Every donation a trust signal: how Ma Earth funded 201 regenerative projects

Ma Earth's third funding round moved almost $2.2M to 201 community-led regenerative projects in 56 countries. From the outside, it looks much like a regular crowdfunding campaign: partner organizations reviewed applications, supporters donated to projects they believed in, and a separate pool of matching funds added to those donations.

What makes it worth a closer look is how the donations guided the matching. Beyond the money itself, each donation was a trust signal from donor to project. Those signals determined how $1M in matching funds was allocated: the match rewarded projects with many supporters, not just those that raised the most money, an approach known as quadratic funding.

The value of those signals lasts beyond the round. Public endorsements from partner organizations and records of donations remain available alongside each project's profile, giving future funders a history of who has supported the work.

The round in numbers

• 201 projects funded, in 56 countries
• Almost $1M donated by more than 11,700 donors
• $1M in matching funds, plus a $200,000 collective bonus
• Almost $2.2M combined

The challenge: small projects are expensive to assess

Ma Earth backs regeneration led by communities, from tree planting to soil and watershed restoration. Most of these projects work at a scale where a few thousand dollars makes a real difference. In this round, matching ranged from $2,000 to $15,000 per project.

For grants that size, researching every project from scratch can cost too much relative to the amount granted. A funder may want to support this kind of work and still struggle to identify which projects to fund. Good projects can then go unfunded simply because assessing them is too expensive.

Yet much of what a funder needs to know is already known to the people around a project. Is the team real? Is the work happening? Does the local community want it to succeed? They can answer those questions far more cheaply than a funder working from a distance. Ma Earth's round drew on that knowledge through partner review and donations from project supporters, rather than asking the matching funders to assess every project themselves.

How the round worked

The round ran in three steps.

• Review. 800 projects applied. Partner organizations drew on their expertise to review the applications, and 201 of the projects they invited joined the round.
• Crowdfunding. For three weeks, more than 11,700 supporters donated to the projects they believed in. Donations went directly from donor to project and totaled almost $1M.
• Matching. A $1M matching pool was allocated using individual donations as signals of support. Both the number of supporters and the amounts donated helped determine each project's share. Once the projects together had raised $200,000 in donations, a further $200,000 collective bonus was unlocked.

Why count supporters, not only dollars

The matching did not simply follow the money. It took into account how many people backed a project, not only how much each person donated.

A thousand dollars from two hundred people earned far more matching than a thousand dollars from two, because two hundred supporters are a broader signal of trust in a project's work. That is the idea behind quadratic funding.

The donations come mostly from people who know and support the projects. Combined with partner review, they help reduce the burden of assessment for funders, and that makes it possible to fund many small projects at once.

It also changes what a project can tell its supporters: a small donation matters, because every supporter counts toward the match.

What the round leaves behind

Ma Earth could have run this round on a closed platform, keeping the project information and funding history within its own system. Instead, it chose to build on Certified and Hypercerts, open infrastructure for publishing and reusing project records. That way, the records remain useful after the round closes.

With the help of Certified, each participating organization creates an identity on AT Protocol, an open, decentralized network for publishing and sharing data. It then publishes its projects under that identity, as public records that anyone can access and reuse. The records belong to the organization itself. If a platform were to shut down, they would still be there for another application to show. The reuse has already begun: GainForest, which works on open tools for regenerative intelligence, uses records created on Ma Earth.

Four kinds of signal build up around the work:

• Project profile and updates. Organizations publish their projects and keep adding updates about the work, building a record of progress over time. So far, projects have posted updates far more often than expected.
• Endorsements. Organizations endorse other organizations they have worked with or know well. Each endorsement is published under the endorser's own identity and appears on project profiles, and funders can filter projects by who endorsed them. In this round, endorsements from organizations including GainForest, One Earth, Regenerosity, Silvi, Restor, and the BioFi Project helped funders find and assess projects.
• Funding records. A record of who funded a project is a trust signal that outlasts the round. Donors who choose anonymity remain anonymous.
• Reporting back. Funded projects are expected to show what they did with the money before the next round. Future funding decisions can then draw on evidence of the work, rather than on a new promise alone.

Over time, project updates, endorsements, and funding history paint a fuller picture of the work and who stands behind it. Each funder can decide which signals to trust, drawing on a record that grows with the project instead of starting the assessment from scratch.

Open records that stay out of users' way

For us at the Hypercerts Foundation, the exciting part is seeing partner expertise and donations from individual supporters guide a funding round of this size. The resulting project records, endorsements, and funding history remain available on an open network, ready to inform the next funding decision, on Ma Earth or elsewhere.

Just as encouraging is how little the open infrastructure got in users' way. Moving from a closed platform to a decentralized network can make an experience more complicated. Ma Earth's third round shows that shared records on an open protocol and a polished experience can go together. A big shoutout to Ma Earth's design and development team for making that possible.

What comes next

Applications for Ma Earth's fourth round open in early 2027. Returning projects will already have a profile to reuse and a growing track record of updates and endorsements. As funded projects report back, evidence of what they did with the money will add to that history. Projects and funders alike get a stronger starting point for the next round.

That is the idea behind Hypercerts in miniature. Trust builds over time, and it should not have to be rebuilt from scratch for every funder and every round.

If you fund, review, or support projects like these, get in touch or read the developer guide. The case study is also on hypercerts.org, and Ma Earth's round results are at maearth.com.