Rewilder July 2022 Update

Rewilder is a crypto-native non-profit that coordinates the global purchase of land for wildlife conservation.

Hi friends! It’s been a while since we last got in touch, and we have some news, both good and bad.

First, the big reveal: we’re buying our first land in Uruguay. You can read why we chose this country in our community forum post by Juancho. We’re excited to take this first step and can’t wait to get started with rewilding the land.

However, we’ve encountered a few delays. As we promised during our donation campaign, we're trying our best to do the land purchase in crypto directly (without opening a bank account) and service providers here (notaries, accountants) are not super happy about it. They want us to go through a bunch of extra hoops, which might cause a delay of a few months. Fortunately, Ripio has started operating in Uruguay recently and they've been extremely helpful in making our first land purchase happen.

We’re also in the process of finalizing our US 501c3 status, which is taking longer than expected. The IRS replied to our application two weeks ago (it took them 8 months! 😅) and asked for more information, which we’re preparing to send back.

Additionally, the value of ETH has dropped significantly since our fundraising campaign in October, from ~$4500 to ~$1100 today. Unfortunately, this has caused us to lose over $100k in donation value. Not selling the donated ETH was a conscious strategic decision we made and we’re very sorry, it was a huge mistake. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to deal with this and other challenges of being “crypto-native”.

We had a great land purchase option lined up in Treinta y Tres Department, Uruguay, but it's now unfortunately over of our budget. We considered postponing the land purchase until ETH price recovers. However, given this could take years, we decided to sell donated ETH now and to find another smaller land within our current budget and move forward with that. This way, we won’t leave Rewilder in an extended limbo and we can put your donations to good use sooner. We believe that learning how to protect and rewild a smaller terrain today is better than waiting for ~2 years and then buying a bigger terrain.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. We know it’s mostly bad news, and we hope you’ll understand and continue to support Rewilder. Please join the discussion on this topic in our community forum.

Love,

The Rewilder Team