#Blockchain and the Environment with @Hedera and Industry Leaders

Recorded: April 27, 2023 Duration: 0:58:39

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Hello, hello everyone. Thanks for being here. We're just going to wait a couple more minutes just to give everyone the chance to join the speakers panel.
How are you doing guys? Um, what do you think you think we can get started? Yeah, I think that'll be great and we'll probably have a couple speakers and maybe we'll have a celebrity guest or two join in a few minutes. I know folks are at consensus today and so there may be a lack of connectivity.
for one or two folks joining, but yeah, why don't we kick it off? All right, let's get started. Okay, so first of all, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Mika. I'm Community Development Rep here at Hedera.
And today we are joined together to discuss the importance of conserving the environment. So we are gathered in the spirit of honoring the environment and to remind ourselves of the importance of taking care of our planet and finding innovative solutions to the environmental challenges that
that we're faced with. So as some of you may know, cryptocurrency technology has been getting a lot of attention in the past couple of years for its potential to revolutionize many different industries, but also for its ability to promote
sustainability and to reduce our carbon footprint. So in this discussion we'll be exploring some of the ways that DLT and blockchain technology are being used to promote sustainable practices and protect the environment. So I would like to give the floor to Wes to start off as I think he'll be leading
most of the discussion today. So, Wes, you are up. Awesome. Mika, thanks to you and Hedera for hosting. We're always super impressed with Hedera's focus on sustainability and investment in different sustainability goals, not just at the protocol level where we have a low carbon footprint, but actually looking at
how we can take climate action in a climate positive way where we're driving real-world outcomes. I think that's really a big theme for today's discussion. We have some great panelists here who are our office speakers and I think we have one or two in the audience that we need to pull up as well. But I'd love to go around the room from a
perspective and have everyone introduce themselves, share a little bit about your background from a climate perspective, how you got into the space, and then we'll pivot over to talk about each of our organizations and what we're looking to do in this intersection of Web 3 and the environment. And maybe we'll start with Alan Rancel
from Filecoin and Green to help kick that off and then I'll come back and do mine at the end if that sounds good.
So yeah, it showed me I am the head of Filecoin Greed. So Filecoin Greed is the sustainability initiative for the Filecoin network as part of Protocol Labs. What we focus on is making environmental claims in Filecoin really transparent.
So you can store data on Falcoin. Anyone can do that with Falcoin storage futter. We make it possible for you to understand where the energy to store that data is coming from and provide you actual proofs from existing renewable energy markets. So, you know, really tapping into these, what's called
renewable energy certificates which allow you to say, okay, energy was purchased in order to do this thing, right, to store data on the Falkway network that was produced by this particular producer in this particular place over this particular time period from this particular source, right. So like solar energy was used to store your data,
in this state on this month. And we really feel a lot of potential in, you know, blockchains and web 3 more generally to make sustainability claims both more transparent and more granular and really build this layer of public verifiability into everything that we do at this sort of intercom.
section. I guess US for a bit on my background, I was doing a academic collaboration between protocol labs and the MIT Energy Initiative looking at how decentralization can apply to power grants. And so how can we use
use some of the IT that's being developed in the Web 3 space in order to help decarbonize power grids and really build power grid control systems that are robust. And so that was sort of my intro to the entire space then Filecoin launched and people including me started asking how much energy is it using and how
and we make it more verifiable sustainable. That's what I'm really happy to be here. I'm really happy to discuss all the sort of implications of this kind of Virginia free-size-based. Awesome. Thanks, Alan. I think it's interesting to see how folks come from different industries and come into the Web 3 space and bring their own views that
ultimately bring the Web 3 space forward. And with that, I'd love to pivot over to, on a learner from Climate Collective and ask the same question. First off, how did you get into this RE-5 area of intersections between Web 3 and the environment and tell us a little bit about yourself and the Climate Collective?
Hi, Wes. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited to be here. I'm at Consensus in Austin and yeah, it feels really meaningful to jump in here and spend some time with you all to make sure that this conversation reaches beyond the people right here.
in Austin at the moment. So I'm the CEO of the Climate Collective. Climate Collective is a innovation network and impact network that brings together builders, entrepreneurs, investors, NGOs, scientists. Yeah, that's
the broad, give it, everyone focused on climate. So anyone that works on climate and is dabbling or interested in or actively using blockchain to improve its climate solutions is welcome to engage with the climate collective.
