LFGrow | Social Impact at Scale

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so with this we are ready for our next talk and the next panel is about discussing social impact at scale so we have three amazing people here uh marcus from climate raphael from zuken and scott from get coin and now we're gonna kind of cover a lot of things that we want to talk about on how we think we can spend our time and resources as developers or as users in web 3 to sort of make all this more impactful for for the space so i want to welcome all of you here i want to start off by asking the first question which is love for everybody to kind of get to know who you are what you do and sort of how you got into this space and now we just gotta start with scott and we can go to uh marcus but uh scott welcome and uh free to take over awesome yeah kartik thank you so much and i'm just excited to see this topic being discussed now actively um in the space honestly it's been kind of a wild few years on the bitcoin side where we sort of started as a community of uh i guess just software developers looking to grow and sustain public goods in sort of the open source software digital public space and i think what we we're kind of seeing now is honestly just a complete evolution of that into this regenerative finance movement and that's honestly being sort of my mission in the space since i started in the space so it's sort of in a sense like a dream for me that this is happening and i think that you know what i'm hoping will happen in the future is just really getting more of these sorts of conversations happening across the space um but you know my my real background is kind of boring i did machine learning uh back in 2015 kind of got into dallas in 2015-16 the dow hack happened so there was a period there where no one really wanted to talk about dallas for a while um but then i joined bitcoin as a co-founder with kevin in 2017-2018 and that's sort of like the a little bit of a backstory of that whole journey um but yeah i'm just super excited to see this sort of evolution and i'll pause there just because i feel like we have a lot to discuss on that topic later absolutely um marcus would love to kind of get a bit of inter on yourself as well as climb up everyone um thanks cardik for having us and uh to the lf grow community uh welcome from klima dow glad to be here um so uh ultimately klima is uh trying to bring the voluntary carbon markets on chain and create a regenerative economy where the fundamental asset of economic activity is uh tied to environmental services in particular the mitigation of carbon emissions um i personally came into the space um around the time that klima launched a little before my background is in data science and data engineering i've been working in the web 2 world for about six or seven years um i first started learning about crypto personal investment a couple years ago um took the deep dive into d5 over the last year or so and um when i found klima it all kind of clicked and i um was excited to bring my data skill set to bear on this uh exciting new space of refi amazing and raphael last but not least we'd love to learn more about your stuff too yeah i'm super excited to be here because actually this is a big flashback for me i've been at east london i don't know if you you remember kind of i was sitting in in the audience um watching you speak and um so yeah toucan which was uh still called co2 can two years ago um essentially like our goal is to build you know technology that can uh put you know climate action at the heart of every financial transaction and we realize that the the fastest path towards doing this is to bring carbon on chain as a money lego or as a building block for others to build on right and um yeah marcus is here chemo obviously being um the most important protocol right now that is building on on toucan and hopefully you know one of many protocols uh that can unlock what we now call uh refi um yeah i'm really happy how this term refi came together i i remember uh i think like two years ago we tried to turn the coin dc5 for decentralized climate finance but refi is just so much more elegant so yeah it's up here but um yeah like i'm i'm excited to be here and this is a little bit nostalgic we're super excited to have you too i think it's uh this is one of my favorite parts here which is any time somebody who kind of comes in at the hackathon and sort of ends up pursuing their projects to be more than just a hackathon project and sort of comes back and gives back to the community that is a perfect cycle moment for for us and just a global team um and it's just wonderful to kind of have these experiences and and interestingly we've had this happen for every single event we've done in the past six months and it just pulls down you know this is a this is a thing so i i'm beyond excited to uh to see this um so i think you kind of brought up a lot of interesting points already because uh this sets up the theme for we want to discuss next um starting with you raphael uh would love to kind of understand like what does it mean to be to regen for you and kind of what do you think it's important obviously there's a bias here but would love to uh to uh kind of still get that answer from each of you yeah i mean that's a tough one actually so for me the the the main the main problem that we have right now is you know climate change is a huge coordination failure and um when i first looked at this problem two years ago i was coming also coming from the dao perspective and i was like cool we have these amazing coordination tools smart contracts are great at that and we have this huge coordination failure how can we you know put the two together and for me um probably being a regen is applying some degen uh blood towards a regenerative cause so um it's you know let's try things let's experiment let's move quickly really like one of the key thesis thesis that's probably