NFTs to protect biodiversity with Cryptobees

The metaverse? A wonderful virtual world in which we could flourish at leisure? For the perfumer Guerlain, the important thing would be elsewhere: the urgency would be to preserve our world as it exists in reality. Which leads him to push a concept: that of ” Reverse “.

Everyone knows that the biodiversity tends to become impoverished, and even sometimes to disappear, partly because of theAgriculture industrial. However, Guerlain, for 15 years already, has been committed to a project “In the Name of Beauty”, through which this perfumer wishes to mix ecology and pedagogy, with one priority: the preservation of bees. Hence a new initiative: to associate the Cryptobeesa collection of NFTs (so-called non-fungible tokens) like bees, to real plots of land that can be owned.

Preserve endangered animal and plant species

In 2020, photographer and environmental activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand acquired the Vallée de la Millière, north of the Rambouillet forest, in the Yvelines, with the intention of preserving the 430 species animals and plants. Quite quickly, partnerships were formed with the University of Paris-Saclay, and with the Haute Vallée de Chevreuse Natural Park. The objective: to welcome researchers concerned with reducing the human impact on ecosystems. However, the Vallée de la Millière estate has long belonged to the founding family of Guerlain. The hyphen was therefore natural.

The idea of ​​the new operation is to link a collection of visuals NFT made around bees in plots in the Vallée de la Millière. As it should be, each of the 1,828 creations is unique. And as for Cryptopunks or Bored Apes, each of these NFTs has its value defined by a level of rarity. This rarity is notably defined by the coding in each of these Cryptobees of one of 15 varieties of flowers and plants of the reserve, of 21 materials natural geology local and also by the geographical coordinates of the parcel concerned.

Become the owner of a plot via his NFT

In this respect, Guerlain is following a trend that is in theair time: associate an object digital unique (the NFT) to an object physical. Thus, the purchase of the work Human One by Beeple used NFT technology but gave the right to a creation that the purchaser could exhibit in the real world. For its part, the site Blockchain App Factory opened an entire section to this possibility of associating an artistic NFT with its physical counterpart.

In Guerlain’s operation, the purchase of each Cryptobee makes the purchaser of the NFT owner of one of the 1,828 parcels of the Vallée de la Millière, helping to make this purchase an eco-responsible act because 100% of the sales will be invested in the “rewilding” of the reserve and the restoration of ecosystems. The collection can be examined on the NFT Objkt marketplace at this address: https://objkt.com/collection/guerlain-reaverse

Currencies with low ecological impact

The currency used for the operation is the Tezos XTZ, renowned for its low ecological impact. The entry price of a Cryptobee is thus set at 20 XTZ. At the time of writing, one XTZ is equivalent to 2.55 dollars, or approximately 2.41 euros.

Currencies such as Tezos are part of the current trend of offering cryptocurrencies ecologically responsible: IOTA, XRP (Ripple), Cardano, Nano or SolarCoin are other examples. And the new version of Ethereum is similarly called upon to drastically reduce the power consumption linked to transaction management.

Guerlain’s initiative should be compared to other projects that contribute to restoring the ecological image such as theinitiative launched by Cardano to finance the planting of one million trees.