Long-Term Cooperation: IOTA Foundation Signs Memorandum of Understanding with EIT Climate KIC

Yesterday, we shared with you the background of our participation in EIT Climate KIC's Deep Demonstration on Long-Termism, you can find the blog post here. Today, we want to share more of our collective thinking around the institutional and technical infrastructures that underpin the systemic shift toward the long term.

We are happy to share that the IOTA Foundation and EIT Climate KIC have signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding in order to continue the collective toward long-termism in 2021. EIT Climate KIC as the leading European climate innovation community is spearheading the effort to build a new European network of organizations and individuals that are passionate about long-term sustainability and shaping the future for generations to come. Together, we are working on hands-on experimentation as well as building the ground-swell movement toward long-termism on both an institutional and financial level.

As we have discussed in our previous post, society is optimized for short-term gain most often. This is often codified in the dark matter that makes our societies tick: the tacit ways of organizing our economic behavior that often evades our attention. At the IOTA Foundation, we fundamentally believe that a new time requires novel approaches to governance. As the first non-profit foundation in the European Union that was financed with a cryptocurrency endowment, we pioneered such novel arrangements in what we think will serve the IOTA protocol best in the very long term. Throughout the year we have been sharing our learning and have been working with diverse thought leaders and renowned organizations from the field of sustainable finance and economics to strategize how we can create the structure to support long-term impact initiatives.

To give an example: One of the most important challenges of the 21st century will be the restoration of ecosystems and associated livelihoods. However, these are typically long-term investments - A depleted coral reef might take a few decades to recover, and a depleted forest several centuries. In order to take collective action to replenish our natural resources, governance and technological infrastructure are just means for a broader movement. The partnership between the IOTA Foundation and EIT Climate KIC, together with a strong ecosystem, provides a unique opportunity to combine all three elements. While it takes time for such an ambitious project to flourish, we already have made great strides in leveraging IOTA´s capabilities such as digital identity and digital monitoring, reporting, and verification methods to create novel, lasting networks of social value. The Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by IOTA and EIT Climate KIC is a strong commitment to continue this important collaboration in the next year and beyond while extending the scope of our partnership and initiative.

Dominik Schiener, Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the IOTA Foundation commented on the partnership: “We are proud of our continued cooperation with EIT Climate KIC and the strategic partnership that we have built over the past two years. With the Deep Demonstration on Long Termism, EIT Climate KIC pioneers mission-driven innovation ecosystems that bring together diverse perspectives that are needed to create systemic change in Europe. For the IOTA Foundation, the work on long-termism is an enticing challenge: While we are focused on building things that have real utility for people today, as a social-good oriented foundation, we must both consider the long-term consequences of our protocol while working with our community and other organizations to imagine the long term future we collectively want to enable.”

We are excited to share more information about our joint initiative as we progress through the coming months and want to create more opportunities for our community to become involved in collectively shaping the future toward sustainable and regenerative economic development. Stay tuned for more insights into the experimental research probe we developed over the past month tomorrow, in the final part of this short blog series.