Can a digital token solve conservation's oldest funding problem?

The economics of tropical forest protection have a structural problem that philanthropy, carbon markets, and biodiversity credits have all failed to fully solve. BioFia, a conservation finance initiative brought together by David Ontaneda (Director of Strategy & Partnerships at Fundación Maquipucuna), Gunthar Hartwig (Product, Research, and Design Consultant & Advisor), and a small core team including conservation expert Rebecca Justicia, is proposing a different architecture. It is early stage, the concept is still being tested with communities and investors, and nothing has been piloted yet. But the problem it is trying to solve is real, and the thinking behind it is worth understanding.

The problem with existing models

David Ontaneda's family has been running a cloud forest reserve in Ecuador for decades. In 2017, the government sold mining concessions covering 80% of the reserve with no prior consultation. When the family went to fight this, the Minister of Environment told them two things: he answered to the Minister of Mines and Resources, and unless conservation could pay the same as mining, there was no hope for the forest. This from a minister who, by David's account, actually cared and wanted to do good, but was working inside a system where the economics simply did not allow for it.

That conversation is what led David and his colleagues to search for ways to make nature protection genuinely investable. The tools currently available to private forest protectors each carry significant limitations.

Philanthropy creates dependency and favours large, well-connected institutions. Government funding moves too slowly and rarely reaches communities on the ground. Ecotourism is vulnerable to geopolitical instability. Carbon markets have an additionality problem: a forestry company that clears primary forest, plants a monoculture, and sells credits on the new growth can access the market more easily than a community that has successfully protected untouched primary forest for generations. And biodiversity credits, while promising in theory, remain early stage, voluntary, capital intensive to measure, and almost entirely dependent on corporate relationships to find buyers. The biodiversity credit market is not structured as an investable asset, it is closer to directed philanthropy, where a buyer supports a specific outcome but cannot trade their position or receive a financial return.

The result is that the forests with the highest ecological value, intact, irreplaceable primary tropical forest are systematically the hardest to finance.

What BioFia is proposing

BioFia's proposed solution is a dual token system built on a simple premise: nature is the store of value, and the people protecting it should be the ones who benefit from that value.

The first token is the Standing Forest Token, or SFT. Each SFT represents one verified hectare of intact primary tropical forest. The token is minted by the forest protector, not by BioFia or any central issuer. The forest protector verifies their hectare, receives the token, and can sell it on an open market. The total supply of SFTs is capped at one billion, matched to current global estimates of primary tropical forest. That fixed supply is intentional: as forests disappear, the number of tokens that can ever be minted decreases, building scarcity into the system from the ground up. If all one billion tokens were eventually minted, that would mean a billion hectares of primary tropical forest had been successfully verified and protected, a strong signal of value rather than a reason for it to collapse.

Every time an SFT changes hands on the secondary market, a transaction fee flows back to the original forest protector. That creates a recurring royalty stream that does not require the forest protector to sell their land, take on debt, or depend on a single corporate buyer. Forests with higher biodiversity can earn higher royalties, reflecting the greater ecological value of what is being protected.

The second token is the Annual Verification Token, or AVT. Where the SFT is fungible and tradable, the AVT is unique to each specific hectare of forest. It is issued annually, based on verified performance, and bundles together all the ecosystem benefits that hectare provides: carbon credits, biodiversity credits, water benefits, and any other applicable credit mechanisms. Forest protectors already engaged with carbon or biodiversity credit schemes can integrate their existing credits into the AVT structure rather than having to choose between systems. The AVT is also designed to be contextually adaptable, in jurisdictions where conservation activities can generate fungible tax certificates that businesses can apply to their tax bills, as Costa Rica's green tax model already allows, that benefit could be incorporated as a feature of the AVT structure.

The investor side of the model is designed to serve two different motivations. A financially driven investor can buy and trade SFTs as an appreciating asset, with scarcity driving long-term value. An environmentally motivated investor including corporate ESG teams, can stake their SFT to a specific forest plot, creating a visible signal of support and gaining the ability to purchase AVTs from that forest directly. That staking mechanism is what builds a personal connection between buyer and forest protector, and gives corporate buyers the storytelling they need: a direct, named relationship with a specific forest and the people protecting it. The current carbon market, where buyers are entirely detached from the places they are supposedly protecting, offers none of that.

Verification works in two layers. Satellite imaging provides top-level monitoring without requiring the forest protector's involvement. On the ground, BioFia is exploring community-led monitoring methods including bioacoustics and ground surveys. All verification data is recorded on-chain to create a transparent, auditable record.

Where the project stands

BioFia is explicit that this is a proposed architecture, not a deployed system. The model rests on assumptions that have not yet been tested in a market. The scarcity thesis that investors will value SFTs because primary forest is finite and irreplaceable is logical, but unproven. The demand from forest protectors is based on strong responses from indigenous leaders and communities at COP30, where the team went specifically to challenge their own concept and heard, by David's account, an overwhelming response of yes, and do it quickly. The technical and legal architecture for AVT integration with existing credit systems is still being designed, and a blockchain chain has not yet been selected.

A pilot has not yet launched. The question of whether financially motivated and environmentally motivated investors can coexist within the same token economy without one group undermining the incentives of the other remains genuinely open.

What is already clear is that the problem BioFia is trying to solve is one the NTC community knows well. The forests with the highest ecological value are the ones the current financing system is worst at reaching. The team is actively looking for critical feedback, collaboration, and challenge, particularly from people who have been thinking about similar problems from different angles. If you have thoughts on the concept, questions about the architecture, or experience that feels relevant, they want to hear from you. Add your comments below or reach out to Gunthar Hartwig and David Ontaneda on LinkedIn for any questions or further details.