Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. The podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I'm the SVP of communications here at swirl labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am delighted to be joined by Tony Guerra, Donna, who is the CTO and member of the board at the perrine foundation. Hi, Tony, how are you? Hi Thanks for having me. I'm great. How are you? Good, good. So, Tony, the Perini foundation is probably new to most of our listeners. Can you tell us what does the foundation do? What's its mission in life? So putting your foundation is a very young foundation. We're, I think, five or six years old. We are Switzerland based. And the goal of foundation is adopt innovation, technology for nature, conservation and protecting nature and the people who live in these areas. Great And you you mentioned that you've just started a few years ago. Tell us a little bit about the project that you are launching with Hedera. So maybe if I can roll back a little bit the history and why innovation, technology and how it came into existence. I think the context of blockchain is important there. So basically I'm a blockchain geek since 2012 called the level. I was mining Bitcoin on Xboxes just for fun because there wasn't ASICs back then. And my friend Roman, who was also in the board, the CEO, he is in conservation since many years so and he's been working for iucn, which is a very big global organization, active in more than 100 countries and an incumbent organization. And basically he told them. The easiest use case for blockchain is cross-border payment, and you have a lot of cross-border payments. If you can save 2% or 3% and bring that back to the protected areas that actually need it, that's a good thing. And back then I was 16 or 17. It was still reputational risk, regulatory and securities, all that. So we said we take all the risk and we create the foundation and we externalize the development of blockchain applications that are implemented for nature disinformation. And that's why we started with an implementing blockchain use cases for conservation. So we had a big partner right from the start. We, we adopted and we created a zero carbon blockchain in 2018, but slowly and the longer, the more we discovered. Our our it's not our key expertise to maintain a layer on blockchain. That's that's not what we're best at. So so we started to look around for good partner that have a blockchain or a DLT that can scale, that makes sense for big global organization and and that's why we got in touch with our I said, well that actually makes sense in terms of application. We never said we do NFTS, but last year we did. We always called it nature collectibles. I'm very skeptical towards the hype elements of the blockchain worlds. So last year we built a so-called digital collectible where we mapped endangered species as nature collectibles. We had quite some success. It was a pilot with three protected areas, and now we decided to move to a Ta with all our blockchain applications. Use that for our and like the real release with eight protected areas where we have these nature collectibles protected areas with their endangered species in an app that has all the gamification that is needed for a project, a project like that. And yes, I mean, certainly we know very well that building and maintaining layer 1 network is very difficult. Right so that is the core of what Hedera does. How did you come to find Hedera as you were realizing that that's probably not core to your business to build out one yourselves? I can't remember now. I think it's personal connections. Coincidences I met I had it on the radar. Since since a while. I think through I think at the end of aws, I think that was the key moment where, where we got in touch and met and, and also through some contacts that, that I met in, in, in previous interactions where people from Hedera were working at other organizations, where I was also working at other nations where we've met in previous business lives. And I think that was really was, was the, the kicking moment where we say, oh, let's do something. And then we met again in New York at NFT, New York. Yes yes, definitely. I know we had a contingent out at Davos and there were a lot of discussions around what kind of deal can be green, how can they contribute to these kinds of projects, and how can projects that have an environmental focus feel comfortable using dlt? It's the key. I mean, the infrastructure needs to be net to have a net net footprint that is 0 or below. This is absolutely key also for our partner. This was always clear. If that's not the case, we're not going to touch it. Sorry, I interrupted. No, you're fine. So hopefully this means when you talk about nature collectibles, I assume this means that you will, for every collectible that you sell, hopefully you will get a larger piece of the donations that can go towards your work, because there's not the issue of paying $30 for a cross border payment or whatever that might be. Well, we're actually quite radical in our approach. We say primary market, the first issuance just goes 100% to the protected areas. Even if we have costs, we go, we put it directly there. They receive everything the user pays, which also makes sure that there will there won't be any trading or other dodgy stuff that you don't want in these collectibles or NFTs. So primary market, 100% of the protected area. And then what is interesting, we say, OK, in the secondary market, if you have a collectable, an NFT and you resell it, the reseller makes some money, but also some of the money that is added to the price is going to the protected area and the tiny portion to us. So we only