Executive Summary

Bloom Network is proud to announce the successful completion of Round 1 of our Local Action Rewards program, a revolutionary model for philanthropy and corporate social impact, powered by our social platform and blockchain technology.

We distributed $15,600 in rewards to grassroots community leaders across 30+ local chapters (“Blooms”) worldwide, funding 11,464 hours of vital community care labor that typically goes unpaid in the traditional economy.

On Bloom Network, social media participation directly funds real-world action. Rather than extracting value from users, it channels it into regenerative work. The platform also shines a light on powerful climate resilience and repair efforts happening across the globe, often invisible in today’s media ecosystem.

This pilot proves the viability of our gift-first economic model. Read on to learn more!

What Are Local Action Rewards?

Local Action Rewards is the core mechanism of Bloom Network's Regenerative Economic Protocol. Unlike traditional philanthropy that relies on complex grant applications and top-down decision-making, our system issues direct, transparent funding of grassroots regenerative work after it has already been done and documented. In Web3, this is called “retroactive funding”.

How it works: community members document their regenerative actions, from watershed restoration to entrepreneurship education, in a way that helps communities around the world learn from one another, and also makes visible the layer of grassroots, peer-to-peer mobilization that does not get airtime on mainstream media.

Each documentor records the local Bloom members who participated in the action, along with the number of hours they contributed. Each report is reviewed to verify truthfulness and assist documentors in improving their skills to communicate the impacts and importance of their work.

Once verified, all member-participants and their local collective treasury receive FLO (Flowers) tokens, a “reputation token” representing their labor contributions to our collective mission of growing regenerative cultures.

(Bloom carefully vets new Local Bloom hubs and develops deep relationships with each community, which means the risk for falsified reporting is low. Our main goal at the outset of this program is to fund unpaid commons care labor.)

At the end of the round, the available grants pool is distributed in USDC (a “stablecoin”), proportional to FLO earned that quarter. Typically Bloomers are investing their collective rewards into local business enterprises, which is proving our thesis that this mechanism will be used to kickstart regenerative economies. More on that in the Success Stores section below.

Lastly, once verified, the impact reports also automatically post to Karma GAP, one of the main impact reporting platforms in the web3 world. This reduces reporting overhead for busy local organizers.

Bloom’s Regenerative Economic Protocol creates a virtuous cycle where participation in community care work becomes economically viable, while providing funders with unprecedented transparency into how their capital creates impact.

For a more technical explanation of the mechanism, see Inverter Network's analysis of our approach: "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Introducing Bloom's $FLO Economy".

Round 1 was supported by generous donations from Gitcoin and Giveth contributors, Thank ARB Foundation, and Kinship Earth, as well as smart contracts and labor contributions from Inverter Network.

Round 1 Results in Numbers

Our inaugural round engaged 120 participants across 34 Local Bloom hubs in 13 countries, documenting 11,464 hours of regenerative community work. The geographic distribution spanned from Costa Rica to Uganda, from Indigenous communities in the Philippines, to permaculture collectives in the US.

Round 1 was for actions done January 1 2023 through July 14 2024. Starting with Round 3 in 2025 we shifted to a quarterly cycle - more reports coming soon!

The actions documented fell into six main categories: Economic Development (8.2%), Education & Capacity Building (22.4%), Food Systems (16.3%), and Water and Ecological Restoration (20.4%), Community Building & Culture (14.3%), and Physical Infrastructure (18.4%). This distribution reflects the holistic nature of regenerative work, where economic, social, and ecological outcomes are interconnected.

Key Statistics:

1. Total USDC Distributed: $15,600
2. FLO (Flowers) Distributed: 343,920, representing 11,464 commons care labor hours
3. Community Actions Documented: 49
4. Total Participants who received rewards: 120
5. Payouts to Individuals:
6. Highest: 800 USDC
7. Median: 182.59 USDC
8. Lowest: 69.55 USDC
9. Local Treasury Payout Cap: $1200
10. Local Bloom Hubs
11. Total: 34
12. Participated: 13
13. Countries Represented in the Round: 7
14. Blockchain Transfer Fees (“gas” costs): $4
15. Compare this to fiat, where the international payment fees would have cost over $1,000

Bounty claims were submitted using Inverter Network’s smart contracts on Optimism, and funds were paid out on a combination of Arbitrum and Base networks on Ethereum.

Funds sent by Local Bloom, aggregated individual and local treasury.

We applied a square root normalization formula based on FLO amounts earned, and we used a cap of $800 for individuals and $1200 for Local Treasuries.

Success Stories: Real-World Impact

“The fact that someone outside our local community cares about what we're doing is so moving. Bloom's media feed is a live-action demonstration of people weaving the fabric of mutual support, not against things, but for each other's autonomy and well-being."

- Tricia Stapleton, Cooperativa Los Higuerones

The interventions our community is documenting are rapidly scalable, low cost solutions to common problems such as flooding and drought, housing and food insecurity, and education access. Not enough people know about them, and not enough funders are funding them. Read the impact reports directly at https://bloomnetwork.earth/communityposts. These reports show you the world we are creating together, the real world where social media participation funds community action.

Here are a few examples of how Local Bloom hubs have said they’re using the rewards.

Tribes and Nature's Defenders: Power Trees for Community Resilience

An Indigenous community in the Philippines is using their Local Action Rewards to expand their local economic opportunities. They use the funds to pay women in the community to plant “power trees”, a medicinal tree that builds soil health, increases biodiversity by attracting birds, and supports healthy water cycles. The community has developed an organic fertilizer product from these trees, creating a sustainable revenue stream while contributing to ecosystem restoration.