not the right word but you know what i'm going to say behind toucan is um we want to put the the the mind share and like just the in the innovative power behind web 3 on to work on the biggest problem that we have as a human rather species so um yeah for me being a region means um trying out failing you know experiment and um and see what you know where it leads us and honestly climate change is is a money problem also right like in both that we need to allocate huge amounts of money and other resources towards uh solving the climate crisis but interestingly money is also potentially part of a solution um which i'm sure marcus can talk more about so um yeah i'll stop here we can jump right into marcus um marcus what does it mean to be a region for you and uh why is it important now for you yeah so to me the the real difference between a dgen and a regen it comes back to like the structure of economic systems um so i think often um well historically um externalities have been a way to get ahead in the capitalist system right you you can basically get something for free by you know polluting or you know taking water from a public source or um yeah basically externalities are a major problem for traditional capitalist systems and regen refi represents this idea opportunity to create financial systems create economic systems where incentives are aligned where um the long-term health of the ecosystem is priced in to on the cost of doing business and uh you know the hard part though of course is that as rafa said there's money on the line right because there's obviously uh when you internalize an externality that incurs a cost um and i think until very recently in legacy you know corporate world the cost of addressing the externality of pollution as an example um of carbon emissions has not been the cost of addressing that has not been justified um there wasn't social pressure there wasn't a feeling of urgency i mean the case of the um you know major fossil fuel companies basically covering up the science on global warming is pretty damning evidence on that front um but there's now this opportunity to to turn that narrative around right to um for instance one of the things that i think is really you know i think there's an opportunity to create collaboration um where there once was competition and that's what refi ultimately means to me that's this incredible answer and um i'll just let's go jump into yeah i definitely think the positive externality piece is at the heart of pretty much everything we're talking about here because and actually i would really credit toby shawn and the other internet crew for writing a really great piece on this positive some worlds which kind of highlights the fact that what we're building and actually what dows are able to kind of produce is kind of a club model which or commons model depending on how you frame it which allows for positive externalities to actually be produced uh kind of as a side effect and i think that that's something that previously was very difficult to extend so if you look back to like ostrom's common model uh commons model rather in sort of like that framing the problem is really that you have local resources which are kind of scarce and you need a way to manage them you need a way to ensure that people are using them effectively and um what hardin sort of in opposition to ostrom was originally stating was that you would effectively end up with this tragedy of the commons where you would never be able to do that effectively you would always end up with basically someone defecting deciding just to go off on their own and not really work with the group and ostrom was able to show at local scale that you can actually do that pretty effectively and there's many cases in which that's happened but in a global context it's very easy to pass on externalities very easy like as marcus mentioned just it's very easy to pass off pretty much everything um that is you know not useful to you as a company or as even a government to some other external party and so with climate change you see this most prominently but it's also true with things like open source software with things like even you know right now as we're seeing uh with some of the crises that are happening uh with things like peace it's very difficult to get people just on a global scale to coordinate and i think what's interesting is this idea effectively of you know public goods on the one hand but also global commons sort of management which is enabled by these style structures so that to me is really the sort of like the positive externality piece of that is at the heart of why we can actually basically enable these uh kinds of solutions today in ways we couldn't before so that's uh a bit of a tldr you know it's it's really good framing too because that is fundamentally i like the fact that you're looking at measuring the impact and not just the process and that's kind of a good way to think about this because otherwise you don't make progress and uh so i think i feel like one thing i missed asking which i should have done before this question is actually giving the audience a better understanding of what each of you actually do in terms of what the the protocol does or what the company does so uh uh there's obviously a big climate heavy focus on this panel i charge two out of three of you are on that problem but bitcoin specifically is a really good probably good sort of solution and company out there so i'd love to start with you scott and then i'll learn more about ukin and klima and just kind of go into what is it the the platform does how do you do it uh some of the impact that you can kind of talk about and just how does how do things work behind the scenes and under the hood um so let's start with bitcoin and then we can go to uh clean eye and 2k awesome we've yeah principally been focused on quadratic funding which is a lot to really get into but in short it's really a