We have members, we also have a large number of grantees that we've supported throughout the last year and a half. And we run a number of different working groups, activations, research efforts, et cetera. I'm very excited.
it to let you all know that one of our big sort of lifts over the last couple of months, which is a white paper or the World Economic Forum was just launched yesterday. And it really talks about the use of blockchain and how blockchain can help the world speed up and scale up its decarbonization
first and really engage and commit to climate action at scale. So within that paper, and I'll find a way to link it here in the chat notes, but within that paper there are lots of really concrete and specific examples of how watching can play in the climate space. And you had a good question, Wes. You asked how I
I mean, the truth is, I'm not a blockchain Maxi, if you will. I am fairly new to the technology. I said that I helped set up the World Bank blockchain lab some seven years ago, probably, and had some ideas at that back then for how I thought blockchain could help increase transparency and age.
which has a lot of corruption issues. But fast forward haven't done much with blockchain since until last year when I was asked to take over the climate collective. I am a climate specialist. I worked in climate since 2007. I spent many years in sub-Saharan Africa.
working on energy efficient cook stove, gold standards certification, sustainable biomass, then did climate finance at the World Bank for good seven years, trying to find ways to integrate big data and innovation innovative technologies in the World Bank's operations to make its work on climate more impactful.
In the last four years, I was with Facebook doing sustainable development goal strategy and social impact partnership work. So a bit more new to blockchain, very seasoned in the climate space and just, I mean, mind blown by the potential of blockchain to actually
solve some of these really thorny issues that's been holding climate back. I'm sure we can get into the examples shortly, but I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And thank you so much, especially for your leadership. The World Economic Forum report is a great report. Folks who haven't seen it, it's a really good
Opportunity to see how institutions are thinking about Web 3 for real climate outcomes. And, you know, there's a bunch of different areas I'd love to explore later in the space on that part and excited to hear more about what's next as well. But, you know, the climate collectives are a great group helping convene the conversation, but also bring
bring the space forward. And as part of that report, there was a few different solutions highlighted specifically in the Hedera ecosystem. A lot of folks are aware of the Guardian as a digital measurement reporting and verification system, not just for digital measurement reporting verification one time, but actually a system that builds systems themselves.
think of it as a factory almost. And we have with us, in Vision Blockchain, and their CEO, Daniel Norkin, who is one of the maintainers of the Guardian. And I'd love for Daniel to introduce himself a little bit in Vision Blockchain and how you got into this climate space and maybe some of the different things that you see across the industry.
Yes, sir. Thank you, Wes. Thank you for hosting as well as Michael over there and and the whole Haderra community for tuning in and the other great speakers that we have here. So hi everyone. My name is Dan Orkin on one of the co founders here.
at InVision Blockchain and I see in an audience we have the other co-founder, his name is Jason Panzas and yeah we're super thrilled here to be talking about climate and sustainability and the Guardian and you know the project is so
So for those that don't know about the Guardian and I know the West just explained it, let me try to explain it from a different perspective. So the Guardian is an open source tool that leverages the Hedera ledger essentially to mint emission tokens and carbon offset
and renewable energy credit tokens. And the reason why we are issuing tokens is because as everyone here knows is that when you're using a public ledger, this provides a level of auditability and traceability that really is the problem statement in the carbon
market space currently. So by having this public ledger where you can easily discover these environmental assets, if you will, you can now reduce fraud in the ESG marketplace and really streamline the whole carbon credit creation and
and really the trading process as well. So again, the Guardian is revolutionary on its impact in the carbon market space and the ability to streamline the entire life cycle of the carbon credits, not just on the creation of it, but actually in
the transferring of the assets and as well as the retirement of that. So that's what we mean by the entire life cycle. And from the assets which are created from the Guardian, there is a whole ecosystem of applications and different techniques that
that are out there within the, you know, refi space such as marketplaces and carbon forwards and different business models that are being spun up. So again, we're truly humbled to be in the position to be the builders and the maintainers of the Guardian.
So that's an open source project and we also have the Managed Guardian Service too, which is a hosted platform for those that want to not deal with the whole technical aspect of managing it, upgrading it and so on and so forth. But I can say, you know, just to answer your question.
on how we got into space. Let me help answer it from a different perspective because it's really not so much about me specifically. It's really about the team and the work that Envision has done. So we opened up in the early part of 2018 and we've been lucky to be involved in the sustainability space.
