Hey everyone, welcome. We're gonna get started in just a minute or two.
Hey, so welcome to everyone who's joining and is in the process of joining. I'm Alan Rancel, the team lead for Falcwing Green, and this is our second AMA leading up to the Sustainable Blockchain Summit, which is going to happen in April. So the
Sustainable blockchain summit is an event that we run a few times a year that's dedicated to two different things So firstly is dedicated to doing a really good job understanding what the environmental impacts of crypto are so things like energy use and carbon emissions from crypto and doing a better job measuring this
and reducing them and doing that in a way that's publicly verifiable. Then the flip side of what we're really focused on is how can we use public data and verifiable data to make sustainability work better across industries. So how can we bring the ethos of Web 3 to sustainability to avoid greenwashing and
make it really clear when people say this project is carbon neutral or this company is carbon neutral. Exactly what do they mean by that, right? Can people dig into the data? Can people understand, you know, what is in a carbon offset and not just assume that it's true, right? That this amount of carbon has been reduced or
comfortable temperatures. These are public goods. These are things that we both rely on the environment for and affect through our actions. We have people from all of these strands here with us to talk about some of the different things that we're going to be bringing up during
So we have Ben here from Github, which if you're in the Twitter Refi area, you certainly know what Github is. And we have Fakundo here from Gainforest, which is an amazing project that's doing fantastic stuff around the world.
around carbon offsets and transparency. We also have Wes Geisenberger here who is the vice president at the HBAR fund leading their investments in all sorts of refi and renewable energy projects. So can we just go around and firstly just sort of introduce
ourselves and give just maybe a minute long intro to your role in Rify and what you want to get out of SPS. So Ben, first we could go with you. Sure, hey everybody, my name's Ben. As you heard, I work with Gekoyne, I'm the great
I'm very excited about just everything we've seen in the growth of the ReFi space over the last year with our climate solutions round. Super excited to work with Filecoin Green and others in the ecosystem to support so many early stage projects playing with
a wide variety of different blockchain-enabled climate solutions. And I couldn't be much more thrilled about these spaces coming together, both on Twitter as well as things like SBS and real life where we can just speed up and accelerate the sharing of knowledge information.
And really the composability and interoperability of all these unique protocols. So yeah, thanks for having me throw it to be here. I was just looking at the website. There's something like $50 million of funding has been distributed now through getcoin. That's wild, isn't it? I mean, we were averaging about $3 million around
quarterly in our grants program last year. And we're now going into our beta round using our new decentralized platform, which I think is only going to speed up and accelerate what we're able to do in terms of helping communities fund their shared needs. So the Gateway and Quarterly program will continue to give away
lots and lots of money that we raise from all kinds of different matching fund partners in the web 3 space and beyond. And also we're starting to see independently run grants rounds now using the getcoin grant stack, which is very cool to see as well. Awesome. So, Kendrick, same question to you. Can you introduce yourself and get forced?
Yeah, totally well. Thank you for having us here, Alan. First of all, congratulations to file coming for the successful launch of FBM. I was so excited to see that coming. It finally happened. So good. Oh, so yeah, my name is for Kundo. I've been working for Gain Forest.
for quite some time by now. And the things we do is that right now we're working on different DMRB models. So, you know, access to all this information. Like, yeah, you want to clean your offsets, you want to clean whatever good you're doing in the ground. So,
The way the market works right now is that you have to go to these trust organizations that they require a lot of time, a lot of work in the field, a lot of money, and you don't actually get to see the picture in real time. So right now by using a multilayer
approach that we can discuss later, we can actually make the measurements close in real time, like maybe let's say from one week to another week, so that's something really exciting and at the same time we're trying to open up this black box where sometimes donations go and
I'm not by any means I don't mean git coin because I love git coin but I mean like you know usually you will go on the street somebody will ask you like hey can I get some money to plan some new trees you give them money away and you just control you just stress it trace ability of what the money is actually going and the one thing I'm super excited
about SPS actually is that these cross network collaboration opportunities that arise from bringing together people that want to be with three native tools to make sure that sustainability claims are actually
as transparent as possible. So we're actually moving in the right direction or we're telling the market, hey, if you want to make it claim that you're so sustainable, show us the data. Let us see the data and we can actually make sure you're not faking it.
Yeah, and let's let's like get into a lot of the the sort of business model around what you were just talking about like measure to earn where you're able to fund people on the ground to do really good work and sort of how that ties in
to Web 3. First, let's, if West, if you could introduce yourself. And also, I think Patrick from Block Green is here. It looks like you're a listener right now. If you could request to speak, that'd be great. And you can introduce yourself after West.