democratic way to crowdfund contributions in a way that kind of allows for a community to signal its preferences according to the will of sort of the poor many versus the rich and a few so you could imagine if you have 20 grantees which actually we do right now sort of have year round going for grants around 13 where you can see this in action but the idea essentially is that over a two week period let's say you get a sense of what the community is signaling and you use this method which actually was created by glenn wales that we had saved in vitalik to effectively distribute a pool of matching funds from larger players in the ecosystem so in the end you end up with kind of a preference ordering for a given set of public goods uh within a specific community context and you can almost almost imagine those communities as kind of their own commons right so you know someone like a group like polygon or a group like um ave or group like um you know anyone else who's kind of got their own ecosystem could you know kind of curate and decide on what they care about and what public goods they want to fund in the context of their own ecosystems but the beauty is that those end up actually themselves creating positive externalities because it's all open source software so that's kind of the tldr of just you know what we're aiming to do with the tooling that we have and we've started to like as i kind of mentioned at the beginning expand on this notion in the context of you know things like climate be the planet where i'm going now uh and things like uh longevity human health um peace in the case of funding uh in the case of ukraine and ultimately those are to me exactly as as robert kind of mentioned the problems that i think are just missing solutions in the context of you know existing institutions um and so you know we're kind of broad in terms of what we focus on in terms of impact open source software was the start but i think there is this broader recognition in the community over the last few years that there really is a potential for us to actually bring this impact back to the physical world which of course everything that we're doing relies on amazing marcus do you want to jump in sure um i have to say though i think it might be easier to understand what klima is after toucan explains how they bring carbon on chain sure here let's there you go yeah cool um i mean so you can really uh at the at the core is um is a way to connect the web to carbon market with web3 right so um there's a bunch of like small comp like you know modules to it the first one being the carbon bridge so essentially um this is a way to connect to what we call source registries so um what's important to know is that we so we only bring credits on chain that um are verified by nonprofits and and so-called carbon standards in the real world so we're not like the auditing the auditing body we're really just like technology infrastructure that allows anybody that holds these credits today to to move them on chain and so um on the other side of you know when you use the carbon bridge as a user you get so-called tco2 tokens which are project specific carbon tokens so that's important because they carry all the metadata and attributes that are that are relevant because you know carbon is a very diverse asset actually like carbon credits you know can be generated by um planting trees by protecting trees by um having solar energy or like direct air capture so it's like a really broad field of use cases that can produce karma credits right and so um we want to make sure that these that all this data is represented and then now you can think of credits like a semi-fundable you know karma credit is like semi-fungible so what we want to do is that we want to create some commoditization and harmonization to this asset class based on like logical um like homogeneous groups and so a good example for instance is the nature carbon ton which we launched a couple of weeks ago which essentially is like a pool where you can deposit nature-based tco2 tokens or nature-based carbon credits into the pool as long as they match these criteria so you can think of it like a you know i'm from berlin sir you can think of it like a club that has a bouncer and it only allows certain types of carbon credits to go into the club and um and what you get on the other side is a it's what we call a carbon reference token so um in that case it's nct the nature carbon ton and that now has obviously much deeper liquidity and it has more like um it behaves more like a commodity right and so there's right now there's nct the nature carbon ton and bct bct which was developed together with climadow back in october to serve their their theory of change of moving your price floor up um for carbon and um yeah you know the main idea like the main the main thing that we want to unlock is the builders kind of using these building blocks to create you know novel applications and this way i'm excited to see what comes out of this hackathon also and um yeah so there's also two can bounty by the way so building with carbon and and and social graphs i think i'm excited to see what comes out of it cool i'll go ahead so thanks for setting that up raphael um so you know as as rafa was describing uh carbon credits themselves are um sort of like a commodity um but they're heterogeneous and what chickens done is brought them on chain um this sort of legacy web 2 um financial instrument essentially brought them on chain and made them into a tradable asset an erc20 um but that's not really that's sort of like the beginning of a d5 protocol rather than the end right because there's the market that needs to be created if we use an analogy here um to like a sort of antiquated concept of like rail travel um so you know there's someone has to build the rails and then there's a set of cars that carry some commodity on that on those rails right um if if toucan is like building the cars