Context: My Summer 2026 Lecture Tour in Europe
Dear friends,
I have been on a rare and intensive lecture tour, something I have not done since 2019, when Covid broke out. This trip is has brought me
to Bochum, Germany, where I participated in a summer school by the Max Planck Institute on Security and Privacy, (see for the program here).
I would like to particularly invite you to check out my final presentation in slide form, an exercise I have not done for a few years, which summarizes the whole p2p/commons approach.
It adds two key slides illustrating the priorities of our current transition moment:
* from P2P (individual peer association logic) to P4P (alliances of regenerative community projects)
* the shift from ‘Seed Form’ observation to the more integrative Reconstruction Paradigm. The latter refers to a wholesale reorganization of the P2P Foundation wiki content around the new paradigm of Reconstruction, check it out here: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Reconstruction
The two particular slides are copied from the recent article by Aline Frankfort, which reacted to our last article on the Valley of the Commons project, which started on August 23.
Check it out here:
https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7482665367815962624?
to Belgium, to visit a collapse-aware community project, led by Anne Billen and Neil Davidson (And Now What)
to France, to talk to an audience that consisted of three different movements,
i.e. Planetizen, which thinks about new forms of planetary citizenship,
Plurality, which thinks about new democratic tooling for the world as a Pluriverse, and
RadicalXchange, RxC , which looks at how market based mechanisms and incentives could be used for the common good
The first week of August, I joined a local bioregional project organized by Franz Nahrada and associates, in Bad Radkersburg, Austria, followed by attending the Crypto Commons Gathering this previous week in the CommonsHub, Vienna, and the last week of August, i.e. right now, I am keynoting at the Valley of the Commons ‘pop-up village’ learning event.
I would now like to briefly introduce the context for this guest article, which struck me because it explicitly refers to my own work on cosmo-localism.
The project below is typical of a new breed of projects that aims to be both locally rooted, with physical cooperative work on actual regeneratively-oriented farms, aligned with the global coordination and collective ‘distributed’ investment capacities which have been developed by Web3.
You will have heard about,
The wonderful work of the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal, which recently succeeded in upping its balance sheet to 1M euro .
Rifai Sicilia is a project in Sicily which similarly marries farming and Web3 collective investment, and promotes a new model called GrowFi, “an open-source regenerative finance protocol that Rifai Sicilia is developing to turn agricultural and regenerative production into investable, on-chain assets.” . Essentially, if you invest in those farms, the ‘interest’ on your investment is a share of the actual product, in this case, olive oil.
The project presented here is in the same vein, and may appear quite modest.
Nevertheless, the article struck me because it is explicitly framed in a cosmo-local framework and is inspired by the kind of ideas presented in my writing and Substack. So please check out how a Brazilian farm has created a hybrid cosmo-local process, and introduces the important idea of a ‘Networked Rooted Society’, which blends local regenerative identity with planetary cooperation.
In the meantime, I have also discovered a very impressive integration by a Ukrainian Ecovillage network called Green Road. This is significant because the Ukrainians are living the kind of ‘apocalyptic’ disintegration that many more people will experience in the future decades. Their integration of the physical and the digital is therefore not a matter of ‘fashion’, but of survival.
Check out how their dashboard integrates the physical and digital!
Beyond ReFi: The Day a Brazilian Family Farm Paid Its Electricity Bill with Ethereum
By: AgroforestDAO
July 2026
For the past few years, the Web3 ecosystem has been obsessed with the acronym “ReFi” (Regenerative Finance). Whitepapers promise global carbon markets, algorithmic liquidity pools for biodiversity, and tokenized ecosystems designed to save the planet. Yet, for the average farmer tending to the soil, these concepts feel very distant. There is a deep, frustrating chasm between digital protocols and the physical “last mile” of rural reality.
In mid-2026, on a hillside farm in Brazil, that chasm was quietly bridged.
The brother and sister managing Redemption Hill—a project focused on web3-funded syntropic agroforestry —successfully used their individual Peanut account to pay their May 2026 farm electricity bill. It was a tangible demonstration of one of the possible ways that global digital solidarity can meet grounded, ecological stewardship.
But this moment was not an overnight success. It is the result of a rigorous, three-year dual-onboarding process. We are not merely onboarding users to a tech stack or to new agricultural practices. We are doing both, taking control of the toolkit needed to shape a possible Community Agriculture movement adapted for this century, a networked Rooted Society.
To understand how this Network Society would work, we must look to Michel Bauwens’ landmark essay, “The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization,” featured in the book Ethereum Localism (available at The Open Machine). Bauwens outlines a design rule for our survival: “What is heavy is local; what is light is global.”
Our dual-onboarding model is the living, breathing execution of this cosmo-local design rule.
The Dual Onboarding: Balancing the “Heavy” and the “Light”
Transitioning local farmers into a Rooted Society requires rejecting both the instant-gratification loop of conventional, extractive agriculture and the speculative volatility of traditional crypto. Instead, it demands navigating two monumental, simultaneous paradigm shifts that align perfectly with the cosmo-local model:
Paradigm Shift 1: The “Heavy” Biological Reality (Local)
The first shift is physical, heavy, and deeply rooted in the earth. As Bauwens argues, physical production must be localized to minimize thermodynamic waste and respect planetary boundaries. Onboarding into syntropic agroforestry demands a complete departure from the extractive, short-term logic of conventional agribusiness.
