Emerge is pioneering humane innovation by offering Impact-asa-Service. This organization is on a mission to re-imagine how impact could be more than just an outcome of an investment choice. The Æternals was founded as an in-house project to facilitate this goal, with the value of the NFT directly responsive to a collector’s proof-of-impact – making impact an investable asset class.
Lucia Gallardo, Founder and CEO of Emerge and Co-Founder of The Æternals project, shares her vision: “The Æternals re-imagines the future of finance as less consumptive and less extractive, setting a new standard for ESG-compliant social innovation.”
Emerge is an award-winning experimentation lab that helps organizations, institutions, and companies develop projects that converge sustainable development objectives, exponential technologies, and re-imagined socio-economics.
Emerge’s work consistently merges public and private sectors in projects related to digital identification for displaced persons, food traceability, financial inclusion for inconsistent income earners, rainforest protection, loyalty rewards programs, and more. Emerge was nominated for the 2018 Global SDG Awards and Newsweek’s 2019 Blockchain Impact Awards.
Emerge’s work impacts thousands of beneficiaries through its clients and in-house projects. For example, Emerge’s work has directly benefited displaced populations along the Mexican-American border, indigenous communities in Latin America, farmers in Uganda, and more.
“At Emerge, we set out to democratize access to the world’s most advanced innovation, to democratize the benefits of said innovation, and to democratize who plays a role in building it in the first place,” explains Lucia.
Single-minded in its focus on building a better world, Emerge has inspired a new sector of impact businesses and redefined impact strategies for organizations. “In this way, we are one part a technology solutions provider and one part a technology justice movement. And in a world where impact and justice are needed now more than ever, working with us helps merge and focus an organization’s core business competencies with thoughtful and measurable impact strategies, resulting in forward-thinking, viable, sustainable, and impactful innovation leadership.”
The Æternals is an in-house project for Emerge founded in 2021 by Lucia and Shaun Khan. It is a regenerative, NFT-based financial instrument that connects its underlying value to a collector’s proof-of-impact toward rainforest protection.
Explains Lucia: “Aeternals NFTs are a new asset class; their value is not tethered to the extraction or consumption of resources. Instead, their incentive structure is based on regenerative value: a buyer’s demonstrable passion for our environment.”
These are the first NFTs to combine beautiful digital art, interactive gamification, and metamorphic change, driven by impact objectives and traced through blockchain infrastructure. When bought or sold, each unique and stunning asset contributes directly and transparently to protecting the rainforests of Central and South America, purchases Carbon Credits, and provides collectors access to an exclusive interactive game environment. It also grants holders access to a tiered community of like-minded individuals, offers exclusive access to a small batch of ultra-rare NFTs that include (for example) the rights to name newly discovered species on the Amazon, and physical access to tours by indigenous communities of the Amazon (with more to come in the future).
The NFT, which is inspired by and connected to the rainforest, begins as a digital plot filled with seedlings and unbloomed flowers. As collectors engage with the cause and the community through a custom game, community events, direct donations, and more – the plot blossoms and grows. Each new layer comes with added benefits but stops contributing, and the plot slowly regresses toward its original state.
55% of all profits fund the work of Rainforest Partnership, a renowned non-profit organization working directly with nine local and indigenous communities to protect the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Additionally, 1% of ongoing secondary sale profits are automatically directed toward offsetting the project’s carbon emissions, which have already been lowered below industry standards through new experimentation with partner company Tresorio, which re-imagined the project’s energy sourcing and computing efficiency.
How The Æternals employs web3 and Metaverse technology to further its aims of offering Impact-as-a-Service is genuinely innovative. Lucia describes its unique work: “Our experimentation lab has created generative and regressive NFTs which respond to a person’s engagement with a social cause, used blockchain for supply chain traceability, worked in verifiable credentials and digital identity projects traceable through blockchain, and more. Our goal is for our tech stacks to include several components, namely across blockchain and web3, along with AI to increase the efficacy of our impact interventions.”
Emerge’s long-term ambitions are to continue building on what they do today – but to scale them for bigger projects and experiments, and partner with more organizations interested in creating greater regenerative and inclusive systems through viable social innovation.
Emerge, take a bow.
Website: emergetechlab.com | aeternals.io
