Pretend we’re stuck in an elevator together, just chatting it up and I ask you what you do, what is Ecosapiens’ elevator pitch?
Nihar Neelakanti: If we met on an elevator and you asked me what Ecosapiens was, I’d say Ecosapiens is the home of carbon-backed digital art and our core mission is to make climate action easy, accessible, economical, and social. And so we do that through our digital art, called an Ecosapien, that offsets your carbon footprint and is a really cool piece of art that you can display in a lot of different places. That’s what we do.
Who is someone that you admire? And how do they shape the work that you are doing now?
Nihar: It’s probably a cheesy answer, I think he’s really inspired a lot about my sort of logic behind the Ecosapiens thesis, but Steve Jobs. I admire him a lot because he brought design thinking and culture to a space, technology software in the early days, that was very binary and didn’t have the most aesthetically pleasing interfaces. That was a contrarian view to bring design thinking to software. But the primary unlock was that really good design can make interfaces more accessible to more people and more usable and therefore it functions better. When we think about making climate action accessible to people, it was sort of the same idea. You can’t just give people carbon credits, that’s not the most attractive form factor. You don’t really get repeatability out of it, too. But if you disguise this using really interesting art and culture, then maybe that’s actually the hook to making carbon credits more attractive and accessible. And so Steve Jobs bringing design to software has been an inspiration to us and the thesis that we have here at Ecosapiens.
If you could change one thing about blockchain technology, what would it be and why?
Nihar: It’s both the pro and con of blockchain but by tokenizing everything you’re essentially financializing a lot of different things like internet-based assets. Whether it’s your attention, your ability to click on something, a transaction, money moving, whatever. While that I think enables us to create value for consumers, for example, if you turn data into tokens, then you’re now in control of your data. But the flip side to that is in the early days of new technologies you get a lot of people there that are there for speculative reasons. So this is where I’m qualifying the question, because I think it’s the trade off you have to make for ascertaining value to lots of different digital goods. But I would want to find ways to remove speculation from the equation. Frankly, I don’t know if you can just yet. I mean if you go back to the dot-com era in the 90s, there was a big hype cycle around anything that was a dot-com. Then you have the collapse and then you have real innovation happen. So I wonder if that’s just happening here.
You have five minutes to sit down with Satoshi. What are you doing and what’s the one thing you’d like to ask?
Nihar: I wish I had a really big hairy question I’d like to ask Satoshi but I’d be curious to see and learn from whoever this person is if they saw a series of chapters unfolding and if they really had like a tree of logic laid out or if it was an evolution. You never know when there’s going to be a big change in the genetic code that results in a new species, it just kind of happens. I wonder if it was more of that or if there was actually a story to it. I’d also want to know what they thought about the first ever pizza purchase using Bitcoin, and whether that was them and all the absurd things you see using crypto payments. I’m curious to see what they think.
Would you do any out-there activity or would you just want to sit down and talk with them?
Nihar: I just want to sit down and talk with them. So when people ask you, who are the people you would want to have at a dinner table. For me, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, Satoshi, and a few others at that table, believe it or not.
Our last question and the reason why we’re here is, but why, blockchain? Why are you using it? What is it doing? And why do we care about it?
Nihar: In two words it’s aligning incentives, period. So I think climate action is an issue that has compounded due to the way our economic system works. Where we have land, labor, and capital equals production equals value creation for humans. But you don’t price in the negative externalities like production, which is that we have a finite number of resources. We don’t have a new planet that spawns whenever. So to actually create a system that makes it possible to achieve human endeavor, but also to regenerate the planet, I think is necessary. The blockchain as an economic system is actually really good for that because, at least in our case, for example, like Ecosapiens, because consumers want to make a difference. But the issue is making a difference is not easy, it’s not economical, and it’s missing this sort of cultural ingredient. If you flip it around and if you make climate action easy, not only cheaper, but let’s say it’s financially attractive, through tradable assets and you give it that art and culture, then that’s actually the way to flip around the incentives of climate action. Rather than being hard, expensive, and boring, now it’s easy, financially attractive, and cool. And that’s aligning incentives. When we first founded Ecosapiens, I got that question all the time too, like why can’t you do this in Web2. And it could have been done in Web 2 but it’s not for a reason. This is probably one of the most promising ways to do so, through the blockchain. So I’m super bullish, obviously.
Ecosapiens is on Twitter, Discord, and Instagram. Follow them to stay up-to-date on their work.
