2026-11-03 –, Lotus Stage 3
Biodiversity evidence is often extracted into databases that communities cannot control. Drawing on fieldwork with Indigenous and local stewards, this talk shows how ATProto and Hypercerts can keep signed ecological records on community-controlled servers while open indexers make them discoverable. Attendees will learn practical patterns, failures, and tradeoffs for consent, data portability, capture resistance, and verifiable public infrastructure.
Indigenous and local communities steward much of the world’s biodiversity, yet ecological evidence is extracted into platforms they cannot control. What would it mean for a community to own the canonical record of its work while joining an open, verifiable data commons? Drawing on GainForest field deployments, I trace our move from smart-contract-first tools to ATProto and Hypercerts: signed impact claims and media on community-controlled servers; open indexing without making the indexer authoritative; portable verification labels; and funding that references evidence without putting sensitive data on-chain. This technical case study includes why immutable-by-default can violate consent, why wallets exclude users, and why open data can expose sensitive knowledge. Attendees leave with a capture-resistant pattern: separate custody, discovery, verification, and settlement; make revocation first-class; and let communities exit an application without losing their history.
David Dao is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of GainForest.Earth, a global tech non-profit pioneering decentralized nature finance and research.
His work has earned recognition including the XPRIZE Rainforest, WEF Davos 50 and Ethereum Next Billion. David completed his PhD in AI Systems at ETH Zurich, where he co-initiated the field of data valuation for machine learning.