really since then with a bunch of different types of use cases. And what's interesting is that also not just in the sustainability space and other different types of use cases, we've had the luck and the fortune to work with great companies across the space, across different
and help out with tokenization use cases and decentralized identity use cases and NFT use cases and fungible token use cases and all sorts of different types of standard organizations and you know when when when
When we started working with the West and the HBAR Foundation and Surge and Justin over there, it swirls laps and everybody. And two and a half years ago, when we began on the path for the Guardian, the vision was as clear as day to kind of incorporate all of these latest and greatest
technologies with DLT and decentralized identity and so on and so forth to really make this change in the carbon market space. So again, thanks for having us here and happy to dive more into that. Absolutely. And I think it's really cool how envisions working fully open
source for those who don't know anyone in the community who's building on the Guardian can contribute features to the roadmap. You can even see those features and tickets out there as they're developed. It's awesome to be able to watch the community bring a product together and envision helping coordinate it is fantastic. And of course a big part of that is
and we have Justin at Wall Online and I'm going to ask Justin the same question about how he got into the climate space in addition to a little bit about what the Swirls Lab developer advocacy team does because I think that goes hand in hand with the work that Envision is doing but also hand in hand with how he built communities.
they grow such as how climate-clad of convenes. And we also use tools across our ecosystem like different file pool and tools, whether it's Web3.Storage or CO2.Storage, and it's just that if you could help draw a little bit of that together in how SRLs Labs enables different projects to build on the Guardian and other open source tools on HIDARA.
Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for having me on here as well. So yeah, we enable organizations to build on us because we have many, many different integrations. We have a fast network that utilizes the consensus service that utilizes the token service and smart contracts. And so what we really want to do is we want to support all of the use cases that go through in a really
really good way and just shepherd it through as they need us. And I think from our standpoint, that's the most important thing. For me, it's, you know, the history of how this all started was, you know, when man since some of the folks that were higher up at Hedera went to go by carbon offsets, I believe West was included there too.
they realized how opaque and hard it was to get anything accomplished other than the minimum. So it just kind of snowballed from there and under the leadership of West and various folks at the foundation, she's been really good. So yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that Justin.
And obviously a team effort of everyone in the ecosystem, but it also goes beyond just today where we use those third party tools and we have open source capabilities, whether it's whatever city's building with their carbon forward platforms or what envisions building with Guardian or what tolem in the OCI team, object computing
team to build with the arm that are fully open source capabilities. From my perspective, I didn't give a full introduction because I wanted everyone to have a little more time. But the HBAR Foundation, we have a group called the Sustainable Impact Fund, which won in our six funds, but four key funds focused on outcomes in bringing the balance sheet of the plan itself.
the public ledger in an auditable information discoverable and liquid way. And that's where we see this intersection of blockchain and the environment being important. But we have to answer tough real world questions, tough real world challenges, which a lot of times in the rest, in the rest of Web 3, sometimes we're working on things that may seem extremely digital.
extremely detached from some of our real world assets, is some call it. And I wanted to get into maybe some of the challenges that we each look to address. And one of the key challenges you always hear in sustainability and climate change, especially here in the US, but in some other places abroad, is the challenge of credibility and
And how we address that with some of the different tools. And I know each of us are going to have different answers on this. And I want to go back around the room and maybe start with Anna, followed by Alan, just to see how is your organization thinking about the challenge of using Web3 as a tool to
make ESU reporting more credible and also thinking about how the assets that you're creating are solving for real world activity. Thanks, Wes. It's a great question. When I joined the Climate Collective in
In the last summer, voluntary carbon market was really the focus of most groups, because tokenizing carbon credits were so hot at the moment. I think we all fairly quickly unpacked that tokenizing the credit isn't really the big innovation here, creating an end-to-end digital carbon market.
really with the value for society and climate comes in. And I think people have sort of deepened its perspective around that. I definitely feel like the next, not frontier, that's a silly word to use in this context, but the next sort of focused area is ESG. So this is a very timely question.
I think so a lot of groups have done value chain tracking for a long time on blockchain. There is a video from, I believe it's Amazon that I love, that is super interesting, that just shows in a very very simple way how they're tracking coffee beans and that ends
up in someone's coffee and you want to know that you got good beans and that the farmer was well paid and who roast them, etc. But you don't really care what technology is on. You don't really care that blockchain was involved in that tracking. You just want the outcome of knowing where your coffee have been and the quality of it. So I think this
This is a good learning for the ESG space. I don't think we should flag blockchain for ESG. I think we should just talk about the benefits that that brings. And I say that for two reasons, one I already mentioned, but the second one is ESG is a lot of compliance. I mean, having worked at a large
corporate with a lot of let's say ice on it, meta Facebook. These are a lot about compliance and risk management and sort of future kind of profit trajectory of companies and markets and
assets. So focusing too much on what technology we're using to get to that, I don't think it's helpful, given that it's already kind of a sensitive space. But I'm really, I'm confident that blockchain has a
a lot of value to do. One of the things that I've already seen is simplicity in reporting and the transparency in reporting. With all the work talked about greenwashing and green hashing and you name it, we all know that there's increasing scrutiny in how companies are reporting
their CSR work or ESG work or net zero commitments and using technology that makes that reporting easier but also allows the company itself or others to double click on these different aspects. I think it's the key to building credibility and trust in these
types of reports. So that would probably be my first answer. I'm sure others on the call have other ideas too. That was really fantastic. And I'd love to hear Alan's response to that, because I think that there's a lot to respond to, but also a lot to add from the Filecoin Green Bridge back to as well. Yeah, I love the response. And I think that's
that's like 100% true and you hit on a lot of the like really important ways that I think this intersection can add a lot of value, right? When you when you when you build a web 3 underpinning for sustainability and ESG all the things that you can sort of fundamentally do that you can't do before. I think like taking a step back and just asking you
what is Web 3 about or what should it be about at sort of a technical level. People think a lot about token prices and DeFi and all the memes that go on and Flubbin NFTs and everything, but like really fundamentally what we're doing here is trying
to build verifiability into data at the data level. And so something like content addressing, where we switch from addressing data the way everyone had addressed data for the entire history of the internet before, which is you tell someone what you want by telling them where it is.