Thanks Alan and I'm really excited about the great work with Filecoin and Filecoin Green team is doing to bring SBS together and convene the community. For those who don't know me I'm West guys and Berger. I hope we have the sustainable impact fund at the HBAR Foundation. The HBAR Foundation is a grant giving organization. We have four funds and we
We stood up the first fund by layer one and sustainability in the Web 3. And that fund is focused on bringing the balance sheet of the planet to the public ledger in a way that's auditable, information discoverable, and liquidware appropriate. And we create digital public goods
that try to achieve goals like making climate finance auditable. So building a building pond what the game course team is doing, we really believe that's a principle of where the market needs to go. Not just knowing where the funds are going to but also where they're coming from. Creating digital open source methodology.
that everyone can understand, not by being a PhD in environmental science, but in plain English in a way that is understandable where we know the roles within a methodology to actors who fulfill those roles, whether it's a sensor or a person, and the data that they produce, where it sits within those rules to create an auditability
We have a very important role in the field of the system.
US, Western Europe, India or China, but we can actually build local verification systems that both financially benefit but actually entrust and empower communities. So we build high quality assets and we accomplish our fourth goal, which is discovering a global climate asset or carbon price oftentimes. And any of these assets
We can do that and actually report it on our balance sheet whether we're an organization or start-up or an individual. And we can say, I want to achieve something like net zero or make a
that claim, I can actually report it and make it completely verifiable throughout the process. We're really focused on that in the funds and we do grants for infrastructure as well as large scale applications from anyone from an individual to a Fortune 500 company. Some of the project you may
here about from the sustainable pack funding with the Guardian, which is an open source tool to make policy workflows around digital MRB to make it very easy to create these different methodologies in a digital format, but also new types of market mechanisms like the automated regression market maker, which actually allows you to
So we're super excited about all this work and I will say that the Guardian and a lot of our tools use Filecoin, Filecoin's tooling, including CO2.Storage, Web3.Storage at the building blocks and so we're super excited to be here.
And yeah, I think that's a fantastic overview, right? Like you guys at the HBAR Foundation and working on the Guardian are doing sort of so many things in this space to really push everything forward with an eye to making things not just publicly verifiable but also really follow existing things.
I think that's a good bridge to talk a little
bit about, to hear a little bit from Fakundo about what, like I think a lot of people would come and say, okay, you could build a lot of this stuff in a Web2 context, right? You could like take side a line and
images say and connect those to carbon offsets through a web 2 platform. So what's what's really being enabled right by gain force doing all of their work within web 3, right? Like what's what are kind of the crucial elements that you can get with your platform and the way that you work with data that are hard to get other ways?
That is a great question. First of all, I will say auditability because you can also audit data on a web tool format. It can be done. But the way things work usually, as I was mentioning before, you have a report coming out once every year,
every couple of months and a lot of these carbon offset projects usually you know you buy the certificate each worth one ton of carbon dioxide and that's it. You retire, you make your claim and it's good although many people don't make the actually the retirement but
The thing is that carbon is dynamic and sure you can plant a new tree. Maybe the tree has been up there for five years and you can measure how much the story is doing of a carbon. But you sell the certificate but what happens later? Are you going to keep on printing new certificates?
on the newly stored carbon, okay, that's good. So what actually happens if the tree dies? We see fires and we're actually going to see a lot of more fires due to natural disasters. Nobody's keeping a contrability of that. So this dynamic approach of you having a certificate that today can be worth once
tone but tomorrow can be worth zero or not less of zero of course less than one that should be the right path to go that is what being transparent means to me the carbon offset bottle is not
a picture. It's a movie and movies, you know, they have not seasons but they have different sketches around the play. And right now we're just like focusing on one sketch and that's the only thing we're seeing. So by providing all this data openly in a non-
in a way that cannot be censored and storing all algorithms and making all the not only the data sets that we use, but also the models that we use to make them all open so people can actually interact with them, make them better, use them for the young
use cases and actually challenge us to say, hey, maybe this is not the right way to go, maybe we can do something much better. It's OK. And that's what the WordPress space is all about. So if what we did, be on top of that and go ahead, gain forest shouldn't exist at all. We only exist because the market is failing.
Some of some juicy sound bites there. I love it. You know, firstly, you know, carbon, carbon is dynamic. It's not a picture. It's a movie. And secondly, the pitch for our company is we shouldn't have to exist at all. But yeah, you know, it's totally true what you're saying, right? If you if you go to gainforest.com.
You can use the transparency dashboard that you guys have published to really look at. There's a lot of controversy right now around say Vera carbon offsets. And there's a question about whether, okay, if you sell a ton of carbon, what does that really represent or what does that really mean?
And you know with with Game Forest right you can look and you can just click on you go to Game Forest dot app you look at their transparency dashboard you're interested in an offset you just click on that offset you can see the land being theoretically protected by that offset and look at over time satellite images tracking a deforestation
or forest preservation, which is the sort of thing that these tools really enable. That's pretty amazing. I guess Wes, one of the major ways that people can get involved in HBAR and in the Guardian is by just taking methodologies that already exist in a non-web three
And just building them, building a guardian enabled version of them, right? So one of the several of the bounties for the hackathon, which you know, if you're interested in the the SPS hackathon, you can go to sbs.tech and there's a there's a hack link there. The hackathon is going to be running for about another week.