and putting you know allowing people to put their tonnage into the cars um klima is trying to own the rails so we're establishing and holding long-term liquidity for carbon assets on chain um we started out with two cans bct we since added mco2 into our sort of liquidity rail ecosystem and the idea is that the klima token um is sort of the reserve currency of this new on-chain carbon market where if you want to acquire bct if you want to acquire nct if you want to acquire mco2 or any other carbon assets that come online klima is your medium of exchange right um and the reason why klima klima has been structured the tokenomics have been structured in such a way that the supply of climate is tied to the amount of carbon held in kalima dallas treasury um so basically there's a liquidity flywheel inspired by the olympus protocol where um clima is minted and issued in return for bonders bringing an asset to the treasury so that whole olympus protocol stuff is quite complicated honestly but a good analogy to um to have in your head when you're thinking about olympus style protocols is the federal reserve system um which i understand many people may not be familiar with that system but the basic idea is you have some treasury of assets um like in the old days it was gold and silver would be held in the federal reserve and then dollars would be printed where each dollar is backed by some amount of gold in the treasury um so klima is very similar the clema token in order to issue one klima um we have to hold at least one ton of uh carbon offsets in the treasury um so that's sort of like the top level but if i um if i step back and like think about what is klima trying to do um ultimately we are trying to create an economy on chain um where the fundamental asset in that economy is carbon offsets or really more generally any kind of environmental service that can be tokenized um so starting with carbon offsets makes a lot of sense because they're an established market they've been around for about 20 years and there's already existing demand but one of the things we're really excited about moving forward is the opportunity to create um an economy where as a supplier even you could potentially perform some service right uh you know whether that's planting trees or switching to solar renewable energy um but to create an economy where anyone can participate as a supplier of some ecosystem service and as a consumer of the tokenized versions of those environmental services um to be a little more clear about like what i'm actually talking about um you know carbon offsets are one way of financializing an ecosystem service um another idea would be something like a uh you know an ocean cleanup credit or a wetland restoration credit now the hard part right now is this is a very immature industry and there aren't great methodologies for those more specific types of environmental services um so we're sort of starting with carbon offsets as a simple already existing environmental service that can be tokenized um but the goal really is to create an economy that incentivizes preservation of our planet um rather than destruction of the planet it's super insightful this is amazing and i love kind of the the scope of the impact which is you finally get to work at problems that scale with the help of anybody who wants to part of these communities and that's a really unique uh thing that i think we've seen in in what three um there's a common theme that's been touched on here and marcus you just kind of highlighted that um you're gonna point out that the carbon credit markets have been around for a couple of decades already and everybody has kind of been talking about these things for for a long time in general uh i guess from each of your perspectives maybe we can start with scott here what do you think has changed over the last couple of years that have sort of created the surge in everybody wanting to focus more on impact or refi and kind of what do you think that the factors have been that sort of sparked this i think honestly like kind of what marcus mentioned the tooling is just there now where it wasn't before in a lot of ways there just wasn't really an easy way to you know even in 2017 2018 the idea of even though many people were building kind of products at that time the idea of having users at scale doing this sort of work was like kind of unlikely and now we've realized that actually that's really not even the model that you want to think about you really want to think about building entire kind of like collective communities um almost like effectively greater collectives in which these kind of actions can take place and that generally speaking most people are actually very interested in doing this because you look at how the traditional economy is run over the last even five ten years it's generally not being very good for the average person and i think that ultimately people are just looking for ways to find more meaning in the work that they're doing um there's some great thinkers on this topic actually including uh ivan elitch or highlight just as one that folks can probably check out later it's too much to get into here but i think that ultimately that search for sort of um you know really finding solutions to the problems that we're facing is something that just naturally has almost taken shape in the context of a more absurdist post-modern society that we're in the the other last thing i'll just notice i think you know from my perspective i think that people ultimately just learned a lot over the pandemic about how much we can coordinate globally uh in ways that we're just not possible or really you know as i mentioned like the tools weren't there for before and so i think there's also been in light of all these things that kind of cultural social shift but the details of those things are like way too much to go into i'm sure rafa marcus can dive in a bit more yeah i mean what you said is