you enter a URL into a browser and that resolves to a location on a server and you just sort of assume that because it was there yesterday that same resource that you want is going to be there today. Right and the realization of Web 3 right is that like that is that's fundamentally like not good enough to coordinate society at the
scale that we're looking to coordinate at right now. And there are these tools that people have been using in computer science for decades, but which haven't reshaped the architecture of the internet in order to address data by what it is rather than where it is. And so that's one example of how we're able to
build verifiability into data at the lowest level possible and address stuff by that content itself. And so, you know, so then how does that apply to everything that you were just talking about Anna? I think it's pretty clear that
that ethos, right, of public verifiability and the technical ability to point to data and address it by precisely what it is, right, what is that resource rather than where it is, adds a lot to these sorts of claims, right, you were talking about how just originating carbon credits using
a new system is not necessarily that interesting, but being able to build a full end-to-end traceability system in which you're able to follow the lifecycle of a project from inception of that project or initial funding of that project or sale of carbon futures or carbon forwards
All the way down to the sustainability claims made based on carbon offsets issued by that project, right? If you're able to follow those sorts of trails over these sort of long lifetimes that you aren't able to do, easily if you have, you know, hundreds of people all tapping into this one database,
and you sort of assume that people are making the right edits at the right places, but you don't have that problem that's built into the data layer. I think that's where a lot of the benefit is. You're asking us about tools that are really going to enable a lot of this. One of the tools that we've been building is called CO2.STUDITH.
storage. So, COT storage takes that verifiability and applies that not just to the data itself, but to the data type. So, you get a content address for the data, you can reference it however you want, but you also get a content address for
the data schema or the data type. And that allows you to take data transformations that you might want to do, right? You might want to pull data from five different carbon offset projects and use them in some CO2 ledger for your company or project, right? It allows you, you know, that's sort of an example of a pipeline
that you might want to build that uses data from a bunch of different sources and combines them together into one result. If you reference the actual type of that data, you can then guarantee that those data pipelines are actually going to run even though you're pulling data from all these different places.
example of something that really enables coordination on scale that we need, right? We need people on many different continents from many different organizations, all to be able to reference the same stuff and minimize the errors that come from the sort of inherent messiness of that, right? And the way to
do that is by applying these sort of core primitives of Web 3 to the sustainability space. And there's a bunch of great projects that are building on top of that. We just ran a hackathon as part of the Sustainable Blockchain Summit that Hedera and the HMAR Foundation participated in.
And I just want to give a shout out to some of the folks who did really awesome projects of that hackathon, including Sylvie Protocol's OpenTree's project, as well as BioWorbit, who are both taking some of these concepts, right, taking publicly available data, in this case satellite data.
data and applying that to verifying that trees are planted in the given place or that they are continuing to grow or mapping deforestation and really being able to tie that verifiability to specific claims having to do with carbon offsets or a variable claim
Awesome. I think the hackathon was really emblematic of all the different areas we can tackle with Web3 technology. I want to pivot over to the next topic of what are the most promising areas where TLT can address climate change.
how we can support it, Web 3, DLT can support an end-to-end market, we can map the market life cycle and we kind of talk about how the content addressing could make that very specific granular data. But where did some of these things come together? And I'd like to go over to Daniel and then just in to talk a little bit about what are
those intersections look like. So for example, Daniel, I know the Guardian uses CO2.Storage and Web3.Storage in certain instances. And it comes out of the box that way to write to this decentralized and most cases, at least wreck friendly or offset friendly environment. But can you
talk a little about that integration and where you see things like DMRV sitting versus maybe where some of the other tools integrate to that. Yeah, sure, sure. Thanks for that. And yeah, and we have a really good partnership with Filecoin Green and have included that into
into the open source. So again, it's like the use of Filecoin green down to the technical level gives the API gateway, if you will, into the IPFS world. So that we're using Hedera Topic
and IPFS and whatnot to be able to store certain piece of information, but just kind of looking at it holistically really at the really high level view is that the Guardian is not an MRD solution. I just want to make that pretty clear.