We can have something like that. But you know some of the some of the bounties put up by Hedera right are not even like you don't even have to make a working Independent project right like what you're really interested in is capturing a lot of this knowledge that exists in a sustainability context and play
And I'm just plugging that into the Guardian. Is that a good kind of way to think about it? And can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. And I think Alan, you really nailed it. Like we're trying to take these rule sets that are locked in PDFs, locked in silos of environmental knowledge, which has been developed for a long time.
well-thought-out and make them discoverable. If you don't know the rules, it's really hard to follow them. It's really hard to compare them. And a lot of those rule sets, they follow common formats and schemas. And of course, if we want to improve them, the first thing to do in our art is to start to digitize them and compare
what are the different rules that look like against each other? And so in the Guardian you can actually do that if you digitize the first set of rules that people are following today, you can actually go and say, "Well I want to adjust this part of the rule. What does that do? How do I improve it? How do I add different lines? How do I subtract things that we maybe think aren't terribly valuable?" And we can actually see line by line#
set of steps, rules and requirements for a given project, what's the difference? And of course, when you see how people answer, you know, data inputs in different formats, you can start to see the depth of the information as it's being formed. You start to see the breadth of the information that some rule sets require and some don't. And this idea of
You have to have a PhD in a specific type of environmental area to understand what the rules look like because it's all locked in academic papers or a series of coursework or practical work in the field. It should really be that way. It could be quite easy to see
side by side and it's in the public's best interest to have this information as discoverable because if we want to score it, rate it, and compare apples to apples from a data format perspective, we need those out in the public and so we really encourage folks to look at that, the bounties out there, there's a $10,000 first place prize for folks who are
of who create the best methodology on Hedera that can be a digital public good that anyone can compare to or use in a given project. And that's something that we see tremendous value in and we think it opens up new opportunities for sustainable building blocks in our ecosystem or collective ecosystem.
Yeah, 100%. And I think that's, we really do think of it as a collective ecosystem, right? Is that sort of the whole big part of Web 3 is the interoperability between all of these different projects, which is really ultimately enabled by content addressing, right? And so, this is something I talk about a lot and think about a lot, which is that
With location addressing, you address information and resources based on where they are on a network. With content addressing, you address information based on actually what it is, which means that you're able to request that resource from whoever has it. That's really a key to decentralizing the information architecture of
a lot of what people are building and also therefore allowing like all of these projects to sort of interoperate, which is really important. I think another piece, you know, you said locked in, a lot of this information is locked in academic papers, which I think is totally true, right? And that's part of what we're trying to do
with SPS is really get the people who understand a lot of the sustainability issues in depth and a lot of people who understand web 3 in depth and create sort of a venue where you can you can meet people who have sort of complimentary expertise to you right so you know again on this
on this, what Fokendo said, you know, carbon and decarbonization pathways are not paintings, right, or pictures, they're movies. We're going to have the head of the MIT Sustainability Initiative, Jason J. there, and he's going to do a workshop looking at decarbonization and different ways of
actions that we can take as a society or as a project can really bend the curve and what's going to be more effective and what's going to be less effective. As an example of people who have a lot of deep knowledge and sustainability and not necessarily in Web 3, but they want to share that knowledge across these different
And I'm talking to people a lot about speaking to SPS and sometimes people say, like, you know, look, like I understand Web 3 really well, but I don't understand sustainability or the opposite. I understand sustainability really well, but I don't know anything about crypto. Like, do you still want us coming to your event? And we totally do, right? We want people who have a deep knowledge
or interest or passion in some important aspect of this intersection to come and share what they know and share what they believe in with other people who have complementary skill sets and backgrounds. So I think Ben can we come back to get coin. You know I think one of the really amazing
about Gekuin and the shelling point and the ecosystem around Gekuin is that Gekuin is about funding open source software, but increasingly it's been about also funding things like ReFi,
to finance climate positive actions. Obviously, the Green Belt book is from the getcoin ecosystem and really focuses on how crypto can be really good for the world. I think people might ask why. Why is getcoin
not just about funding like sort of strictly open source software, like why is there this broader sort of like environmental vision connected to it? I love that question and also I just wanted to say I really love the invitation to people who you know whether
you are an expert in climate or an expert in web3 that everybody is welcome. And honestly, I think if it was the case that you needed people who are experts in both to show up, I mean that Venn diagram gets pretty small. Like they're the goal of what we're
I love it. To tie that back to the question about Gikwain, I think simply because the tool has the potential to be useful in a variety of other ways, the use cases for Gikwain
grants rounds has expanded over time. It actually started as a bounty platform and then became kind of a peer-to-peer crowdfunding platform and then adopted to this idea of, or adopted this idea of quadratic funding after Zoe, England, and Vitalik wrote
their piece on what we now call quadratic funding. And it's basically just an ongoing experiment. During the pandemic, Kevin Awaki actually ran a quadratic funding round to help local restaurants in Denver, which
they worked on with local government and we've run around for a community group in Oakland that was funding a bunch of groups in Oakland with funding from the local government there. So I mean there's definitely kind of a wide array of different ways that this funding mechanism can be used. And to me that's kind of
paid for this super important work that they're doing. And that was the problem they were trying to solve. But I think as that idea of funding public goods expanded, there is this realization that there's a lot of different public goods that are in need of not only more funding but also more coordination and collaboration.
