**4.4 Build a community around the coin**

A nature conservation-based project supported by a responsible token and blockchain should clearly address the areas and beneficiaries to relate, being entities and/or individuals. The scope of the project must be outlined for each purpose, such as nature restoration, fauna protection, income generation, social improvements, education and health support, for instance. The project must have specific, and measurable data to be collected with identified participants and provide veracity and control in DLT (blockchain) for the the guarantee of successfull objectives. The governance structure should join stakehokders, investors and beneficiaries enrolled in the project's activities with clear roles. As seen below, the beneficiaries will have a role to provide key forest information for the project to be effectively measured, thus helping to its better effectiveness. These roles and obligations are better implemented by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)5 linked to the project's token blockchain. The major steps to initialise the funding are:


<sup>5</sup> A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization constructed by rules encoded as a computer program that is often transparent, controlled by the organization's members and not influenced by a central government, therefore, they are member-owned communities without centralized leadership.


The community around a coin should include the coin's object providers and investors with mutual interest in conserving the forest, because both will prosper with the standing forest. A third group takes part in this DAO in the roles of field implementation, analyses and data verification about the forest and people's social indicators. In a forest carbon project, for instance, the providers are the forest inhabitants or those with access to the forest's dynamics. The coin investors, without access to the land, have a financial interest in preserving the land. The third group is made, possibly, of service partners, such as a nonprofit organizations to implement field projects; auditors; and scientists and researchers providing data verification and technical proposal roles. This last role, may be applicable in changing scenarios, where specific metrics and data may loose value for accounting the forest carbon and environmental preservation, at the same time giving room to new indicators that make better sense for the coin objective of supporting a standing forest, thus a carbon storage.

The tokenomics must address the coin value linked to forest key indicators in a model requiring constant observations and verified contributions. At the ICO, providers are issued with coins, aside from the investors' purchase. The role of providers is to report positive and negative observations, to contribute to modeling the future of the forest; whether it will be in a sink or source state. The better the providers accomplish their role, the more is the certainty over whether the forest will be in a sink or source state. At the same time, the value of the tokens received during the ICO will trend upward, thereby incentivizing them to keep providing observations to the model. Internal data providers contribute to the model by changing the value of the parameters of the model, in accordance of governance principles, pre defined in the DAO agreements. Internal data providers, like researchers or scientists, keep their role to permanently assess and review the intrinsic dynamics of the forest considered in the project objectives as laid out in the digital currency model of contribution to the forest and their inhabitants, the beneficiaries and data providers for the model.

Additional attention to this model must relate to forest protection issues, such as the avoidance of illegal ownership of forest areas under carbon and coins' incentives; the issuing of forest leasing mechanisms, when applicable; and carbon verification to assure a legal framework of compliance with applicable legislations and the avoidance of double accounting of carbon credits. Finally, a responsible token initiative should address their results to nature and social issues according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [15] as a measurement for its key project indicators, thus, providing material, measurable and comparable results for all.
