Case Studies - Leveraged and Shared Assets

• The LAND initiative, led by Capital Certainty, is acquiring land estates the size of small countries in key locations, beginning with the Amazon Forest. LAND tokenizes land ownership through social, productive, and environmental outputs. Its goal is to create the world’s largest agrotech ecological digital hub. To fund this initiative, LAND leverages digital assets and activates sustainable business models, including carbon credits covering millions of hectares. The benefits are then reinvested in biodiversity, climate control, and local well-being while increasing the value of the land by between 30 and 200%. LAND’s MTP is “Make LAND’s prosperity resilient, ownership accessible, destiny diverse, and innovation global.”

• South Africa’s Sun Exchange leverages roof space in the sunniest places on earth, crowdfunding solar cells on the roofs of different organizations.

• We’ve talked about Waze already. It’s so popular in urban areas like Los Angeles or Mexico City that its use actually has a macro effect on traffic efficiency in the region.

• Microgrids may prove to be the most important—and disruptive—shared assets in our future. Microgrids are decentralized groups of electricity sources and loads that are part of the area power grid but that can detach themselves—typically during challenging technical (brownouts) and economic (fee increases) moments—to operate independently in “island mode.”

LabCentral Inc./BioLabs is a non-profit organization that operates a shared laboratory facility headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, LabCentral offers lab and office space for approximately 60 new biotech startup companies, largely found at nearby MIT and Harvard. LabCentral’s main sources of funding are revenues from user fees, as well as grants and sponsorship contributions. Biolabs, a related for-profit equivalent company, serves as home for more than 300 startups in eight cities. BioLabs companies routinely account for more than 20 percent of all Seed and Series A Venture Capital invested in life sciences in the US. The company is currently opening labs around the US, wherever biolab space is in short supply.