Broadfield Enterprises Uganda: Entrepreneurship Education Through Innovation

Broadfield Enterprises Uganda directed their funds toward entrepreneurship education through "Infinity Tools," a product they co-developed with German team Solarpunk NOW. Infinity Tools are erasable stone tablet surfaces paired with bamboo and beeswax prototyping toolkits. They enable students to design and build their future, from structures to permaculture land designs, in a zero-waste way. Since BEU already teaches permaculture and entrepreneurship across the Ugandan school system, these tools integrate seamlessly into classrooms, helping students imagine, design, and build regenerative futures.

Diamante Bridge Collective: Decentralizing Community Leadership

Diamante Bridge Collective, our largest adopter, used their collective funds to hire a local point person for community participation in Bloom Network. This creates a revenue stream for a community member while significantly reducing administrative burden on our central volunteer team. It also helps their local members celebrate and recognize one another, as they’re not always themselves aware of what everyone is doing in their decentralized village in Costa Rica.

Their model provides a scalable template for other Local Blooms as they grow.

Participant Distribution for Round 1

What Went Well

Impact Report Quality

The depth and authenticity of the impact reports exceeded our expectations. Many reports captured not just quantitative outcomes but the qualitative transformation happening in communities - the relationships built, the cultural healing, the intergenerational knowledge transfer. These reports demonstrate that our platform is successfully surfacing the kind of authentic, place-based stories that traditional media algorithms miss.

Decentralization

Local leaders successfully invited their community members and granted them Bloom membership status, reducing administrative burden on our central team. Diamante Bridge Collective's model of using collective treasury funds to pay for local technical onboarding support represents an excellent principle of decentralization we can scale.

Community Building Through Technical Onboarding

Surprisingly, the technical troubleshooting during our first funding round built stronger connectivity and relationality between members and platform helpers. What we initially saw as a technical challenge became a relational opportunity, with volunteers getting to know community members personally and forming trust across different places and cultures.

Peer-to-Peer Incubator

We're beginning to see Local Blooms learn from and coordinate with each other to establish regenerative supply chains, particularly around hemp cultivation and agroecology. This peer-to-peer incubator dynamic, where local enterprises support each other's success, is exactly the kind of economic model we designed our system to facilitate.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Technical Integration Complexity

Using a separate blockchain app for Round 1 resulted in an additional 200+ hours of administrative work for our overburdened volunteer team.

The hurdle of setting up a Metamask account proves to be a complete barrier to participation for all but a few members new to blockchain, despite custom training materials designed for a low technical literacy audience.

For Round 2, we’re integrating Inverter Network’s bounty smart contracts and Para’s smart wallets directly into our platform. This streamlines bounty submissions, automating address lookup and making it easier to update claims as new members join.

The Gift-First Economy in Action

FLO was designed to activate a gift-first economy rooted in generosity, mutual aid, and the sharing of surplus. This isn’t theoretical. For 18 years, Bloom Network has practiced and celebrated gift economies through events, coalitions, and community action.

Now, we’ve formalized these practices using next-generation fintech. Our Local Action Rewards system turns cultural values into infrastructure - a beautiful, functional “basket” where people can contribute financially to support local regenerative initiatives. It’s not just technology; it’s a tool for culture shift.

We’re witnessing a new economy emerge, where those with enough give freely, and where care work, even when compensated, is met with extra recognition and support. It’s a radical departure from extractive systems toward regenerative, community-rooted wealth.

The future is already here, and we’re distributing it.

Bloom Network isn’t just a social platform; it’s a prototype for a cooperative future, where infrastructure is built and governed by the people it serves. As one co-founder put it: “We’re transforming the corporation into a cooperative owned by everyone on the planet.”

Looking Forward: Proposed Changes

Enhanced Education and Support

We’re refining our impact tracking to link objectives with outcomes, helping Local Blooms clearly communicate their value to funders while preserving the relationship-driven approach at the heart of their work. At reviewers’ request, we are encouraging reporters to share the “why” behind their actions, to better highlight the importance of their community development work.

Localized Onboarding Support

We're developing localized onboarding support to better serve communities in different regions and with different technical capacities. This includes language support, cultural adaptation, site performance improvements, and technical assistance tailored to local contexts.

Call to Action

The gap between the need for funding and the availability of capital for grassroots regenerative work is vast, despite this work being among the most cost-effective and scalable solutions to today’s most pressing challenges. Local communities are already mitigating flooding and drought, addressing food and housing insecurity, and building alternative education systems. But these proven interventions are chronically underfunded and largely invisible to traditional philanthropy, because they are being done in a collaborative, decentralized, networked way.

Bloom Network has built an innovative system to bridge that funding gap. In our pilot, just $15,600 compensated people for an estimated $343,920 worth of labor at grassroots scale - amplifying regenerative work that would otherwise go unseen and unsupported. Our protocol enables transparent, cross-border microfunding in under 20 seconds with a total fee of $.10 globally, unlocking the potential of decentralized communities that traditional foundations struggle to reach. This is not a charity model; it’s a regenerative economic engine designed for long-term self-sufficiency.

We’re seeking mission-aligned funders to help seed a one-year growth pilot of our Local Action Rewards system. With your support, we can scale this groundbreaking model, document its real-world impact, and set a new standard for how grassroots regeneration is financed. If you're ready to fund systemic change and back a network of people building tangible climate and community resilience, this is your invitation. Contact us to explore partnership opportunities and help grow the future, now.

community@bloomnetwork.earth

Direct donation links

Fiat: https://donorbox.org/bloom-network-donations

Ethereum (all networks) - 0x5219ffb88175588510e9752A1ecaA3cd217ca783

Bitcoin - bc1qcfqchqqc060zd5tk6qa88kh8a45nquyjc4e5dg

Lighting - bloom@getalby.com

Whitepapers: https://bloomnetwork.earth/learn/whitepaper