About

We are tech support for nature.

GainForest is a Swiss non-profit building open, community-first tools that give the people protecting our planet the funding, data, and governance power they deserve.

GainForest team and Indigenous community at the maloca, XPRIZE Rainforest finals in Manaus — Inhaã-bé · Greater Manaus, Brazil

50+Live
frontline communities, live on Green Globe
151+Live
high-quality Bumicerts signed on ATProto
4
years as a registered non-profit in Zurich
3
continents: Latin America, Africa, Asia

Our mission

Scaling human cooperation through trustworthy machines.

Most climate finance never reaches the grassroots. We close that loop with regenerative intelligence; a research practice for designing sociotechnical systems that preserve human agency, build digital trust, and scale Ostrom's principles of commons governance beyond their local limits.

In practice that means open protocols, community-owned data, AI assistants co-designed with Indigenous communities, and Bumicerts that bind a community's photos, audio, and field notes into one signed proof-of-impact record they own.

Read the essay

Our story

From a 2017 UN hackathon to the Amazon.

Eight years of co-designing technology with frontline communities; a few moments that shaped the work.

2017
A hackathon at the United Nations
David Dao prototypes a small idea at the UN: pay forest stewards directly for protecting their land, using blockchain to make the payments transparent.
2018
Decentralized Sustainability
The founding essay publishes on Medium; the concept finds its first community partners across Brazil, Bhutan, Kenya, Paraguay, and the Philippines.
2022
Registered as a Swiss non-profit
GainForest e.V. is registered in Zurich, with two years of operational runway and direct support from the Ethereum Foundation.
2023
Co-designing Taina with Indigenous communities
Taina; the community-owned AI assistant co-designed with four Indigenous and local communities around Manaus, ships its first version on Telegram.
2024
Winning the XPRIZE Rainforest finals
After five years of competing, GainForest and ETH BiodivX win the XPRIZE Rainforest Bonus Prize in the Amazon, beating 298 teams worldwide.
2024
Founding the Indigenous Science Endowment Fund
The entire $250,000 XPRIZE prize is donated to a new endowment fund to train Indigenous and grassroots scientists in the Amazon.
2025
Launching the Nature Guild
A rotating circle of stewards from Brazil, India, Uganda, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines is formalised to steer GainForest's research priorities.

The team

A small global team, building in the open.

We're a distributed team of researchers, engineers, ecologists, and community organisers spread across Switzerland, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, and beyond.

Co-founders

Core team

Nurfatin "Fatin" Hamzah
Community Lead · Malaysia
Holds GainForest's global community programme together. Has spent months in the field with Bumicerts partners in Surigao del Sur and across the network.
Niña Cerilla
Operations Lead · Philippines
Runs operations across the global network and coordinates Bumicerts rollouts with the Oceanus Conservation mangrove team and other Philippine partners.
Diego Rivera Buendia
Engineering & AI · Mexico
Builds the open-source GainForest stack and the AI tooling on top of it; ATProto integrations, Bumicerts pipelines, and the models that turn community-collected data into actionable insight.
Satyam Mishra
Engineering · India
Works on Taina, the community AI assistant, and the bioacoustics + remote-sensing tooling that the field teams rely on.
Karma Yoezer
Engineering · Thimphu, Bhutan
Software engineer building the ATProto + Hypercerts layer that anchors every Bumicert. Contributes across the Hypercerts Foundation, GainForest, and the wider Hypersphere ecosystem.
Donald Nwokoro
Engineering · Nigeria
Web3 and back-end engineer working on Green Globe; the live planet view that surfaces community-led nature projects, plus the ATProto packages and lexicons behind it.

Recognition

Backed by friends who believe in this future.

GainForest e.V. is a small Swiss non-profit standing on the shoulders of foundations, labs, communities, and ecosystems that fund open infrastructure for nature. Every name below has helped move this work forward.