🌍 Making Sense of Web3 for Climate #4
A newsletter helping you understand the crypto and climate intersection (5-minute read)
Happy Friday investors, founders, and generally passionate humans,
It’s my pleasure to share that Ale Borda — a fellow at Fifty Years VC and contributor to DreamDAO and ReFiDAO — is helping write these newsletters for the next few weeks.
Ecosystem News 🚀
🚢 Leverage, a supply chain visibility platform, raised $5 million in funding from investors including Mark Cuban, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and the Gaingels investment syndicate.
🪨 7bridges, using AI to make supply chains more resilient, just raised a $17 million Series A backed by Maersk’s Venture Arm.
💧 Everledger and Civic Ledger partnered to create a ‘Water Ledger’ that will track water resource use in Australia. This supports the Australian Government’s efforts to lower regulatory costs and increase compliance with “digital certificates” for Australian mining companies.
🔆 Powerledger, an Australian energy trading platform operating in multiple countries, won a World Summit Award for their work providing distributed energy in India.
🌲 Moss.earth, a Brazilian offset startup, announced a Series A investment of US$10 million led by SP Ventures and Acre Venture Partners.
🌊 Eden DAO announced its investment DRMSyndicate planning to pre-fund carbon removal projects before they launch.
🏔️ KlimaDAO just announced their partnership with Mobilum to enable users to purchase $KLIMA tokens using Visa and Mastercard.
🍃 eAgronom, a farming-based carbon credits platform, announced a Series A investment of $7.4M led by Yolo Investments and ZGI Capital.
Events
At EthDenver next week, Toucan will host Regenerate: a series of workshops, office hours, and hangout space. Our very own Ale will lead a Systems Mapping workshop there :)
Gitcoin is hosting an event “𝙋𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙞𝙘 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙!” on Tues, Feb 15 at 4 pm EST.
iXO World has started a weekly Twitter space where they talk about the Tokenized Earth Economy. Every Tuesday at 3 pm UTC.
Weekend Reading 📚
A skeptical look at climate crypto’s claims (35-minute read)
TLDR: many web3 projects are using fancy terminology to rebrand business models which already failed. Payments for environmental services, market-based mechanisms, and the conservation economy were all models floated over the last two decades but failed for a variety of reasons that the article outlines. Web3 provides real revolutionary advantages... but #ReFi founders must find where web3 authentically solves problems. Learning from history will prevent wasting money on accidental greenwashing.
If you’re a long-term or climate-focused investor: We highly recommend a team member analyzes this article. Avoiding hype or (unintentionally-)false claims is a job combining investment acumen and an understanding of climate science.
Introducing a nature-based carbon-based token (10-minute read)
TLDR: Toucan, a leader in creating an open carbon credit registry using blockchain, recently launched their new Nature-based Carbon Credits tokens. While their original BCT credits included all offset types, the Nature-based carbon (NCT) credits achieve benefits beyond sequestration. NCTs, improve ecological co-benefits (soil quality, water quality, air quality), habitat preservation, species protection, social and economic benefits for communities.
This launch showcased the amazing spirit of collaboration in web3. Regen Network, Moss, Blockchain for Climate Foundation, KlimaDAO, BICOWG and StarCB all contributed to the Natural Carbon Credit’s criteria.
The collaboration spirit in web3 is amazing. Regen Network, Moss, Blockchain for Climate Foundation, KlimaDAO, BICOWG, and StarCB all contributed to the design of Toucan’s NCT criteria.
DIOs - Decentralized Impact Organizations for the Climate (15-minute read)
TLDR: Using blockchain we could create decentralized impact organizations (DIOs) that use Social Policy Bonds to economically align a community of strangers towards a shared social objective. Social policy bonds (SPBs) are financial rewards for achieving social goals.
To solve massive climate problems we need aligned groups of people to tackle local interventions. Current market mechanisms do not incentivize large-scale experimentation or long term thinking. Fixed plans fail in highly complex and unpredictable systems. SPBs could drive ambitious long-term goals that require diverse, adaptive, collaborative approaches. Highly modular and fluid DIOs enable continuous experimentation and diversity of players to govern shared resources in a decentralized manner.
Read the article to learn how to build one — or join us watching as the first DIOs start to emerge 👀
Let me know if you have any specific questions about web3 for the climate. We read every reply.
With love,
Alex Filotimo & Ale Borda
Building web3 investment systems for a better climate
P.S. know a specific web climate company Aera Force should meet? Here’s their quick referral form.
This newsletter is for educational purposes only.
Love the idea of SPBs, especially when you consider how they could be used as a force to counter continued investment in damaging legacy industries. Have AeraForce identified any emerging IDOs experimenting with SPBs yet?