🌍 Making Sense of Web3 for Climate #5
A weekly newsletter profiling the crypto for climate intersection
Investors, founders, and climate champions,
We’ll be back to our weekly publication schedule on Friday. You may also receive a notification in the next 48 hours as our newsletter migrates from Substack to Revue Newsletters.
In this edition,
The #Ecosystem News section has a range of announcements beyond fundraising.
Aera Force officially launched its climate investment platform.
Our contributor, Ale from Fifty Years, shares her observations from her trip to the ETHDenver conference.
Let’s foster innovation for a better Earth.
Ecosystem News 🚀
🚜 Nori, a carbon removal marketplace that compensates farmers for improving their practices, raised a $7M Series A round from M13, Toyota Ventures, and Placeholder VC.
📣 A #ReFi podcast just launched, hosted by early web3 climate contributors (John Ellison and other Toucan Protocol members).
🤖 Arbol, a Fintech insurance company, transacted $70M of insurance premiums through Ethereum in 2021.
Interestingly, Arbol uses data from the web3-climate startup, dClimate, to automatically pay out claims.
🌊 Puro Earth, a NASDAQ-owned carbon removal marketplace operating since 2019, launched its blockchain offset registry.
♻️ New Hope Ecotech, a blockchain-supported Brazilian recycling program, is expanding to Chile to help corporations track recycling.
🍃 Kevin O’Wocki from Gitcoin DAO launched his book, “GreenPilled: Regenerative CryptoEconomics.
⚽ Manchester United football club partnered with Tezos, a “low carbon” Ethereum alternative, to create blockchain applications for their fans.
H/T to the ReFi DAO for sharing this news first.
⚡ Protocol Labs raised a $38M fund to invest in solar energy deployments
(Bonus) Aera Force Launch 🌞
🌎 Investing In Our Collective ReFi Future (6-min read)
Aera Force launched our climate investment DAO last week. Details are in the announcement, but, in essence, Aera Force was born from collaboration between Aera VC’s traditional climate fund and our web3-native friends at Gotham Labs.
Passionate investors, researchers, or founders like yourself will shape the DAO’s future. If you’re interested in contributing, investing (only for accredited investors currently), or pitching your startup to Aera Force’s community, get in touch!
This newsletter will share the best insights from Aera Force researchers, investors, and contributors. However, I (Alex) will ensure this newsletter’s content remains unbiased and in service of our climate investing readers.
Curated Articles 📚
Token Engineering is the Future of Organizational Design (6-minute read)
Web3’s features might allow an explosion of new businesses and communities. Often, conversations focus on the digital ownership that web3 enables but this author, Gideon, suggests “modularity” is one of web3’s most promising features.
What is modularity? Blockchain contracts can transform all manner of assets — money, driver’s licenses, car titles, corporate equity, and even artwork — into virtual objects stored on a blockchain. These “modules” function similarly to how programmers use an API. It allows startups to access open-source software and leverage existing programs without reinventing the wheel every time. Novel combinations of these assets and contracts will allow for various new legal and organizational workflows.
A new approach to decarbonize blockchains (8-min read)
Why does this matter? This initiative makes it easier for blockchain users and ESG-conscious corporations to ensure their blockchain transactions use renewable energy. Energy Web, Protocol Labs, and Filecoin (a company that offers ‘cloud’ file storage using blockchain) collaborated to build a tool for crypto miners and Filecoin users to purchase renewable energy. Protocol Labs also launched an investment fund for solar projects to offset their personal footprint.
Web3 Natural Capital Assets Taxonomy (10-min read)
This article summary is primarily for web3 founders — it is less relevant for investors & our traditional climate audience.
ReFi solutions currently create programmable tools that use capital to improve the environment (i.e., creating mechanisms to inflate the cost of carbon). Startups should do more to move beyond our “carbon tunnel vision” as the only measure of ecological health.
The article recommends that web3 founders building “Natural Capital” startups should create a new taxonomy with categories based on ecology. By doing so, they can create standards to care for ecosystems that do not replicate flaws (&biases) in current conservation finance. Read on to learn how people could apply this taxonomy to real-world action through GeoNFTs.
(Bonus) ETHDenver #ReFi Snapshot 🌱
Context: ETHDenver is a significant (in size & quality of speakers) in-person conference for web3 startups. While most of the benefit was meeting new people, Ale noted down these three comments:
Far more talks were geared towards climate action, public goods, and collaborative economies than previous Ethereum conferences. The events Schelling Point (organized by Gitcoin) and Regenerate (organized by Toucan and Fifty Years) were solely focused on building the web3 infrastructure for climate action.
Allowing for intentionality and reflection amidst building web3 startups is important. One session asked the audience to collectively imagine the future we seek to build in alignment with nature. We took a step back to analyze how or even if the tools and infrastructure we are actively developing are moving us closer to that future, or if they were just a mere distraction.
Andrew Yang made a special appearance (link to talk here) to encourage web3 startups to actively engage with regulators and politicians. Amongst a wide-ranging talk, one soundbite stood out: “Web3 could be the biggest anti-poverty initiative in the history of the world... Let’s make it so that people see the benefits of technology.”
If you have any feedback, questions about web3, or suggestions, feel free to reach out. Alex reads every reply.
With love,
Alex & Ale
Researching web3 applications for a thriving planet
P.S. know a specific web climate company Aera Force should meet? Here’s the DAO’s quick referral form.
This newsletter is for educational purposes only.