and parallel networks
Yeah, education is a massive issue. And of course, the younger generation will be the ones operating this transition, even more than my generation, for example. Even though we are opening the gates, if you like, and starting to create the structures. I think that it’s a seven-generation endeavor that we are undergoing. I think education needs to be completely revisited at its core because currently it’s oriented to create… I will be a bit… But to create good consumers, to insert people into the current economic system and to give them a role and to define their pathway as well in life, buying a home, a car, etc. There are different steps like this that we learn at school that are not necessarily really important or even interesting.
I think we are seeing a lot of parallel networks of education that are talking about regeneration to children and really exploring the human side and the ecological side from the first age. And I think what we are seeing is that it completely changes also the behavior of kids around this education because we are freeing up creativity and also educating children for them to understand that they are parts of the world not dominating the natural world as such. So that’s really interesting to see the shift. There are a lot of programs in our network around youth and education for children and definitely, we think that that’s a priority. That’s really something that needs to be done to empower youth for them to define their path in life and push forward this transition.
JANE
Do you have any particular point that you’d like to add? Any final message that you’d like to share?
Call to action: making regeneration mainstream
Yes, maybe a call to action to an invitation for anyone who wants to explore these regenerative pathways, wellbeing pathways that we are deeply exploring in our networks to join us, to simply reach out to us and to propose their contribution because that’s an open network and everything we create is for the common good. And we need a lot of people to organize this transition and to make it mainstream.
JANE
How would someone join? Would it be through your website?
ALEX
Through the hypha.earth website, yes. And they will find the link to our social platforms, Discord or others, and we can reach out to them through these channels. Thanks so much, Jane.
JANE
Thank you very much.
ALEX
Great. Thank you.
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