GainForest Turns ETH Yield into Biodiversity Conservation
GainForest has gone live on Lido Impact Staking. For anyone holding ETH, that means a new way to support frontline biodiversity conservation without parting with a single token of your capital.
Instead of donating ETH itself, supporters can now direct the staking yield their ETH produces to GainForest. The principal remains fully the supporter's, withdrawable at any time. What flows to GainForest is the reward stream generated by that ETH being staked through Lido, a continuous and low-friction source of funding that compounds quietly in the background while the underlying asset keeps earning.
It is giving, restructured. The supporter keeps what they have. The cause receives what the asset produces.
Why GainForest
The world loses roughly ten million hectares of forest each year. Much of that loss happens in regions where Indigenous peoples and local communities are already doing the work of protection, often with fewer resources than the problem demands, and rarely with the recognition or direct payment their stewardship warrants. Less than one percent of global climate finance reaches them.
GainForest is working to close that gap. The organisation builds infrastructure that lets communities prove the value of their stewardship, combining satellite imagery and field data stored on ATProto, giving communities direct control over their own records, into verifiable impact certificates issued through Bumicerts. Each certificate represents documented evidence of conservation outcomes, creating a transparent and portable record of the stewardship communities are already performing. Funders can donate directly through Bumicerts, with payments flowing straight to communities via crypto, cutting out the intermediaries that typically absorb a significant share of conservation finance.
That shift, from trust-based philanthropy to verification-based philanthropy, is the quiet revolution GainForest is helping to build. It treats nature as measurable, stewardship as work worth paying for, and transparency as the default rather than the exception.
How It Works
Getting involved takes a few minutes. A supporter connects a wallet at gainforest.impactstake.com, stakes ETH through Lido, and chooses what share of the resulting yield is routed to GainForest. The rest continues to accrue to the staker. There is no lock-up beyond standard Lido mechanics, no minimum commitment, and no handover of principal.
The result is a funding stream that behaves less like a one-time donation and more like an ongoing relationship, with supporters contributing continuously as their ETH earns, and GainForest receiving a predictable inflow it can plan and deploy against.
The Bigger Picture
Lido Impact Staking was built by Launchnodes on top of Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol in Ethereum. It exists to make capital work twice: once for the holder, once for the cause. GainForest joins a growing roster of organisations now funded this way, alongside GiveDirectly, UNHCR, UNICEF Venture Fund, Giga, Grassroots Economics, Speech Without Borders, and MercyCorps Ventures.
Every one of them represents a small answer to a broader question: what would philanthropy look like if giving did not require giving something up?
For GainForest, the answer now includes a steady flow of ETH yield.
Learn more: https://gainforest.earth
Support GainForest through staking: https://gainforest.impactstake.com
