Open Forest Protocol and SOTA launch “Re”: Regenerative NFT Charity Auction

Open Forest Protocol
7 min readJan 21, 2022

Re-think, Re-flect, Re-imagine

United by a deep concern for climate change, Open Forest Protocol hs brought together 10 artists from the NEAR NFT community to present a regenerative NFT charity auction, curated in a custom metaverse gallery built by SOTA.

The NFT artworks range from photography, digital illustrations, to audio-visual pieces, all of which invite us to re-think, re-flect, and re-imagine the relationship between human, nature, and technology in the age of climate change.

The NFTs will be up for auction on Mintbase from Jan 21 to Feb 3, the participation of which requires connecting to Mintbase with a NEAR wallet and bidding with $NEAR. All the artworks part of “Re” can be experienced in the SOTA metaverse gallery or accessed directly through the “Re” store on Mintbase.

Re-generate

Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is a forest data auditing and carbon financing platform built on NEAR. A portion of the proceeds from the NFT sales will go to OFP’s NFT DAO, which will directly fund a forest project on OFP in need of financing. These projects will go on replanting trees in deforested areas or conserving existing ones, and thereby restoring the land, repopulating the ecosystem, and sequestering carbon. All the NFTs here not only minimize their environmental impact by minting on NEAR — a climate neutral blockchain — but contribute to the actual regeneration of the earth. To that extent, we call them “regenerative NFTs.”

“Re” features…

Metaverse NFT Gallery by SOTA

Enter the gallery!
  • No account, sign up, or avatars necessary. Just enter the gallery and start exploring.
  • When you walk up to the artwork, the description and link to the auction automatically pops up.
  • Explore the gallery and participate in the treasure hunt!

Check out the video demo of the gallery, explained by Anders from SOTA.

Auction on Mintbase

Enter the “Re” store!
  • Each NFT is a 1 of 1 and auctioned through Mintbase
  • You can access the auction page by (1) clicking on the artwork’s auction link in the metaverse gallery, or (2) visiting the “Re” store on Mintbase directly
  • The NFTs will be up for auction for two weeks (closes on Feb 3rd), but individual pieces can be sold out sooner depending on when the artist accepts a bid
  • From the primary sale, 25% of the revenue goes to the OFP DAO, 25% to SOTA, and 50% to the artist
  • From all secondary sales, 5% goes to the OFP DAO, 5% to the artist, as royalties.

Confused about how to participate in the auction? Watch this video.

Participating Artists

Vanesa Stati, “Nemetón” (digital art)

In Druid times the Nemeton was the sacred space in the dense forest where the natural and the supernatural were in contact; the power of the ancient great tree, the energy of the creation itself, permeated the whole place. They were a meeting place where great teachings were passed on and important discussions about existence were held. It’s time to go back to the Nemetón.

Simon Wairiuko, “Open Door” (digital art)

Ushering us into the outdoors is a female figure overlaid on screens. The open door is a history of our interactions with nature and the impact these interactions have had over time. Do we progress? Or is it an endless cycle?

Claudia Padrón Gómez, “Rebirth” (conceptual photography)

“Rebirth” represents the beginning of the cycle of life in a city forgotten by time, disintegrated in silence and conquered by the force of mother nature that recovers from the ruins everything that was once taken from it. It is the continuity of existence, transcendence through chaos and destruction. It is a symbol of resilience and coexistence, it leads and transports us to the duality between life and death.“Rebirth” represents the beginning of the cycle of life in a city forgotten by time, disintegrated in silence and conquered by the force of mother nature that recovers from the ruins everything that was once taken from it. It is the continuity of existence, transcendence through chaos and destruction. It is a symbol of resilience and coexistence, it leads and transports us to the duality between life and death.

SPHYNX, NOVUS SPHYNX, “Beacon — I” & “Beacon — II” (audiovisual)

The concept of my work revolves around science fiction and the hope that as individuals and society we can integrate into decentralized communities with common goals that give real solutions to current problems.

BEACON — I and BEACON — II are NFT artworks that are presented as geo-temporal positioning beacons, the sound that contains the token is the harmonic basis for the synchronization between the two points of the jump in time or the arrival track of the travelers.

Zeitwarp, “‘AND WHAT IS COOL…?’” (audiovisual MP4)

‘AND WHAT IS COOL…?’ is an audiovisual MP4 conceptual artwork from ‘THE
NO$TALGIA SHOW’ series that examines Transience, Obsolescence, Transformation and the Nostalgia/NO$TALGIA phenomenon.

The video features a PHREAK MUSIC soundscape created by scanning the background MUSIC GRAFFITI image through a series of visual synthesizers.

The piece references a dialogue between Socrates & Phaedrus as reported by Plato: “And what is good Phaedrus, and what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

Isa Kost, “I Take Root In The Sky” (Blue and Red) (video)

This portrait came from observing nature around me. Bare trees apparently asleep in the winter days I imagined them as roots in the sky. Roots are fundamental, they represent us and remind us where we come from. Roots are like arteries through which our history flows. We are nature and we can keep alive what is inside us so that what is around us doesn’t die.

Serste, “COSMOGONIA 2022: ARIA” & “COSMOGONIA 2022: TERRA” (digital art)

COSMOGONIA 2022 is an allegory of the renewed amazement of our species towards Nature.

“Cosmogony is any model concerning the origin of the cosmos or the universe.”

The title suggests the urgent need to focus our exploration on the portion of the Cosmos that we can reach and on which our survival depends.

Barbara Tosti, “SHOVE_ME_LOVE_NATURE_MIRROR” (video with sound)

The self perception and world around us perception is filtered by our being. Our being is baked like a cake, from the beginning till today. One cup of parents DNA, one cup soil where you learn to walk, one spoon granma stories, one spoon teddybear … baked anew every day. Reflecting like mirrors in nature around us is the perfect topping in our digital baked day.

Carolina Cavenaghi, “Future is a Matter of Fate in the Nature” (audiovisual)

A Tale of Electric Neon for Open Forest Protocol about the future of the nature.

Anders Jørgensen and Martin Menso, “Garden of Elysium” (VR Experience)

The “Garden of Elysium” by Anders Jørgensen and Martin Menso arises from the philosophies of meditation and spiritual transformation. It aims to examine the intersection of technology and nature through the means of a neo-environmentalistic VR experience. By widening the scope beyond a strictly unreflected human behavior, “Garden of Elysium” examines the human perception of time and space in relation to the doctrines of holism.

Meet the Sponsors

We are happy to announce that two long-time NEAR ecosystem partners have co-sponsored “Re”: Ref Finance and Meta Pool.

Ref finance is the #1 community-led, multi-purpose Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform on NEAR Protocol. Its main features include token swaps, yield farming, and single-sided staking.

Meta Pool is a liquid staking protocol built on NEAR. People stake their NEAR tokens with Meta Pool using automatic staking strategies and receive “staked NEAR” tokens they can use in the DeFi NEARverse or they can be swapped any time back to original NEAR tokens to unstake.

You can learn more about Ref Finance and Meta Pool by exploring the SOTA metaverse gallery. Don’t forget to participate in the in-world treasure hunts (to be announced on NEARweek’s Twitter)!

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Open Forest Protocol

Blockchain platform for next generation forest projects. Transparently measure, report, and verify the entire life cycle of trees.