benefit for the foundation in secondary market and to a tiny, tiny degree. And what is also important quite often what you have in donation area or in the protected area businesses, that there is a big donator or a foundation and they spend a lot of money, a lot of media presence, and basically you have a cake for Christmas, but what you really want is a Bowl of rice every day. So so that's what we try to generate recurring revenue for the protected areas where there is an alignment of interest of, of Sellers, buyers and, and the protected areas. And so how has obviously had the experience of building out your own blockchain and developing on that? How has the experience been developing on hedera? So basically we have a team of software engineers and I was surprised how, how, how easy it is. And so it was really low threshold. If you've done stuff on blockchains, it's really no, no problem at all. I was a bit worried at the beginning, but it's really a piece of cake. And the second thing, what was really good, but what I kind of expected from the personal contacts that I had, like the support is massive. So it's, you know, a quick message on the Slack or a phone call or WhatsApp message and you get supported community is absolutely great in terms of supporting but also in the human interactions where what I think, you know, I don't want to work with robots I want to work with humans that are more than just numbers and figures. That's right. And I know our developer advocate team is so eager to help projects as they work. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship with the Bar Foundation as well? So basically we're in touch. We actually we only briefly met online and we meet the end of this week, so I would know more in a week. So we are in touch is a great support that we get in many ways. So, so but I haven't been there physically so I'll go to the place near Zurich on Friday. Great good. What do you see longer term, your vision for the foundation, what you all hope to do and what parts of it you would like to put on the ledger going forward. So so basically, we have two focuses, these nature collectibles and the carbon credit. So we develop a new methodology for carbon credits. With iucn, we have access to a big area of the planet on land based. Basically, IUCN has created the green list standard, which is a standard for protected areas. And this standard creates already a lot of data. And we will add to more criterias that we can use that for carbon credit issues. That's something that we will look at very closely very soon also with your team. So I think there is massive opportunities there to also if you look at the figures of carbon credits, the predictions from Ernst Young and all the others, and also the Warning voices who say that nobody is ready for prices of $200 to $300 for a ton of CO2. And I think if we do want to have impact, we have to look at the climate crisis and the easiest and fastest way to measure and create impact is if you like it or not, carbon credits. Yeah so really taking a holistic view, right, not only on the fundraising side but bringing transparency to sort of your entire process and and ecosystem. I think. And the challenge really is if you, if you, if you think of organizations that are big and have the reason for existence through overhead. So if you say we want to bring transparency and efficiency is not something smart because you reduce your overhead. But that's really what we try to do where we say, ideally our foundation is not needed anymore. And we have tools that in an idealistic vision are now managed that create impact on the ground. But I think those are completely another topic difficult to manage, difficult to handle. I've been collecting some experiences, so there's a long way to go. Really the foundation should be just the enabler that gets the ball rolling. Yeah one step at a time. Right absolutely. Well, Tony, Thank you for joining us today. Any other words of wisdom or things you'd like to share with our community before we wrap up? Well, honestly, I think it really is worth checking the user friendliness of the nature collectibles. I think users understand. I mean, if you're in blockchain, of course, it's no problem. But I think we have to talk to the big masses and they understand apps and they understand web shops. And if we can have a user experience that is really an app and do all the magic with the blockchain behind or the dag, that's, that's when we can create success. So I'd like to invite you all to, to just download the nature collectible app and just get the user experience and share it with your friends and family and show this is, this is what blockchain is. It's nothing magic. It's just an app. And so if I want to go download that app, where do I go? Is it on the Apple store? It's on both stores, iOS and Apple. We're looking at worldwide store as well. That might take a couple of months. And the nature collectibles, if you look for collectibles, you'll find it in Google or whatever. You look for it. There is also nature collectibles website or the perimeter foundation website and there will be hopefully quite a lot of media and reports about it as well. So that you will find it if you look for it. All right. And the app is called nature collectibles, is that right? The app is called nature collectibles. That is right. All right. And it runs on Hedera. So that's the best part of it. Beautiful we will go check it out. I encourage everyone in our community to do the same. Tony, Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you will come back as you continue on this journey and keep us updated. And we appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. All the best.