where the Guardian supports the MRV solutions of the world and the SaaS companies that are building their solutions to be able to help businesses empower them, businesses and governments and individuals to be able to manage their environmental
impact and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or the GHG emissions and align themselves with the climate goals. That's where you would really want to build applications on top of the Guardian, specifically because of those integrations that West had mentioned and then I
talking to it. And really, again, just kind of speaking to the Guardian and how it enables applications, because again, our target audience and the reason why we have the Guardian as an API product is because we want to empower those
Builders in this space to be able to have something that allows them to really combat what's happening in the carbon space. And we notice that the process of designing and collecting the supporting data, which is where IPFS comes in and Filecoin and whatnot for where they're
The collecting of the supporting data for the carbon claims traditional traditional methods without the use of all of these technologies I'm talking about. It's really manual. It's prone to errors. There's poor data quality that we see. It's lack of standardization that we hear that's an issue.
a one data structure doesn't match with the native with with another data structure. There's a lack of assurance. We still are seeing the issues with potential double counting and greenwashing and just an overall lack of trust. And that's where the Guardian really comes into play to help those applications.
really combat those common issues in the ESG space. The way that we do that is really interesting. Again, applications can bolt onto this is that we have something that we call a policy workflow engine, or PWE for short. And it addresses all those issues.
issues. What's interesting is that the policy workflow engine looks kind of like a BPM tool. And we designed it that way because in the carbon market space there are these standards and business requirements for these standard bodies that have their
methodology. So the way that you go about carbon accounting, there is a certain methodology, the GHG protocol is a very popular one where it has a series of technical requirements and business requirements that need to be fulfilled. Same thing when you're creating carbon
or rental energy credits, there is a methodology to follow. And what's interesting is that by using the Guardian and all the different technologies that we have, you're able to take this traditional methodology that you have, it's like a 305 PDF page document that there's
of information and we're able to now create a digital methodology, a DMRV, by combining the digital methodologies together with a kind of thesis earlier with the use of decentralized identifiers and with verifiable credentials.
is that you can now have this provable and auditable ecosystem that you weren't able to have before. And again, because these methodologies are digital, the applications that are built on top of the Guardian now have additional features by having a digital methodology that you don't have before.
or like the ability to have peer review tagging, which is coming out this month actually. We also have the ability to use a tool that we call the DIFTool or a differentiation tool. You can compare methodologies within one standard organization or
even across centered organizations, you know, to really understand what are the pros and cons and again this helps out from the entire ecosystem when it comes to pricing models and demand and supply signals and whatnot. Again, this is what happens when you
take applications from a traditional methodology and now you start to bring in this whole digital revolution that's that's been happening, you know, over over the past couple years, not just in Web 3, but just, you know, in general. So again, the applications that are building on top of the Guardian are our vast for sure.
Awesome. I think maybe Justin wants to speak to that too. Yeah, so just for some of the applications that use us, they're all really exciting. One of the ones that I really love is Doveu. They're making it really easy to offset carbon and they have, they saw a lot of the problems that exist in the industry today that we've talked about like the green washing
and not understanding at a granular level how those assets are created and what they're comprised of. That's one. And then the other one I really like too is timeless, timeless because quantifying your emissions and understanding how much emissions you have into the atmosphere is honestly
the first step. You really can't measure it, you really can't manage it. It is true, you really do need to know more information and timeless enables that. On the other end of that, you have folks like Cripsy, they're actually really great as well because then when all of those attributes
and all of those things that make that carbon offset or sustainability asset valuable, they all have to be carried down to the user in a really intelligible way that doesn't necessarily show all the complexity right in your face. It has to be reported in a very good way that people can understand.
That might have been kind of short, but those were the three. Those are my three. Awesome. Thanks, Dustin. Thanks, Daniel. I really love the different types of examples we see. If you think about the Guardian as a factory and being able to use it across, whether it's agricultural use cases for buying offsets or enabling.