And that was something that really attracted me to get coin early on as somebody who came from the climate space, although I was somebody with an interest in crypto. I was really drawn to this new energy and this new group of people coming together to try to solve some very hard problems that frankly
to kind of mimic what has been said already. I think all of our jobs in the climate space shouldn't have to exist. But yet we've been trying the same things for a very long time and we need to try some new things. And that has a lot of promise and a lot of opportunity.
You know, frankly, I think the secret sauce of Gekkoin is not just the funding. You know, our friend, Pranov from RIFI by South and Lowelabs, often says people come to Gekkoin for the funding, but they stick around for the community. And, you know, I think that's really where the magic happens, and it's events like Shelling Point,
or like SPS, when people come together and really share information, learn together, help to create the space together. And frankly, I think anybody who feels like they know everything there is to know about either climate or Web 3 is actually probably missing out because there's a lot to know.
and we're building it together in real time. It is a juicy and exciting space to be in. A lot of the cross-pollination that we see between projects that are getting their start as Gekwain grants is for me one of the most rewarding things to watch.
We see projects find common cause, find ways to collaborate and evolve and share resources, share their, whether it be code or developers or funding or really even just a vision. It just feels like there's this real acceleration of innovation that's happening as the result of
kind of these underlying dynamics, which are values of open source technology, but I think they really can turn into a lot more just as a result of taking those values and putting them into action. Yeah, 100%.
that, right? And I think that that phrase really captures kind of the magic of get going in the community, which is, you know, you come for the funding and stay for the community because it's really about building those relationships between people and projects that makes the whole sort of community work, right? And this whole ecosystem of people who are
are aligned and trying to accomplish similar types of goals in order to make the world better. I do want to ask you what I think is maybe a hard question that I'm curious what your answer is to the future
of financial sustainability and scale within some of these Web 3 public goods funding systems. I think that historically a lot of public goods have been funded by governments. You would ask, and if the reason
Governments are able to to fund them right as they they you know they get taxes they issued a currency and they can put that money into say scientific research What do you see as sort of emerging models for? Making the the public goods funding mechanisms that we have in a web 3
sort of scale and be financially sort of sustainable in the long run or at least like kind of buffer them from market shocks. If that kind of makes sense, right? Because if it, because you know the way the way Bitcoin has historically worked right is you raise money and that's a pretty intensive process.
And then that money gets directed through quadratic funding to projects in the community. What do you see as the future of models to sort of like insulate and protect those funding streams from external shocks? Absolutely love this question. And it is a hard question and that's what makes it great. And frankly, I think
at least what I'm seeing is kind of the direction we're heading. And I think it's a mixture of answers. Like I don't think it's just one answer that is kind of going to be the silver bullet that makes this work. But you know, we are seeing a variety of funding mechanisms that are, you know, at a pretty early stage of being
rolled out, but I think are really promising. Like for example, some portion of funds from validator nodes being allocated to public goods funding, other types of what Kevin O'Walkie called aqueducts, basically different ways that we can create ongoing
or cash donation to turn into public goods funding has actually dedicated a Oracle node to us. And we're starting to see also some folks who are running validators on various different chains who are basically using the idea that they're going to give a portion
of their funding to public goods as an incentive or really just like a way to highlight why you should stake your tokens with this particular validator. So I think there's models like that which have a lot of promise. There also is kind of just harnessing
self-interest, honestly. A lot of the folks who run ecosystem rounds do so to incentivize people to build in their ecosystem. So there are win-win business cases for funding public goods and definitely trying to find and highlight those is important.
And I think there's also some opportunity in what we call the sort of de-gen to regen pipeline. Again, sort of harnessing that self-interest to try to find ways to fund public goods. So for example, we just raised a million dollars within NFT drop. And a bunch of people made
some good money by flipping that NFT. It's also a really interesting collectible which I think could also turn into a form of an impact certificate or some sort of an attestation of your participation in the ecosystem which could unlock benefits. So there are ways to kind of create incentive structures that
kind of give people a reason to want to participate in the network, maybe for slightly less altruistic reasons, whether it's at the project level or the individual level, but I think the more that we can sort of align those incentives, the more that we can get ongoing stable funding for public goods. Yeah, I could keep going.
