“Sustainably” Surveilling and Tokenizing Nature: The Case of O.N.E. Amazon
The architect of BlackRock’s ETFs has teamed up with a group of companies tied to US intelligence and US government debt trading to tokenize the Amazon rainforest and borgify it with a large-scale sensor network in order to create a new form of “digital gold.”
A satellite surveillance company with links to U.S. intelligence, former Trump administration officials, U.S. government debt barons and the stablecoin Tether (USDT) announced plans earlier this year to build the “Internet for Forests” in the Amazon rainforest. The satellite company, called Satellogic, plans to join an initiative to rig up one of the world’s oldest and most important forests with sensors and “machine intelligence infrastructure” led by a group called O.N.E. Amazon. O.N.E. Amazon, in turn, seeks to turn the Amazon rainforest into a digital asset security to be chopped up, tokenized and sold off to investors around the world as a novel form of digital credit. O.N.E. Amazon’s partners in this endeavor, such as Aecom, also have important U.S. intelligence connections.
O.N.E. Amazon is chaired by Peter Knez, who oversaw the creation of ETFs (exchange traded funds) and iShares, which is now owned by BlackRock. Knez, who also served for many years as BlackRock’s Global Chief Investment Officer, also chairs the Venom Foundation, which is developing a proprietary blockchain and token to facilitate the “development and implementation of central bank digital currency (CBDC) and traditional finance products by governments and businesses” around the world. Given that O.N.E. Amazon describes its rainforest tokenization initiative as “crypto with a purpose” and that it is also chaired by Knez, it seems likely that the Amazon-focused initiative may involve Venom in some capacity. Given Satellogic’s ties to past efforts to impose a Bitcoin blockchain-powered carbon market on Latin America, it is also possible that Bitcoin or another prominent blockchain will be used, especially considering the involvement of Jalak Jobanputra, a major investor in the digital currency space and particularly in important Bitcoin-related companies, in allegedly co-founding O.N.E. Amazon.
As we previously reported earlier this year in a piece entitled Tokenized Inc., BlackRock and other titans of finance are attempting to tokenize and financialize the natural world. Considering that the architect of iShares now stands at the helm of O.N.E. Amazon, it is important to reflect on BlackRock’s Larry Fink’s words shortly after the approval of the iShares Bitcoin ETF earlier this year. Fink stated that “We believe ETFs are a technology no different than Bitcoin was a technology for asset storage.” In other words, blockchain and ETFs, per Fink, merely serve as a technological means to store centralized indexes, funds and tokenized assets, in direct contrast to the founding aspirations of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer digital currency. Now, the very man who developed BlackRock’s ETF machine is seeking to tokenize the Amazon rainforest and transform it into a digital asset of finite supply – essentially turning a major and crucial ecosystem into a “digital gold” or bitcoin analogue.
For years, titans of Wall Street like BlackRock have helped saddle South American countries with unprecedented debt levels, robbing them of their economic sovereignty through dollarization or institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Now, they are seeking to turn the continent’s most crucial resources into a form of “digital gold” that will be enforced by a satellite-sensor system tied to individuals deeply invested in efforts to globalize dollar-denominated debt and also to American intelligence. While the goal is framed as “conservation” of the Amazon, the Satellogic-O.N.E. Amazon proposal seeks instead to enable the exploitation of a protected resource like never before while also building a cybernetic surveillance grid into one of nature’s greatest monuments – not to ensure the forest’s “health” – but to ensure the “integrity” of the digital asset security it is now poised to uphold.
The amount of securities to be issued will be capped at 750 million, “corresponding to the hectarage of the rainforest.” In other words, each security issued represents one hectare of the Amazon.
O.N.E. Amazon aims to create “sustainable impact for the environment and investors by using next-generation technology to bring innovation to conservation.” It was formally launched at COP28 in December 2023 but appears to have begun operations sometime around 2021, if not earlier. The “innovation” O.N.E. Amazon offers is related to its issuance of an upcoming,“regulated O.N.E. Amazon Digital Asset Security.” Per O.N.E. Amazon’s chairman Peter Knez, “each security will represent the perceived value of one hectare of biome in the Amazon rainforest, backed by a 30-year preservation agreement over that land.” The amount of securities to be issued will be capped at 750 million, “corresponding to the hectarage of the rainforest.” In other words, each security issued represents one hectare of the Amazon. Knez stated in an interview with TradeArabia that the group has already secured “an impressive long-term land preservation agreement for 50 million hectares of rainforest, an area larger than Spain.” The company asserts that “investors will benefit from the potential capital appreciation of the security” in large part due to “the finite size” of the rainforest it is tokenizing.
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