Last week, Erai Beckmann and Kyleigha Beckmann represented Peace Through Trade at EarthX 2026 in Dallas, the world’s largest annual environmental conference. Over three days at the Hilton Anatole, 175,000 attendees joined heads of state, investors, scientists, conservationists, and entrepreneurs from around the world for what EarthX calls its Congress of Conferences.
Erai participated in a fireside chat at the Island Resilience Summit, one of more than 20 summits running inside EarthX. He opened with the Edmund Burke quote that inspired our name — “to dispel the drums of war, we must initiate cultural trade and exchange” — and walked through the history behind it. When the British Empire was stretched thin from constant conflict with newly acquired territories, Burke theorized that if they replaced military occupation with commerce, it would uplift the quality of life across those regions and resolve the conflict without force. He was right. The conflict dropped and it created the largest trade network in human history at the time.
From there, Erai drew the line to what Peace Through Trade is building today. There are 900 million adults on this planet who have a smartphone but no financial access. They’re connected to the internet but locked out of the economy. He talked about how the American banking system went through a similar evolution when Merrill Lynch was founded to give the middle class access to finance that had previously been reserved for elites. The banking establishment at the time didn’t want it. It happened anyway. And it created some of the largest financial institutions on earth.
That’s where we are now. The next wave isn’t giving the middle class access to Wall Street. It’s giving the other 900 million people access to the global economy from a device they already carry in their pocket. A blockchain-integrated social streaming marketplace where people can earn, trade, and participate in commerce without needing a bank that was never coming to their village, their town, or their country.
When people have financial access, conflict goes down. Commerce replaces desperation. Communities invest in their futures. We don’t know every solution that will come from connecting 900 million new participants to the global economy, but we know what happens when they’re excluded. We see it every day in the content we post. Farmers destroying their own harvest because nobody came to buy it. Families losing a chunk of every dollar they send home to fees. Entire populations building informal economies because the formal one never had room for them.
EarthX exists to bring the people building real solutions into the same room. That’s exactly where we belong. The conversations we had over those three days reinforced something we’ve believed from the start — sustainability and economic access are the same fight. You can’t protect the environment in communities that can’t participate in the economy. You can’t ask people to care about the planet when they’re struggling to survive on it.
We connected with government leaders, agricultural officials, investors, and fellow builders who see the same gap we do. This is the continuation of a growing relationship between Peace Through Trade and the nature and resilience summits happening at EarthX, and we plan to be back.
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Thank you to everyone at EarthX who made this possible. The mission is bigger than any one conference, but being in that room mattered. We’re just getting started.