just jumping on it like i think we're just in like very turbulent times like you know as you know i live in europe and you know europe is like i've wore really close to me and like that's just one example but i think in general as as like a human at human level we're kind of in a transition phase it feels right and it it's very clear that the the model that we thought was uh working hyper growth etc globalization like we just you know we just looked at the bright side we completely ignored some of you know that we were basically destroying the the basis of life and so it's just so clear but it's really hard to get out of that right it's like it's like we we're like addicted to growth and we're um and and also on like the personal level right like it's just everybody's just like why should i you know where where should i give up my car where so like it's a it's a really fundamental problem um and i think what has changed so you know i remember two years ago when i talked about crypto and carbon like nobody cared um but like also in crypto i think the the tone has shift shifted right it's kind of like an industry which um which now has you know like there's been a lot of criticism actually about the environmental footprint also crypto i think that has actually played like the nfp like the nft hype which has been you know bringing a completely new set of users actually to web three that were maybe more more climate conscious has i think done a lot of good for this climate and refi movement and kind of opened open the door but generally i think as scott was saying like people love to work on something that is meaningful and now you can actually work in the most fascinating industry of the world and do something meaningful like so you know i think it's um that place that plays into it it's just like um yeah doing something meaningful can be fun and um and people because of this transitional phase are are willing to think outside of the box right something that came out would just not have been possible even if it i think was techno like if even if the technology was there like 10 years ago i don't think like people were ready to to rethink money at that scale right and what crypto has done is that it you know it's it made reinventing money really easy and this just opens up you know a new like a new playing field and uh so yeah i i guess this is it's just interesting times and like turbulent times are always interesting times and that's where kind of major shifts happen yeah yeah i think you know it's just speaking from my personal experience relatively new to the web 3 space and was really inspired by klima to drop my my meat space job and go full time basically as rava was saying you know with to take this opportunity that isn't presented very often to work on something meaningful and you know on cutting edge technology um so i do think there's a sense that like the pressure to do something at least in like the climate space specifically has been growing and growing and public consciousness does seem to have shifted in the last couple of years um to the point where like corporates are under extreme pressure you know to have esg plans um and like the mainstream public is fed up with inaction on this issue specifically i think um the the other thing i will say though is i do think there's been some important innovation in d5 specifically that has unlocked some of these new economic systems that weren't really practical um before like i know that some of the early clema founders had kind of an idea for this concept of like a new money system built with carbon as the backing but the idea of like a on-chain treasury managed using a bonding mechanism similar to the federal reserve was really not it hadn't been implemented until olympus came around um and so it's really these lego blocks that have been created that now allow us to build more sophisticated structures that enable refi to uh exist as such that's a really good point and actually this was exactly my next question which is there a lot of that from a timing standpoint is also because you have now an abstraction that just previously wasn't there or we just hadn't figured out how do we actually enable certain things to exist in a simple way aside from what you just said marcus what else is um is kind of just enabled by blockchains here that sort of helps you accomplish the goals for each of your companies yeah i in the carbon space specifically there's a huge opportunity because the legacy carbon market is um pretty uh antiquated to use a nice term um so there's a huge lack of transparency most of these deals are done in back rooms you know behind closed doors pricing data is not public so like most transactions are not um you don't know how much people like microsoft and amazon are paying for the tons they're requiring um so there's a level of transparency just at a pure like financial level that the blockchain brings that is right now absent from the legacy markets um at least in the carbon offset space so that's a big opportunity um the other thing i would say is that um this sort of interoperability aspect is really um promising because um you know in the old world if you want to retire your carbon credits if you want to claim them um it's like a manual process like you're talking like spreadsheets and email level of technology um and so if you wanted to automate offsetting that is like not really practical to do some you know larger entities have set up api connections and stuff but it's not practical for a small project to offset automatically um whereas on chain it's just a contract call um so that level of abstraction has really created um the opportunity to create an ecosystem rather than a series of like walled gardens where you have to go through um like a web to centralize authority to offset your carbon yeah just like jumping on that you know carbon credits really are packaged positive externalities right like somebody's