Skip to content
Citizen Infrastructure

Interspecies money: gorillas with bank accounts

In August 2024, in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, a family of mountain gorillas did something no animal had done before: they received a digital identity and a wallet. It was the world’s first cross-species payment, run by a venture called Tehanu, led by the futurist Jonathan Ledgard.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

The logic is unusual but tidy. Tehanu estimated the financial value of Rwanda’s gorilla population at nearly $1.4 billion — about 10% of the country’s GDP. Acting as the gorillas’ trustee, Tehanu used AI to infer the animals’ interests (gorillas can be identified individually by face and gait), then made mobile payments to the neighbouring people who could meet those needs — things like sensors to monitor the gorillas’ well-being, or extra security against poachers.

The crucial design principle: the money flows mostly from the protected species to local human service-providers. As the project’s backers put it, “if it does not work for people, it will not work for animals.” Protecting wildlife becomes a source of local income instead of a cost.

Bigger than gorillas

Section titled “Bigger than gorillas”

Interspecies money is meant as a template. Tehanu has said it plans to extend the model to elephants in rural India and ancient beech trees in Romania, and a working group has discussed scaling to 100 species by 2030, even floating a “Bank for Other Species.” It is early, experimental, and full of unsolved problems — who counts as a legitimate trustee, how to prevent theft or fraud — and its backers say so plainly.

Why it’s a story worth knowing

Section titled “Why it’s a story worth knowing”

This is one of the most concrete experiments in more-than-human governance anywhere: giving a non-human a seat in the economy, with a human held accountable for representing it. It’s also a sideways take on funding the commons — aligning money with the long-term health of a shared, living resource rather than its extraction — and a flagship case in the Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs’ Planetary Compendium.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”