on that one for a while, but it's a juicy topic. Yeah, no, 100%. And I think, you know, to some extent, maybe there is sort of a chicken and an egg problem in which historically people have been worried about connecting sort of automatic funding sources to some public good because they
are convinced right that there's going to be like some good ongoing mechanism to allocate that money and to you know with with the with by using quadrotic funding and showing like okay we actually do have a sustainable way to do that allocation like maybe that's sort of the the the piece that
can then convince more people to use AquaDux to allocate that funding and automatically plug that in, which I think is a really good direction for things to go in. We have Patrick here now from Block Green. Can you introduce yourself and talk about what Block Green is?
appreciate you having me apologies for the little high team mix up earlier but at Block Green we are a hash rate streaming protocol now what does that mean we operate in the mining space which obviously has been at the crosshairs of the environmental conversation for a while and frankly
that's a good thing. We ourselves mine Bitcoin using excess natural gas that would otherwise be flared. We tend to, we don't tend to, we feel that there really is a way to reduce emissions while mining Bitcoin.
Our goal is to provide access to liquidity to sustainable miners, where in a case otherwise it wouldn't be available. We are kind of a nuance, not kind of, we are nuance product in the sense that lending in the miners
space has come and gone, so to speak, in a lot of ways. Our protocol is on chain, transparent, and we're really focused on miners who are reducing emissions, whether that's through traditional renewable mining. We see a lot of methane or not a lot of
We've seen methane and landfill methane reduction miners, quite a bit of flair gas miners. They're just some really interesting stats about the Bitcoin mining network in general and the waste. That was really where we tried to dive in.
self-environmentalists. I certainly am not as much of an environmental expert as some people on this call, which is a great thing. We're interested in what type of feedback we can receive for our protocol and the amount of energy wasted in the United States and some
the other top gas-bearing countries is larger than the Bitcoin network by orders of magnitude. So we want to be part of the educational process. We want to learn from many of the people on this call and that will be at the summit. And in short, that is our way of
supporting sustainability and trying to paint the Bitcoin money network in a different light because it's been a tough letting here for a little bit on this sustainability side but we truly feel that there's a way to secure the network, monetize electricity and do so in a sustainable manner. We want to reward companies for doing that.
Yeah, 100% and it's totally true, right that the the amount of energy wasted from flaring is massive and the amount of global warming potential from methane or natural gas that is just released through say leaks or through uncapped wells is also pretty massive.
And so there's a lot of work to do in, you know, just like hard to see an energy from methane and flaring, preventing methane leakage and making like combustion of methane that would otherwise be released more efficient, right? Because even if it's flared, it's not 100% gone. Exactly. It's, um, it's hiding around.
Yeah, no, I was going to ask a little bit on the crypto and protocol side of, you know, okay, so you have an on-chain protocol that is certifying your Bitcoin money and that it's using natural gas, right? What are the information on ramps that look like for that?
to validate something on chain that makes some sort of real world claim, right? Like what solutions do you have in your protocol for ensuring that the hash rate that you're claiming is from nothing that would otherwise be wasted or energy that would otherwise be wasted actually comes from that.
Yeah, that's a great question. And just to sort of level set, so we don't only work with with, you know, flare gas mitigation miners, that's just an area that we see as an immediate opportunity, but, you know, sustainable miners in general are who we want to focus on. Methane as you well articulated is, you know, an area
that certainly needs improvement and can't be improved. But in terms of our onboarding, on ramp, you know, how we view miners, you know, we've built out a sustainability and environmental team. We have a sustainability framework. But to your point, you know, a lot of people can say they're operating in a way
that is, you know, carbon reducing, but there are granularities there and, you know, unfortunately, what you see is not always what you get. So there's quite a bit of on-site due diligence, you know, a little bit about my background. I worked in the energy
space for quite a bit. I saw how irrational natural gas markets can act. I took a liking to Bitcoin mining around 2018-2019 when I saw a colleague point this opportunity out. From there, I don't know if anyone here
So it follows natural gas, but you see prices go from $2 to $9 to this and people complain about crypto volatility. It's quite comfortable in that space. But I think, you know, transparently, we are open to developing our sustainability framework. You know, we're still students in
every aspect of this space, but we like where we're headed. So I hope that answers your question. I'm happy with that deep right now. Anything I just said. Yeah, energy markets are pretty wild, especially when you look at like negative prices in electricity markets or
Or like negative prices for oil in some cases that has to do with like the details of like how parts are being managed like it's like it's so nice. Um, but um, cool. No, I think that's I think that's great and we can we definitely sort of dive into two different pieces of that maybe if we have some more time on this um at certainly at SBI
which you guys are going to be coming to, which is great. I have a couple more questions for people who are speakers here, but also if people on the call who are listening have questions, please request to speak. And we can, you know, we can slot you in because it'd be great to hear
what people are thinking about and what people want to be addressed both here and at SBS. As people are thinking about their questions and maybe requesting to speak, I wanted to go back to you, Fokendo. Can you describe what measure to earn is and why it's an important part of the refice solution?
I mean, this is a great question and I really hope Meshertware becomes the next big thing. So last year or almost like a year ago, a year and a half ago, everybody was like doing, you know, play tour, X Infinity, all those games, great stuff. But Meshertware, it's kind of like the same approach.