You know enabling different more IoT direct ways of Monitoring but also taking that all the way through the verification process of course all all this uses things like CO2 storage every time a piece of data is logged But these systems that we're building that's just one piece of the system and you know this this scenario
We have a lot of negative energy around whether it's tokenization, DMRV has a much larger opportunity. We talk about ESG reporting, we haven't talked about ESG investment, we haven't even talked about exchanges for credits or new types of markets that may come from the more compliance driven realm, which is a much bigger portion of the carbon markets than the
market. And my next question is where do we want to see the climate and crypto narrative go? Where do we want to see different systems being built with context? These DMRB systems, they can create all sorts of attributes, they create all sorts of assets, and by all-quin green we can create all sorts of credentials
that you can use for data mining. In the Guardian, you can create the world's largest library of open source methodologies or digitized open source methodologies or policies today. Where can we take this? And maybe I'll go in a different direction. I'll go back to Justin first and come to Allen and then Daniel.
I think for me I would really like to see the barrier to entry for the masses to go down. I think they all know that regulation is coming and this is all going to be a requirement soon. So from my standpoint we know we're going this direction. I want to make sure that these companies do it right the first time and not
have to pivot every couple of years. To me, that's really important. And then as far as the-- I don't like how there are folks that say that they may not believe in climate change. And I hope that one day, without a shadow of a doubt, that there's not so much thrashing on the conversation.
I totally agree. Yeah, I think that's
Yeah, I think that's totally true, right? And clearly, if we can, you know, as much as we can play a role in both, you know, lowering that barrier to entry and also building that consensus around the sort of need for urgent firemeth election, I think that's really important. The other thing that really stands out to me is that I would like
with three solutions for sustainability to become more accepted by the traditional sort of ESG industry. Right, what we are doing is both from a technical and organizational point of view, leapfrogging that existing industry, but I think there's a lot of pieces that hold us back. Right, and
So number one there is the environmental reputation of Web 3 as a whole that largely comes from proof of work, but that's what's grabbed the headlines. We have this great conversation at the end of the Sustainable Lockshane Summit on a panel where John pointed out that
So at your can, they think that a major mechanism for driving the Volicaric Carbon Markets is that people at companies making ESG claims are putting money into sustainability because that's what they're
expected to do as a public company that wants to have a certain type of image and that those companies, when they're trying to decide what offsets to buy or who to do business with in order to make those claims, they look at the existing registries and they look at a few other sort of sources of credentialing
that are embedded within the existing industry and that's sort of as far as they go, right? They see a lot of what we're doing as really kind of fringe and it doesn't have a lot of credibility in their space yet. And so what I would really like over the next several months and years is for us to really show people
that look, we actually are leap-progging a lot of what the existing industry can do and push into that traditional ESG space more. I'm going to have to go in just a couple of minutes, but this has been a really great conversation. Thanks so much, Hedera, for hosting. Awesome. Thanks so much, Alan. I appreciate you stepping out of consensus.
and giving us a little bit of a urine site. I know that there's a lot of awesome work in the Filecoin, Filecoin Green ecosystem when we're super, super grateful to have you here. I'll kick it over to Daniel though to pick up on that point. Yeah, sure, thanks.
I guess the way I'd like to think about the climate and crypto narrative and kind of the future of it, I can probably think about it in three different pillars, three different trains of thoughts that probably converge all together. The first one is I teased this a little bit in what I was saying.
before and Wes also mentioned that within the Guardian repo, so just this FYI, if you're anyone that wants to go and check it out, it's open source right now, go to hidara.com/guardian and you can go take a look at the repo for yourself. I think one of the pillars
that I'm thinking through or track, if you will, is the move to digital. So obviously, one something as move from traditional to digital, a lot of capabilities become unlocked and with us having the largest open source
libraries of methodologies really really enables the ability to kind of move quicker and I think that obviously the quicker that things move the more that we can start tackling this whole climate change issue that we're all facing.
The other thing to talk about, and again, this kind of flows into the next one, is ease of use. And I hate to talk about, for example, chat GPT, but I think that that's been on the tip of everyone's tongue for the past couple of months.
and why ChatGPT and AI really took off to be the fastest growing product in the world ever is because of their ease of use, right? AI was difficult and now which ChatGPT for example you need to do is sign on and now you start interacting with this huge language database if you will.
