Whitepaper
Our Vision
"So much good can be done on so many levels" - Elinor Ostrom
Figure 3: Illustration of the GainForest ecosystem
Our mission
GainForest's mission is to reverse global deforestation; to stop the damage and start the repair of our natural world. To achieve our mission, we catalyze impactful community-based nature conservation by incentivizing frictionless sustainable financing through trust-enhancing technology.
Our inspiration
We are inspired by Elinor Ostrom's seminal work on Governing the Commons and her eight robust design principles:
- Define clear group boundaries
- Match rules to local needs
- Community participation
- Community-based monitoring
- Graduated sanctions
- Provide low-cost dispute resolution
- Protect rule-making sovereignty
- Nested decision hierarchies for scaling commons-oriented governance
GainForest aims to translate Ostrom’s groundbreaking ideas into digital equivalences through smart contracts. We hope to provide local communities with a technological solution that enables the needed trust, knowledge, and stakeholder engagement to successfully implement these principles that would be otherwise hard to implement.
Figure 4: The GainForest platform replaces a trusted third party with a self-enforcing smart contract thus providing transparent and frictionless transactions. A programmable smart contract also creates automated trust through data-driven impact verification and novel incentives for donors and investors through token economics.
Our vision
GainForest envisions a world where modern technology unlocks unprecedented stakeholder engagement for local communities through radical transparency and automated trust. Therefore, the GainForest association aims to guide and support modern philanthropy, non-governmental organizations and frontline communities with our commitment to frictionless and transparent financing and automated and audible impact verification. The association openly develops and maintains the GainForest technology stack which includes its smart contracts and machine learning impact verification system. We also provide close technical support to indigenous communities to help them achieve sustainable self-governance.