The result is the world’s first nature-backed financial instruments, according to CEO Merit Valdsalu.
Everyone wants to get paid for doing nothing. Novel venture capital group Single Earth has found just the right way for property owners to do exactly that. And you don’t have to be a Wall Street hedge fund shorting stock or part of a Reddit investment mob to make it happen. The goal: saving the planet. The tool: blockchain, tokenization, and a stock exchange for natural value. The result? The world’s first nature-backed financial instruments, according to CEO Merit Valdsalu. “Single Earth is an online platform that enables forests, wetlands, and other natural resources to generate profit without being sold as raw materials… but instead as carbon offsets and biodiversity offsets,” Valdsalu told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. “We reward landowners for not clearcutting their forests and not digging up their wetlands … but instead, for preserving the ecosystems that actually keep all of us alive.” As a concept, it’s simple. Single Earth tokenizes land, forests, swamps, and biodiversity: any area of rich ecological significance. Companies, organizations, and eventually individuals will be able to purchase those tokens and own fractional amounts of those lands and natural resources, getting carbon offsets in return as well as ongoing ownership rights. And land owners get paid for… doing nothing to their land. “Single Earth is not a fund itself,” chief technical officer Andrus Aaslaid told me. “We are not trying to become the largest landowner in the world. We are trying to provide the technology that people who own the land would be able to create profit out of it without having to sell it as raw material.
