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Elevate Festival Videos 2024

Elevate Festival Media Archive

Using Blockchains to save the Commons

Our planet suffers from the burden of people and the hunger for resources that emanates from them. Phenomena such as climate change, species extinction, marine pollution and air pollution can be traced back to a fundamental problem - a large part of the costs that we humans generate with our lifestyles are not paid by the polluter. In concrete terms, they are passed on to society, paid collectively and usually with a time lag.

There are already attempts to prevent this injustice: Elinor Ostrom, in particular, has intensively researched how the management of common goods can look like. And thanks to blockchain technology and the token economy that builds on it, this can be set up from scratch.

You can learn more about this from our guests: Griff Green, together with a global team, is working intensively on building the "Commons Stack", a development framework that allows the simulation and construction of fully functional microeconomic systems. Shermin Voshmgir and the Institute of Cryptoeconomics (WU Vienna) are mainly involved in the development of purpose-based tokens. And the lab10 collective with Thomas Zeinzinger has launched the energy-saving ARTIS blockchain, which as an infrastructure for climate protection projects should help our society to transform it hopefully promptly into a #ZeroCarbonSociety.

Presented in cooperation with We Are Europe.

We Are Europe