So kind of with that with that case is that we want to make it easy for policy creators to to be able to go ahead and start to develop policies and start to use the Guardian. We want to abstract all of these blockchain terms because I think you know one of the biggest lessons that we learned since
2018 until now is that nobody really cares about what technology that we use and I think that Anna even even mentioned this earlier is that like nobody really cares about the technology that's there. We just want to make sure that the technology is working and that it's easy. So even if you take a look at the Guardian right now,
Yeah, it's using Hadeira and yeah, it's using W3C standards and yeah, it's using Filecoin and IPFS and yeah, it's using all these databases and all these other pieces of technology, but no one will ever know that because we've abstracted all that to just simple API calls for the developers out there.
there and we even have a UI for people to use. We understand that the UI at times when you developing policies could be a little bit cumbersome. So over the next couple weeks and over the next couple months what you'll see is us coming up with ways to make it easier for policy creators to be able to again
move towards the world of digital and start to take these methodologies, move them into something digital and again just make it easy to be able to contribute to this open source library. So definitely
I see those two things really, really coming together. Awesome. Thanks Daniel. I recognize we have about 12 minutes left on this spaces and I want to leave some time for some questions. I'm going to ask one more question and then I'm going to ask folks in the meanwhile to raise their hands.
hands if they have any questions that they want to ask for this panel. And the next topic is really going into what do we want to see over the next six months. We have about a little more than six months coming up to COP28 in Dubai. And what do we want to see from a Web3 ecosystem? I know Daniel, you just pointed out the easy
of use, making it easier to get to these technology solutions out there into the market, making it easier to use, easier to adopt. But what else do we want to see from an ecosystem perspective, a web through perspective, a climate perspective, and maybe I'll start with you, Daniel, and then as folks raise their hands, we'll pull them up.
Sure. And this kind of, you know, it's like the best thing that I could say is again, just continuing with the theme of ease of use. The more the ease for the adoption, the lower the barrier of entry, the more
that these companies, businesses, governments and whatnot can go ahead and participate and make these climate claims. I think that one of the key areas that is really important over the next months is definitely
the availability and the transparency. So again, ease of use for sure, but again, as as we go and we make these digital methodologies, and we're able to have more visibility, I think that the more companies will be able to make these
these climate claims and really stand true to them. It really is going to provide them with a lot of long-term value that they're looking for at the company business level. So again, over the next half a year or so, I could definitely see ease of use and transparency
equalling or corporate adoption. Awesome and Justin I'm going to take the same question over to you you know we have we have a lot of different things that in the year of implementation that we want to accomplish and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you're looking forward to over the next six months.
Yeah, definitely for me is being able to differentiate policies and all of the different details within them, I think is very important. The ability to tag and be able to quantify certain parts of your tokenization journey along the way.
way is needed, I think, in a big way. And it's kind of hard to explain, but if you can think about the difference between one of the methodology libraries and a new methodology library that you've created and modified, it should be very easy to be able to tell the difference between the two. And I think that's definitely one of our big priorities.
Awesome. Well, Justin and Daniel, I appreciate it. I think I have one more question planned and if folks do want to do want to raise their hand, we'll pull them up as a speaker. But if not, I want to talk about different opportunities from a support perspective. Of course, the HBAR found
The foundation has the sustainable impact fund for folks who are interested in building and climate. We have a lot of fantastic grantees. Many that are still being worked on. Things that will come out in the future. But of course, we have a lot of fantastic grantees that are making great progress. We talk about Dovoo, we talk about Cripsy, we talked about Timeless and of course, Envision.
Those folks who are building real-world applications focused on climate. But what types of other support is out there for the ecosystem? Justin, could you talk a little about Swirl's labs support from a developer advocate perspective and how you enable different parties who are building on the Guardian and the ARM and other open source solutions that are focused on climate?
Yeah, absolutely. So we try to have a good spread of folks around the world so that regardless of where you're located, you can get good support from us to help you along in your journey of getting everything from the start all the way to the finish. And even after that, when you want to iterate and make things better, faster, then we want to be there to
help you out and make sure that you're able to do that successfully. And that's the job and we're always excited to do it. And Daniel, I know your team has been working with the community on Hedera, you know, running things like community calls and providing other resources. Can you talk a little bit about what your team does and how you
support. Folks, interesting building in climate and Web 3. Yeah, sure. And take my word for it. There is no lack of support at all. So we're fully committed to providing a great experience on many different levels. I'll try to explain some.
And we have so much out there that I'm probably forgetting some so like if you want to chat just feel free to send me a DM and we can talk about a little bit further. But just taking it from, I can take it from two different levels. One with open source and one with the managed guard.
So with open source, obviously like Wes said, everything about what we do is open source from our project management of open source. We keep the road map is open source. All you have to do is download this and have extension and just navigate to open source.
to get up repo and you can see that is one of the tabs. You can see what tasks we're working on. If you have questions, you can ask a question in that issue. But more specifically is that you can find us on Discord. So you can go to the -- the Dera Discord go to the sustainability
the chat over there and we are monitoring that area. I know that there was a hackathon too that was mentioned with Filecoin so we were helping support that initiative as well. And also on Slack, too, so we have a whole community that's on Slack that, you know, if you're interested in joining
Again, just send me a DM and I'll send you the link to that Slack. So we have a lot of different meetings that we can introduce you to. So every Wednesday at around 8 a.m. Eastern, we have a Guardian Tech meetup that's kind of talking about what is planned.
