2023–present

Funding the Commons

Conferences, commons, and the $35T thesis

Funding the Commons started through a connection with Evan Miyazono at Protocol Labs. The initial concept was a conference — bring together the people thinking seriously about how to fund public goods and give them a room to work in. The first event was in November 2021.

The Events

Since then, we’ve run 15+ events across New York, Lisbon, Bogota, Berkeley, Berlin, Paris, Taipei, Bangkok, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco. We’ve held events at the Internet Archive and the Universite Sorbonne. The speaker list reads like a map of the public goods ecosystem — Juan Benet from Protocol Labs, Kevin Owocki from Gitcoin, Aya Miyaguchi from the Ethereum Foundation, Mark Graham from the Internet Archive, Alex Skidanov from NEAR.

At FtC San Francisco 2025, I gave opening words with Wendy Hanamura about preserving digital memory. At Edge Esmeralda 2024, I co-facilitated the FtC content track with Ryan Rising. Each event sharpened the question: why are the things that matter most to human flourishing — clean air, open knowledge, functioning ecosystems, shared infrastructure — so chronically underfunded?

From Conference to Institution

What started as a conference series grew into something more. I served as Director in 2023 under Protocol Labs, then became CEO. As of 2026, Funding the Commons is an independent public benefit corporation.

The trajectory: conferences led to deeper research, which led to the Commons Lab concept, which is leading toward a Commons Fund. The underlying thesis — that there’s roughly $35 trillion in natural and digital commons value that’s unpriced, unmanaged, and unprotected — is still forming, but it’s the frame I keep returning to.

Earth Commons

Earth Commons grew out of the Sustainable Blockchain Summit, incubated within Filecoin Green. I served as CEO from 2024 through 2025. The focus was on bringing the public goods funding lens to environmental commons specifically — forests, watersheds, soil, biodiversity. [placeholder — what did Earth Commons accomplish? What’s its status now?]

The Work Now

FtC SF 2026, “Intelligence at the Frontier,” is happening at Frontier Tower. The program has matured, but the core problem hasn’t changed. Public goods are still underfunded. The mechanisms are still being invented. I’m still a Celo Scout through the Celo Foundation, a role I’ve held since May 2022, which keeps me connected to the on-chain public goods ecosystem.

The question that connects Funding the Commons back to everything before it — NuMundo, ReSource, even Cosmic Convergence — is the same: how do communities fund and sustain the things they share?

Third-Party Recognition