But it's driven towards nature's stewardship. So for example, when we're talking about like in some cases, you know, you got some donations that they go into this black box and you don't know actually how they're being used.
In reality, for example, when we work and we try to get some big sponsorship from some companies saying, "Hey, I actually want to plant man groups, but I want to make sure my money goes to where you tell me it's actually going to go." What we tried out in early February, I was
pilot project in Kawait, which is the southern region of the Philippines, was amazing. So we got together with a community leader from the Philippines. She managed to bring around 40 community members from the area.
We had some training on how to measure the forest, like how to take measurements in the forest, how to identify the species we were looking for. And then every single person, they got an address set up that was linked to their unique
you know, to the unique personality. And then they went to the woods, into the woods, they did their measurements, then other people actually did some seed planting, some seedling planting I mean. And every one of these actions was recorded. So they had an app to
actually take a picture, identify the species, upload the measurements of the tree they were seeing, every tree was provided a unique ID, and then when they got outside from the woods, because then again, the internet connection right there did not exist at all, when they got back to the
the city, they uploaded all the data, it was verified by the Oracle, everything is stored on the file coin, I was gonna say servers, but I mean, chain, you know, in a distributed matter, and then when everything was verified by the Oracle, then the funds that
we had first gotten from this big donor, they were released in Italy to the wallets of each individual person for the task that they did. So it's not that you make it donation and you know like maybe this one organization that sits in the middle takes I don't know 50% of
or even higher percent of the number to peace salaries. No, this was actually money going to the humanities and this is so important not just because it's actually important because when we talk about REFI, when we talk about how we can actually reward those who make nature
to worship properly, we need to find new models to finance this. And usually speaking, a lot of the work that happens in the field, a lot of time actually comes out of
And volunteers are fine and we need them the same way as we need donations, but we actually need to create different Financial models that include everybody in the equation because to be honest like and you were talking about this with men
There's like so much money in the government and they have all these bonds and they have all these strategies and the UN has all this money being pledged to you know okay you plan to treat you somebody please verify it you get the money that takes time
And then it takes time, the bureaucracy around that makes that the final cut that the people in the field get usually ends up being like less than 10% of what they did. Somebody else keeps the money in the middle like
progress, validators and stuff like that. But this way you can actually make sure that people have an incentive to keep the forest alive and to keep giving you the measurements that things are working. And if we want to stop
I don't want to say to stop relying, but donations alone are not going to fix the world. That's why we have governments, we huge monetary budgets, but they are not using them properly. So now, here from the space, with the help of Ben, with the help of Patrick, fight on your help.
and everyone here, I think we're actually pushing in the right direction. Like, okay, we are doing amazing things with not so much money. Like, sure, you know, you can say a million and that sounds like a lot, but when in comparison with the budgets available in the work, for things that sometimes don't work,
We are nailing it and that's the message we need to send out there. So we bring more trust into the system and we can actually showcase these tools to governments, to the private sector and to start creating this snowball effect to go into the right direction if we want to stop this crisis.
from happening. Yeah, I think there's so much there, right? And I want to key off of a few different points that you said, which I think are like 100% right? Really quickly, you mentioned that people are measuring these trees and areas without cell connection or
And they're creating these records locally and then when they get back to somewhere within network, they're able to add that data to the database, right, which a lot of the architectures that we're building, right, we're talking about content addressing recently.
are really good for those types of systems, right? That is super central to the ReFi space, right? Because you do want to be getting data from many different sources. You want to be getting data from people with all sorts of different types of credentials. You want to be getting data from different physical locations.
some of which have good network connection, others of which don't have good network connections, and you want to be able to take all of that data and ultimately put it together and figure out what we're going to do with this, right? We're going to like use that data to direct where funding is going and how resources are being allocated in order to have a positive impact for the planet, right?
And so, kind of addressing that right, and sort of the way we work with data in Web 3 is just much better for that than the way people tend to work with data in Web 2 systems. And if you're interested in that, you know, the interplanetary file system, IPFS, which was started by Particle Labs,
I think for a long time people have assumed that interplanetary was hyperbole or just marketing or something, but it is actually being used in space right now. The reason it's being used in space is about to be used in space, in a demonstration with Lockheed. The reason for that is exactly what we were just talking about.
about, right, that when you address data by what the data is rather than where it is, that is a fundamentally better architecture in a way of working with data at these sort of extremes of decentralization, right? So, so look for that if you if you're interested in want to check that out. But where I think, you know, measure to earn, where you sort of went with that for
which I think is like 100% the right place to focus right is that people need to be able to make money by protecting nature rather than degrading nature right and if we're able to set up systems where you can pay people in order to measure the natural world
around them, particularly to measure ecosystems that are fragile or in danger that need to be protected most, then you can actually give people a source of revenue in order to protect those systems and you don't force them to make the trade-off between feeding their families and protecting nature.