going out is doing something and somebody's verifying somebody else is verifying that like there has been like a state change essentially right so let's from no trees to trees right and the the delta in that state change is then given out in terms of carbon credits but so it's a carbon credit really is a bunch of data and signatures and right now a lot of pdf documents that are kind of packaged together right so but ultimately we're dealing with like an intangible asset that is you can see it you can smell it and so i i personally think that environmental markets are like this is this might be the killer use case for for blockchains right or it's definitely i believe it's definitely one of them right um because because the integrity of that process is so important and um because you know and just adding on top of what marcus has been saying is not like every jurisdiction i was trying to figure out how do we how do we address climate change and so there's a bunch of different carbon markets actually right like we talked about the carbon market as if it was one thing um when we talked about the carbon market actually we talked about the voluntary carbon market right now but there's like event there's like a compliance carbon market and that one is you know it's different for colombia than it is for the us than for europe so um everybody's like doing a little bit of their own thing and then we have these credits and some of these are accepted in one jurisdiction and not in another so um like we believe that having that like you know neutral piece of infrastructure that's what we call the meta registry that um everybody can issue on and that everybody can retire and like everybody you know can can do so programmatically um this can actually unlock a much more homogeneous global carbon market that i think you need to have in order to address this at scale because climate change is a global problem and doing regulation on the like local level i don't think it's going to cut it um see i'll i'll stop there but um i'm really like actually my conviction grew grows by every like every day my conviction grows that you know two years ago i thought crypto might be a good market to sell carbon into and now like in the last few years i realized no no it's actually like we're now kind of leapfrogging from web one directly into web3 apartment markets basically yeah no absolutely it also says scott i know this is maybe not 100 overlapping but i'm sure there's an answer for for git coin and giving out grants too so we'd love for you to share one thoughts yeah i mean for us it's it's pretty simple which is like in again like three years ago five years ago dows were not really a topic that were very popular um and i think that the idea of i mean downs are a nebulous term but really what we're talking about like when i talk about the movies what i'm trying to kind of get out is the idea of these global internet native organizations and almost like kind of you know commons uh based organizations that to robin's point have the ability to create their own currencies and govern themselves according to their rules and really all that we're doing with the tooling that we have with prophetic funding and so forth is providing a rail for them to basically figure out what their preferences are how they should prioritize what they're you know funding and in a way that effectively allows them to uh you know build things that create positive externalities i just think that really you know we we did that for so long with mostly the support of the dream foundation um now there's just hundreds of orbs that want to do the same thing and are kind of um leaning on a lot of the principles that folks like actually aya like in the top together like the subtraction mindset uh sort of principles um from from that side of the space and that to me is really just at the heart of everything that we're doing i think one one thing that we sort of in a way acknowledge but didn't touch on specifically is i think all three of you are in an industry that is um that has a proxy for like uh the enterprise side or just the legacy world also is is a pretty big player um and kind of my question so i've got two kind of two-part question here so the first piece here is for the current non-blockchain solution that's out there for the problem you're solving um what does that kind of look like in terms of the partners that you have to work with their reactions about the technology or what do you have to convince them to actually think about these things or accept your solution as one of the other integrations like what does that look like and then similar to kind of on that theme what has been anywhere from challenging to the still stuff that you have to do behind the scenes that interacts with the real world especially for a lot of stuff around carbon credits i assume it's it's not just a software only problem um it'll be obviously to think so so what kind of goes on behind the scenes what are those conversations like what are the challenges there and kind of how do you think about that part of the world also now adopting to uh the newer solutions yeah i so glimma has a bit of an interesting positioning here because we we're ultimately aiming to be a credibly neutral market facilitator right we want to work with everybody basically um and so that gives us an opportunity but also a challenge um because you know the opportunity is we are able to interface with standards bodies you know we're able to interface with um with legacy carbon players and sort of get feedback from them get input from them but when it comes to actually bringing um consumers of credits on chain there's definitely a dichotomy between the sort of legacy consumers who are already operating the market already have expertise in how to offset versus the entities that maybe want to be doing that but don't have the resources or the funding to do that so that's kind of where we've been