By Amalie Stoker, TIFS Research Intern
Deep in Ecuador’s Amazon headwaters, the Sharamentsa Achuar community has spent generations stewarding roughly 10,000 hectares of rainforest—tracking jaguars, tending the land, and maintaining relationships with the forest that don’t easily fit into discrete ecological, cultural, or economic categories. In 2024, that stewardship became the basis for a new kind of financial instrument: a Biocultural Jaguar Credit, issued through Regen Network and co-designed with the Sharamentsa community and Fundación Pachamama.
The credit is notable because its design attempts to hold together forms of value that environmental markets often separate. It recognizes jaguar habitat and biodiversity alongside the cultural knowledge and stewardship practices that have helped sustain the landscape over time. That approach matters as markets for carbon, biodiversity, water quality, and other ecosystem services continue to grow.
Across these markets, financial actors are trying to make ecological outcomes measurable, verifiable, and investable. Yet many of the ecosystems generating that value are sustained through stewardship that is place-specific, relational, and difficult to standardize. The challenge is therefore larger than determining how to price an ecological outcome. It is also about designing financial infrastructure that reflects how stewardship actually works—and determining who has the power to define, govern, and benefit from that infrastructure.
For TIFS, this is a familiar problem. Much of our work focuses on the “Missing Middle”: the financial and market infrastructure needed to move capital toward regenerative and agroecological systems in ways that respond to the realities of place, production, and community. Ecosystem-service markets raise related questions. How can finance recognize ecological value without stripping it from the social and cultural systems that sustain it? How can financial mechanisms be structured so communities retain meaningful agency over the knowledge, data, land-use decisions, and economic value involved?
Several emerging models offer an early look at how people are approaching those questions.
What gets valued?
At its simplest, an ecocredit is a verified unit of ecological outcome. It might represent carbon sequestered, habitat protected, or improved water quality. What varies considerably is how those outcomes are defined, who determines their value, and what rights are attached to the resulting financial instrument.
Regen Network operates a blockchain-based registry for carbon, biodiversity, water quality, and social and cultural dimensions of land stewardship. Its Biocultural Jaguar Credits reflect an effort to design a credit around a more integrated understanding of ecological value. The credit is built on a biodiversity methodology from ERA Brazil, which has since issued its own credits for jaguar habitat in Brazil, and was also developed with partners including the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, which has framed it as a model for “ancestral stewardship credits” across the wider bioregion.
Regen also built participation into its broader structure. At mainnet launch in 2021, Regen tasked its foundation with distributing 30 percent of the token supply to stakeholder groups, including smallholder farmers, Indigenous peoples, and rights-of-nature projects. The significance lies less in the blockchain itself than in what was decided before the transaction was recorded. In the case of the Jaguar Credit, the community helped shape the mechanism and the forms of value it was intended to recognize. That distinction matters. Technology can make a transaction more traceable or efficient. It cannot, on its own, determine whose knowledge counts, who sets the terms, or how power is distributed.
Who controls the data?
GainForest approaches the problem differently.
Co-founded by Dr. David Dao, an AI researcher at ETH Zurich, GainForest grew out of a 2017 UN hackathon prototype and now uses a “Measure-to-Earn” model that pays community members directly for ecological monitoring. Its system combines tools such as satellite and drone imagery, bioacoustic sensors, and offline-capable data collection designed to work in places where reliable connectivity cannot be assumed.
Rather than turning every ecological outcome into a standardized, fungible credit, GainForest has used Hypercerts—digital impact certificates—and blockchain-based escrow to release funding as verified milestones are reached. The model stands out because it does not assume biodiversity must be made interchangeable to attract capital. Its approach to data governance may be even more consequential. GainForest has developed tools intended to give communities greater control over how ecological knowledge is collected, used, and modeled, including what the organization calls a community’s “right to remain unmodeled.”
That idea raises a question ecosystem-service markets will increasingly need to confront: whether the information required to make ecological value legible to investors can be generated without transferring control of that knowledge away from the people and communities who hold it.
Here, financial innovation is less about creating a new asset than about redesigning the relationship among stewardship, information, verification, and payment.
When standardization becomes the constraint
The tension between ecological complexity and financial standardization becomes clearer when projects are difficult to translate into scalable market products.
Around 2018, Regen Network, which grew out of Terra Genesis International, worked with Terra Genesis and Eco Cacao on a regenerative cacao initiative involving a cooperative of roughly 100 farmers in Ecuador. The project sought to pair changes in farming practice with a verification system designed to measure environmental and social outcomes together. The model shared some principles that later appeared in the Jaguar Credit, including community participation in shaping the project.
But cacao presented a harder challenge. Measuring outcomes relied on customized, on-the-ground data collection rather than the standardized methods that carbon markets favor. The initiative did not become a lasting credit class on Regen’s registry, while the platform increasingly focused on carbon and, more recently, biodiversity credits.
The example points to a structural challenge that extends well beyond a single project. Financial markets tend to reward standardization, comparability, liquidity, and scale. Many regenerative and community-led systems operate differently. Their value may be embedded in local ecological conditions, cultural knowledge, relationships, governance arrangements, and long-term stewardship practices that do not translate easily into uniform units. If the financial mechanism requires those differences to disappear in order to attract capital, some of the value the market is trying to support may be lost in the process.
This is where fit-for-purpose financial design becomes especially important.
Not every innovation requires a token
Other models reinforce the same point.
Kula, for example, applies tokenization to governance rather than directly to an environmental outcome. Token holders participate in funding and treasury decisions for RegionalDAOs managing projects in places including Zambia and Nepal. The model is closer to assigning governance or voting rights than creating a conventional ecosystem-service credit.
COMACO offers a different reference point altogether because its model does not depend on blockchain. The Zambian social enterprise has organized smallholder farmers into cooperatives, paid premiums for sustainably produced goods sold through its “It’s Wild!” brand, and layered carbon finance through REDD+ and sustainable-agriculture programs on top of those market relationships.
Taken together, these approaches suggest that the most important innovation is not necessarily a particular technology. The more consequential question is whether the financial structure fits the ecological and social system it is intended to support.
Designing finance around the system
Ecosystem-service markets are still evolving, and many of these models remain relatively small or experimental. But they already surface a set of design questions that will become more important as more capital seeks exposure to biodiversity, carbon, water, and other forms of ecological value. Questions include:
Who defines what is valuable?
Who owns and controls the data used to demonstrate that value?
Who participates in the design and governance of the financial mechanism?
Who carries the risk?
And who ultimately captures the economic benefit?
The examples explored in this piece do not offer a single answer. They do suggest that the technology used to record or transfer value is only one part of the equation. Financial innovation becomes more meaningful when it is built around the realities of stewardship rather than asking stewardship systems to conform to a financial product’s needs. That may mean recognizing multiple forms of value at once. It may mean giving communities greater control over data and governance. And in some cases, it may mean resisting standardization where standardization would erase the very qualities that make a system resilient.
For TIFS, that is the larger lesson. Closing the Missing Middle is not simply about creating more financial products or finding new ways to price ecological outcomes. It is about building the infrastructure that allows capital to meet complex, place-based systems on terms that support their long-term health.
As ecosystem-service markets develop, that design challenge deserves at least as much attention as the technologies used to finance them.