It requires:
Long-Term Vision over Quick Returns: Stewards must design multi-layered successional systems, understanding that the banana plant they prune today is feeding the avocado tree that will bear fruit in five years.
Attunement to Seasonal Cycles: Working with, rather than fighting, local biological rhythms—managing organic biomass, building soil mycelium, and timing planting lines with natural rainfall.
Rebuilding Community Agriculture: Moving away from isolated, competitive commercial farming. To heal from the isolation of the modern food system, stewards must share their learnings, workforce, reputation and celebrations, actively rebuilding sovereignty from the bottom up.
Paradigm Shift 2: The “Light” Digital Infrastructure (Global Cosmo-Localism)
While physical work remains heavy and local, the economic and intellectual resources supporting it must be light, global, and shared. Onboarding into Web3 mutual support is about establishing a mutual aid network built on local financial sovereignty, connected to a global digital commons. It requires:
The Discipline of Autocustody: Moving from passive reliance on centralized, extractive banking structures to active ownership. Stewards must learn to secure and manage their own digital wallets and payment rails, taking full responsibility for their capital.
Cooperative Funding & Multisigs: Making it easy for collectives to have a collective account, something that banks don’t do.
Accessing the Global Commons: Learning how to tokenize or apply for community-driven public goods funding (via platforms like Gitcoin, Revnets, and Artizen) to funnel global capital directly into local, physical agricultural infrastructure, while providing different kinds of usufruct to supporters.
In Ethereum Localism, Bauwens notes that localism on its own cannot resist globalized, extractive economic pressure. It must be reinforced by a global network. By utilizing Ethereum as a shared, open-source ledger, local stewards can tap into a global mutual-support system without losing their local autonomy.
2023 vs. 2026: The Tech Evolution That Erased the Friction
When this dual-onboarding journey began three years ago, navigating the digital side of this shift felt like an uphill battle. Onboarding local farmers to Web3 meant wrestling with 12-word seed phrases, manually adding RPC networks on wallets that didn’t work well on smartphones, and calculating transaction gas in native blockchain tokens. It was a cognitive overload that pulled energy away from the actual work in the soil.
By 2026, the technology finally grew up to meet the user. The arrival of Starlink and the integration of Account Abstraction has turned wallet creation into a secure, one-click process using familiar Google logins, completely removing the fear of losing a paper seed phrase specially for payment accounts. More importantly, the rise of direct, self-custodial “Scan-to-Pay” rails has changed the game in Brazil.
Instead of going through complex exchange off-ramps, modern Web3 wallets can now scan standard national QR codes directly. When the utility bill arrives, the stewards simply point their phone camera at the barcode. The wallet instantly converts their on-chain stablecoins or $ETH on low-cost networks into the national currency, settling the transaction on the central bank’s instant payment rail in under ten seconds.
The complexity of the blockchain is entirely abstracted away. To the stewards, it feels as simple, fast, and secure as using a local digital banking app. The transaction from the multisig is in this link and the electricity bill can be seen below:
Glocal Friendship in Action
This dual-onboarding loop closed beautifully this winter. The funds used to secure this sovereignty were pooled from community-driven ecosystems, including Artizen, the Localism Fund, and AgroforestDAO.
The Redemption Hill stewards managed these resources collectively through their multisig wallet. Every financial decision—whether it was investing in permanent agroforestry tools or settling a monthly utility invoice via a quick QR scan—was executed with radical, unalterable transparency and detailed in notes attached to each transaction.
When the May electricity bill arrived, the stewards didn’t need to liquidate their physical farm assets or fall into local debt cycles. Following the cosmo-local playbook, they used a “light” global asset to solve a “heavy” local constraint. They routed the value through their transparent on-chain treasury to their individual payment wallet, scanned the QR code to easily pay the bill and kept their focus entirely where it belonged: on pruning their successional strata and tending to the living soil.
The Thermodynamic Bottom Line: A Climax Community
Paying an electricity bill with crypto is a poetic inversion of Web3’s early narrative. For years, blockchains were criticized for consuming massive amounts of grid energy to secure abstract data. At Redemption Hill, we are seeing the exact opposite: abstract digital tokens are being used to protect, maintain, and expand real-world, biological energy systems.
This is what the transition to a Rooted Society looks like. It is the practical execution of Michel Bauwens’ cosmo-local vision. It is not found in complex derivatives or carbon credits traded in skyscraper boardrooms. It is found on a farm in Minas Gerais, where a brother and sister have mastered both the successional cycles of the soil and the tools of the digital commons.
We are replacing landless, resource-starved isolation with systemic synergy. There’s a lot of room to grow in this field, and it is time to start using the term Regeneration in an ecological sense instead of a social, financial or spiritual one. We invite all computer scientists to keep it simple and focus on long term agroecosystems so there will be no doubt that your work is delivering relevant public goods.
How is tokenizing nature a protection?