starting in terms of our outreach we have a partnership program called lima infiniti where we're basically um working with enterprises partnering with enterprises and protocols to offset their emissions um it's kind of similar to a like consulting model that many legacy carbon brokers um employ where they'll like uh be hired you know for a few hundred grand to you know calculate the emissions and um and handle all the offsetting activity um so what we've been what we found is that we basically for the legacy consumers we need to fit into their box we need to kind of um show them that there really isn't that big of a difference between um consuming on chain and consuming in the legacy world um at least in terms of the underlying you know legitimacy and quality of the credits um so there's definitely like a thud aspect where you know people who are um experienced in the legacy market want to um throw shade at tokenized carbon um either from lack of understanding or because they feel threatened um so i'd say that's our biggest challenge is like trying to keep everyone 3-3 like trying to keep everyone realizing that like there's a positive some outcome it's better for everyone to move the market on chain um especially in the light of like um uh legacy players whose business model is potentially being disrupted yeah i think you're mentioning a good good point there is that like i think it's it's a mixture of curiosity and fear for the legacy carbon market but in general i think it's the curiosity is winning and this is because it's you know it's a market that historically the volunteer carbon market certainly has been a very small market and uh it's been mostly driven by ngos and you know a few few few corporate customers but there's a very there's a new wave like the the customers of the last 20 years are not the same uh as the corporates that are buying today right you know microsoft and um you know blackrock et cetera they were like carbon offsets were not that big of their gender like 10 years ago and so we have like the car market is now in a phase where the demand side is much more demanding also in what they want to see right so they're asking for more data driven asking for more transparency in the process etc so you kind of have a market that is didn't have the time to adapt to its kind of popularity and so um so curiosity i would say is definitely winning because people understand that they need to innovate they need to you know adopt digital digital technologies and you know why not go all the way so i but yeah so also just adding is that the carbon market also has been a place of fraud historically like there have been incidences of fraud um back in you know 2010 and 2008 et cetera so um there's this i think there's this fear um with regards to crypto that you know just a bunch of cowboys that are now trying to like fraud people and so i think you know this adds to that the fact that there has been you know fraud historically adds to the skepticism but um but yeah like generally i would say um [Music] it's the curiosity is is is definitely winning and um i have no doubt that um like we too can definitely you know pay a lot of attention to make sure that the the tokens themselves are linked directly to the option asset and that it's like a two-way link basically so yeah if somebody takes the time to actually look how that is created it's like really hard to say that you know yeah to to not understand what's going on basically also interestingly uh the answer to the fraud situation problem is is being actually digital and having traceability so yeah it should tell me about it yeah yeah i also want to make sure that you get a chance to comment on this as well yeah i think actually it's funny the fraud piece is particularly relevant for for us because really you know what we're trying to do is figure out ways to in an incredibly neutral way but also in a way that is sort of ensuring um you know legitimacy of the donations measure the impact that's being made in a way that wasn't really possible in a lot of i would say not most but like a large portion of web 2 philanthropic initiatives and i think there's a problem right now of mostly people similar to the realizations we mentioned before in the context of other parts of sort of the economy but there's a realization that a lot of these large you know foundations which which have lots of money don't have a lot of transparency into how they're sort of you know spending that funding and i think that ultimately what we're realizing is that in a lot of those cases using these tools uh whether it's quadratic funding or whether it's you know there's a lot of really cool work happening around the conviction voting and conviction related funding too there's retroactive funding which optimism students and amazing work on all those tools give us new ways to basically deploy funding that just weren't really there before and that weren't really nearly as transparent i think as they can be now and i kind of also want to get to uh wrapping this up on with respect for everybody's time um so kind of the final question is like obviously we kind of talked about how these things are sort of uh being done right now and kind of the individual standalone impact that all these solutions would have i think what's interesting here and also why this is part of the actual electro summit is that there are still more amplified and exponential uh benefits of this being part of a larger network whether it's from a graph or just being able to port anywhere from your history or background to to other uh solutions out there whether it's on the d5 site or other social networks or any other on-chain activity so kind of from each of your perspective how do you kind of think that uh having sort of a notion of decentralized graph of everybody's impact or activity would amplify a refi uh like looking at just kind of lens all together or your wish list of all of this um