Right, which is like, you know, you started off by saying, I hope that measure to earn is the next big thing. And I also do because it seems like one of the really, really powerful ways to break that trade off in a way where Web3 systems can really contribute deeply to protecting the natural world. And if you have more thoughts on that, then you want to share.
I mean, the initial turn is right there. It's up for everyone to use and to see how it works to play around. But now the biggest challenge is to actually find the funds available to drive to these projects.
technology it's already done. I mean I sure we can totally improve you know like I don't want to say this is the end of the movie because it's not it's it's a movie I'm not going one but okay this works we can prove transparency you can go into getting for us that app look at the
channels conservation project in the Philippines and you can see all the community members there wallets the information they uploaded you can see all the all the images all the data they took into this one thing we call the forest map like you know you got Google maps where you see the streets well this is a forest map
or you actually get to see the trees individually. And you can see all the transactions on the chain, I have the data got uploaded, how everybody got paid. But now we actually need to get more companies that make all these sort of donations.
different stakeholders to actually start using and implementing this technology. So now we're on the chase to actually find more people that want to see this transparency, which is also funny because some companies were talking about this before. If you buy
I've seen this at SBS, been mentioned a couple times. We got many different companies, I'm not going to make any gains, but you got many different companies buying cheap, different offsets, and usually cheap things are not so great. And we see it, like
We see a rise on the amount of emissions, we keep on seeing many premises, but still the work is not functioning so well. And I was just mentioning before the call to Alan that, for example, in Argentina, this is autumn, and we just face 41 degrees, which was an all-time high. It doesn't make any sense.
But I'm sorry, I lost track. Shoot, I forgot how I was going to end that phrase. I'm sorry Alan. Yeah, no, 100%. I think that's great. Also, I just saw Alex from the UNF Triple C.
just joined. Alex, if you want to speak, please request to speak because it'd be great to hear your thoughts. I believe you're coming back to SBS in April. You were at the one in July and we really loved having you and we can't go away to talk to you
again, you're sort of prospective on a lot of these really like crucial issues. Wes, I wanted to come back to you. We've been talking a lot about working with data in a web-3 native way and different
Like sources of data that people are going to make decisions based on. Right. So we're talking with Patrick about how we actually know that hash rate is contributed by minors that were run based on flaring methane that
was in the Obama administration, having a really good grounding for the sources of data and validations surrounding these data flows is really central to making these decisions in a way
both that you're compliant with whatever the requirements are and that you can prove that you're really sort of pushing forward our common cause, right, of environmental sustainability. How do you handle this in the Guardian? Yeah, so now that's a great question. And I think this is all
All the top we've discussed are data problems. One of the biggest problems in sustainability absence of Web 3 is how you visualize the data. I really love where the Kundalin team are going on that because I think it's important. In the Guardian, we think about every data point as part of an identity
system, whether it's a sensor tied to a device, maybe it's a cook stove, or whether it's a manual measurement of a tree or some other data point, it comes from a person or a device that's been certified. And in the Guardian, each one of those has an identity
or decentralized identifier, following the W3C specifications. And we believe that no matter who's emitting that data, they're able to issue an assertion that this information is true. And we have a workflow process where in the Guardian, you get some
Authority to issue that information so so if you're following a set of rules if you're following gold standard rules or Barrows rules Today in the web to world they're giving effectively occurred credential or permission to a verifier and a project is gonna try to get that a project validated in order to get registered
We take that a step further where someone who is applying for a project is actually issuing credentials to different roles within folks who are doing those measurements. And of course the verifier is able to see and they're also credentialed. So we have provenance of not just the data,
as it's being monitored. We have provenance of who credentialed that person to do the monitoring. And ultimately, because they have an identifier, you can actually start to build a reputation. I think of it as almost a credit system where you can say by reporting consistently, you can actually build a reputation of, "I'm really good at
I have a lot of experience. It could be an organization of folks who are really good at measuring forestry projects or it could be a series of satellites and those satellites could have their own reputation and the algorithms that are being used over imagery could have their own reputation. And the idea of issuing credentials means you have full traceability of
every single data point in the Guardian ecosystem. And so when you're following a workflow that digitized methodology lays out, you're likely extending that methodology even further to enable digital points of verification where every role and actor has a reputation. Now, why would we do that?
is we want to have actors around the world who can build reputations over time, not just get that reputation from a centralized authority, but create their own set of identity credentials and start participating from day one, ideally in local communities, but we also can enable different parts
to carry those reputations from Project to Project. And so if you're in a country that doesn't have a verifier locally or even on the same continent, what you're able to do is begin a project, start to collect information, report that information in such a way where if a verifier comes along and says, "Yeah, you're doing it right."
And again, you're able to start to prove that you're consistent with the standards that are being laid out. And you can start to enable verification locally in a different way for other projects that, you know, then otherwise would be possible in today's voluntary carbon markets. And that's something that we're pretty excited about because we think it's going to change.
change how grass roots movements can verify their own projects and ultimately participate in this voluntary market, which it shouldn't be voluntary, if only if select few can participate. It should be anyone should be able to participate, but they should have to prove it in order to make sure that credibility is maintained.