What questions that the community has we listen to some of the inputs from the community and by the way the community for those that are listening that are involved we can do this without everyone because as much as we're supporting them they're supporting us and We appreciate all the ideas that we can incorporate into the Guardian that helps make it better but again, you know
It's like if there's questions on Slack, we help answer. We have individuals, Slack channels with companies that are building on the Guardian in the open source that have questions around policy development, around integration from the API level. We are more than happy to help out with that. And also from the managed Guardian service perspective,
that is our hosted environment, but we are still in a free beta period. So if you're interested in joining that free beta period, again, that's a great resource. You can jump on to there and try out the Guardian for yourself in a cloud environment. We provide support as well, so there's support
and help tickets that you can go ahead if you log on to the Guardian application. We have a chat desk so you can chat with us directly that way. So there's definitely no shortage of getting through to us. And I guess one of
thing I could say is that on top of everything I said you can do your own research with the documentation that we have. We have Hedera.com. I think it's like docshedera.com/guardian. So there's documentation about all the Guardian and if you go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com
backslash and vision blockchain. We have playlists on tutorials and webinars and demos and all sorts of stuff for everyone to go ahead and get up to speed with. Awesome. Well, Daniel, Justin, climate collective, and to Filecoin Green, Alan,
You know, we really appreciate everyone joining today and I want to just go go around for some final thoughts about what you're looking forward to and you know, if the intersection of Web 3 and the environment and just want to say thank you all and I'll pass it over to you Daniel first and then Justin and I'll wrap up from there.
Yeah, just just from my perspective again, you know, I'm looking forward to different advances that we have in our roadmap to assist with policy creators and creating that move from traditional over to digital to really see more business and corporate adoption.
Awesome. Yeah, so for me, I'm very excited to add some of the other environmental use cases like biodiversity and things of that nature. I think those are all really critically important to our planet and very excited to even
be a part of that.
is growing and has been growing year over year for the last few years and now seems an inflection point. And from the HBAR Foundation's Sustainable Impact Fund, we're excited to see the different projects that are coming up. And we encourage you to come to us, apply, whether you need just advice.
open source code or funding. We encourage you to go to hbarfoundation.org/apply and click on sustainability and help us bring the balance sheet of the plan into the public ledger. And with that, I want to say thank you to Mika, Dara, for having this space and we'll turn it back over to you, Mika.
Yeah, wow, thank you so much, Wes, for hosting this enlightening discussion. And thank you to all of the speakers that came up on the panel and to everyone in the community for being here and for being interested in, you know, support.
the environment. So yeah, I don't really have anything more to add. Thank you so much, Wes, for leading this discussion. And yeah, we will see you in the next spaces.
Bye everyone. See you. Thank you.

FAQ on #Blockchain and the Environment with @Hedera and Industry Leaders | Twitter Space Recording

What is the topic of the podcast?
The importance of conserving the environment and how DLT and blockchain technology can promote sustainability and reduce our carbon footprint.
Who is hosting the podcast?
Mika, the community development rep at Hedera.
What organization does Alan Rancel represent?
Alan Rancel represents Filecoin Greed, which is the sustainability initiative for the Filecoin network as part of Protocol Labs.
What does Filecoin Greed focus on?
Filecoin Greed focuses on making environmental claims in Filecoin transparent and verifiable through renewable energy certificates.
What was Alan Rancel's background from a climate perspective?
Alan Rancel was doing an academic collaboration between Protocol Labs and the MIT Energy Initiative looking at how decentralization can apply to power grids.
What is Climate Collective?
Climate Collective is an innovation and impact network that brings together builders, entrepreneurs, investors, NGOs, scientists, etc. all of whom are working on climate action and using blockchain to improve climate solutions.
What was the focus of the white paper from the World Economic Forum?
The white paper from the World Economic Forum focused on the use of blockchain to speed up and scale up decarbonization efforts and engage in climate action at scale.
What was the speaker's previous experience before working with blockchain technology?
The speaker worked in the climate space for many years, including energy efficient cook stove, gold standards certification, sustainable biomass, climate finance, sustainable development goal strategy, and social impact partnership work.
What is the Guardian?
The Guardian is a digital measurement, reporting, and verification system for real climate outcomes that builds systems themselves in the Hedera ecosystem.
What is the main goal of the podcast?
The main goal of the podcast is to explore how blockchain technology can promote sustainable practices and protect the environment.