how can we make that better for refi yeah i just want to reference a book that is very inspiring um for klimadow and kind of ties into this question it's called the ministry for the future by kim stanley robinson and one of the really cool aspects of that is that um basically in the book uh a decentralized social network is the driver of mass adoption of crypto and the use of a carbon back currency to basically save the planet from climate change um so i think there's a really exciting opportunity here to leverage um like social pressure social um essentially social proof right like you can show your friends your colleagues that you've taken you know you put your money where your mouth is um so one of the ideas we're really excited about is this notion of like a green check um right so by um basically going through some verifiable on-chain process you can attest that you have you know made a pledge of like what you think your emissions are um publish that pledge and then you know showing that you on chain offset that tonnage to you know meet your your pledge um and then you get a little check a little social proof that you have actually done this action and you can share that um with your with your network yeah i would agree is i think i think this is one of the key missing components right so um it all comes back like you know climate action is something like why do we do that right like uh you know i live in berlin i've have lots of friends who you know who are very conscious of these things and i think actually you know and i've learned a lot about like environmentalism from my friends so for my you know for my peers essentially and i see other doing a behavior and actually i might copy it so i think that this um you know this is how humans work and having this ported into the virtual space which where you know we spend more and more time in you know the metaverse essentially and importing that into the metaverse and allowing you know people to express themselves and to show like the impact that they have uh actually creates a new new currency right which is status and which creates new incentives ultimately for people to do the right thing because uh you know we know from from behavioral science that people like if nobody sees you like people do pretty horrible stuff right but if other people are looking uh people start to behave you know in a much more 33 positive some like you know way so i i'm super excited about um about that component being being brought on chain and uh yeah like as i said earlier i can't wait to see like what comes out of it and um you know like not just out of this hackathon but you know we've been we've been we've been in conversations um and i really want to make sure that this is deeply integrated into kind of the climate positive and not just climate you know like climate is just one problem that we need to solve it's not it's not the the yeah it's just you know it's it's not everything so um yeah i'm really stoked and i think it's really important yeah i think there's a lot of really interesting ideas around like almost a regen score and that's actually been something that we've seen play out in previous rounds uh on bitcoin where people effectively end up donating projects and they end up with actually real rewards as a result of that from you know projects that end up kind of graduating and going and doing their own thing and then giving back to the community that supported them i think in addition though there's this kind of question of on the one hand there's incentives for like extrinsically motivating people to do the work that they should be doing there's also the idea of and this is true in open source software and i think it's just a really important point to hit home is there's people who are also really already intrinsically motivated to do things but don't actually have the financial means to do them and i think that it's often you know historically an open source software and i think this is true in the case of uh you know the climate space and other sort of like global commons as well there's this problem of just generally people not being willing to uh you know and not not necessarily sorry that they're they're willing to but they're not necessarily able to take the time to do the work that they want to do and i think that's actually you know kind of going back to our previous conversation where there's just this mass sort of realization that wait like the collective hallucination that we had before doesn't necessarily uh you know align with our values and now we have you know all these tools to sort of allow that intrinsic motivation to shine through so um i might be overly optimistic about the natural state of things but i think that's a really key piece yeah optimism is important in order to stand up in the morning i absolutely agree and i think one kind of cool piece about this thing is that especially at a hackathon you get to try all these possibilities at a smaller scale and just see what resonates or what actually the impact could be and use it as a proxy to decide what direction you should uh sort of choose or go in more on so yeah i'm super excited to see kind of seeing a couple of interesting carbon outside use cases with new social networks that come out of this hackathon and everything that uh use that's got i think makes absolute sense um yeah like this is very much needed and i'm glad that people are not actually thinking about this thing as a priority not just as a side thing that they should signal that they care about so uh thank you so much uh all three of you for giving us a time and kind of making this amazing chat and uh wanna think for thank you for your time cool thank you kartik thanks so much [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: ETHGlobal

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Id: 09nq2NXDNM4

Length: 47min 23sec (2843 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022