Yeah, 100%. And I think that system that you just outlined really, you can see how that uses a lot of the tech we're able to build, right, and maintain reputation across different projects or across different systems.
And you know ties like what's going on in the real world and how people are reporting it to something that's invisible to the chain right and and you can you know like like so kind of as a like the huge amount of expense that goes into auditing projects in this sort of traditional way. You can you can really imagine that being significantly
decreased with a lot of really good effects by using these sorts of data on ramps. So, you know, where the good effects are increasing the number of projects that can get done and also more of the money from, say, environmental
essential assets going to the actual people doing work on the ground. Alex, thanks for coming. In the last couple of minutes, I wanted to give the floor to you and ask, we're super excited to have you at SBS. What do you hope people are going to be talking about?
Yeah, hello everyone. I'm also super happy to to again join this great event as PS was there last year in Paris and I'm very much looking forward to meet everyone in Boston next month. Yeah, from our side, we we're looking to also
standard settings at the international level. So we just had a meeting of the supervisory body of the Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. And we are working on key areas related to methodology development and specific area for carbon removals.
Yeah, we also keep a close eye and we want to engage with the community on digital MRVs. Or the central allies in digital MRVs are super interesting. We have a partnership, for example, in that area with the Klingkuh cooking alliance.
So we are looking to new methodologies for the cooking stop, cooking, cooking stops improvement projects. Yeah, and direct measurement, I think, is the way to go and costs are going down and there
amazing project that we have been able to engage through this partnership. So maybe just one last point from my side, what I'm hoping to hear during the event and with the community and whether I'm hoping to feel more than that is this sense of urgency. I think all of you have seen
This week, the beginning of this week, the release of the latest IPCC report, the summary report, nothing new, but I think in the way that was packaged and approved by all governments since a very strong sign, the focus of our agents, so for those of you who don't know.
So, my name is Alex Perez and I work with the UN Climate Change. So, the focus of this year as a whole for our agencies to deliver the first global stock take, which ideally would link up with this IPCC findings and draft road map.
for the future and would be the combination of this global stock take process would be at the next COP 28 in Dubai. So cheers everyone, great to connect, what was kind of a random, I was not planning to connect but a good
to say hello to everyone. Back to you, Alan. Yeah, thanks, Alex. Awesome to see you as always. And we're really excited for you to be there. And I totally hear you what you're saying on the recent IPCC report that just came out doesn't add
And necessarily a lot of information that we didn't know already, but it really is sort of code red in a new way, right? There's this big and looking at the press release, right? There's this giant orange box that says human activities have unequivocally connoisseable warming with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 degrees C.
above previous levels. And it is that word unequivocal, right? Getting, getting, I don't know how many scientists have gone into reviewing these reports, but it's like in the thousands and getting all of this reviewed by something like 200 countries and the output of that like wild
rigorous process being so, so clearly worded, right? And the hard to ignore is a major step, right? So I totally understand that sense of urgency. We're just over time. I wanted to close out just really quickly by asking that same question.
to each of the speakers. So what is something that you hope people are going to be talking about at SBS and what's on your mind as one of the most important topics going forward? If you could keep it to just one or two sentences because we're just over time and I want to
one of respect people's time, but then over to you. - I think the word trust really sums up a lot. We've talked about addestations and trust. I think building this infrastructure for trustlessness is fundamentally important and we're, I think, at a really key moment for that right now. - 100%. - So, Kendra.
How would I see people getting closer together and just talking? Well, I'm by all means, join SPS, you don't have to be a coder. Anybody can have great ideas and coders can code, but anybody can have any ideas to bring to the table. So excited to see that.
Totally. Yeah, we definitely don't want to be just a community of people who are deep in both sustainability and Web 3. It should be either/or, right? If you have expertise or interest in anything connected to these problems, we want to engage with you.
right? Wes, I think the thing I'm looking for is, you know, meeting folks who are willing to get their hands dirty and roll up their sleeves and try to make a difference. I think climate change
is a all-hands-on-deck type of problem and we should look at the best ways that we can bring the requirements of the sustainability world and the energy from Web3 together to try to drive better outcomes.
100% Patrick Yeah, great point Wes looking forward, you know to bumping heads with with curious minds looking to promote sustainability and at the risk of sounding redundant Just how do we reduce waste? You know especially in the US or pretty resource rich countries?
I think we do a pretty poor job of utilizing them. So I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and hopefully we can move towards the next future. 100%. So that concludes the second SPS AMA before the Sustainable Blockchain Summit in April of
On April 13th, it's going to be right after the MIT Energy Conference in Boston. We really hope to see you there. You can go to sbs.tech to get tickets. If you're not going to be there in person, please check out the livestream. And really looking forward to meeting you all and have a great rest of your Thursday.