🌍 Web3 for Climate #14

Your 5-minute deep-dive into regenerative web3 investing

Happy Thursday!

Alex here. After curating this week's projects and articles, I am writing to you with immense excitement. 

While we may be entering a bear market, some of web3’s most exciting innovations will emerge in the upcoming year. Many investors felt frustrated at the flood of projects that capitalize on trends, rather than creating fundamentally competitive business models. Now, founders must design their protocols for long-term success, focus on real users (instead of a frothy blockchain-interested investor base), and innovate based on the field’s underlying premise.

We continue to see talented founders focus on web3 applications. The infrastructure is falling into place**. I have no doubt some of #ReFi’s emerging approaches to coordinate capital and talent will reshape our economy this century. 

If you know of young engineers, mathematicians, or economists interested in building startups, I recommend sending them to learn about #ReFi startups with us or the ReFi DAO.

Here’s your weekly snapshot.

Global Ecosystem News 🌊

Fundraises

• 🚄 Allinfra, a Hong-Kong startup simplifying investments in climate infrastructure, has raised $6M in a Series A round led by Nomura.

• 👔 Fashinza, a UAE-based startup creating sustainable supply chains for the global fashion industry, raised $100M in a Series B round from Prosus Ventures, Accel, and Naval Ravikant.

• 🌊 Flowcarbon, a startup selling tokenized carbon credits on the Celo blockchain, raised $70M in funding from A16Z, Allegory Capital, and General Catalyst. The investment included traditional equity and a $38M purchase of its token.

  • (Writer’s note: this sparked broad public attention as the controversial entrepreneur Adam Neumann helped create the company. Aera Force contributors have seen a lot of activity from Flowcarbon’s fast-moving operational team and we look forward to watching them create an authentically impactful product.)

• 🚗 Zeemcoin, a Spanish team creating a cryptocurrency that enables more electric vehicle infrastructure, raised €500,000 in their seed round.

• 📈 eCarbon, a startup creating an artificial registry that mimics the European carbon emissions market, closed an undisclosed pre-seed round. 

  • (Writer’s note: this is more of a speculation instrument than a startup that will generate any change in emissions.)

Ecosystem News

• ⛓️ Ripple announced a $100M sustainability fund to purchase carbon removal credits. Ripple is a protocol with a $20B market cap built to facilitate cross-border financial payments more efficiently.

• 🌍 A new Deloitte research report revealed delaying climate action could cost the world’s economy US$178T by 2070.

Newly Launched Projects 🚀

• 🌅 Sustvest, a platform allowing retail investors to fund solar projects, has onboarded 600 investors since launching last month.

• 🌊 Oceans and Us, a Dubai-based NGO, plans to sell $1.2M of NFT art to fund autonomous plastic-collecting boats. The NFT owners will receive discounts on major Middle-Eastern brands.

• Founders, feel free to submit your project here.

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Curated Readings 📚

Designing Token Economies | Deep Dive from the Not Boring Blog: Do protocols behave more like companies or countries? What are the competitive and cooperative dynamics at play? How do we appropriately value protocols? For founders and investors, this 1-hour read can help you grapple with the underlying factors that influence how web3 startups will evolve.

Throughout the article, the authors beautifully frame the broad promise of crypto. Innovators can rapidly experiment with new economic designs (coordinating financial capital and talent) in the digital realm:

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This is How Energy Startup SustVest is Redefining Investment in the Future: Could projects like SustVest disrupt many billion-dollar funds — while lowering costs for clean infrastructure developers? At Aera Force, we increasingly see startups creating financial tools for renewable infrastructure investments. This 5-minute read outlines SustVest’s approach. Allinfra (mentioned above in the fundraising section) is another example. By “tokenizing” the ownership contracts and payment system, SustVest offers retail investors access to a relatively low-risk asset class. Previously, access to infrastructure investments was reserved for giant funds. Now, any retail investor can earn a relatively low-risk return, all while the increasing pool of capital reduces the financing costs for project developers.

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Bitcoin miners can accelerate the shift to renewable energy, but they won't help reduce emissions: For anyone interested in examining how Bitcoin miners affect the grid, this is your resource. Thoralf, a Data Manager at Tesla and contributor at the Aera Force and All for Climate DAOs, spent months researching how bitcoin mining interacts with grid stability. He shows that mining equipment can improve grid stability, as mining equipment can absorb excess renewables during low demand and quickly shut down during high-demand periods. However, the increase in electricity demand semi-counteracts miners’ direct decarbonization benefit. To pursue a net-zero economy, America should embrace mining’s benefits while pushing miners to consider environmental costs when choosing their power sources.

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Fun extras

• The founder of Senken wrote a Twitter thread discussing the chaotic activity in #ReFi carbon communities over the last week

• Toucan Protocol runs the deCarbonized newsletter if you want a more regular analysis of on-chain carbon markets

• Advice for web3 job seekers from @Michadavinci

• Feel free to contribute to this repository of web3-climate investing research

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If you have questions about the terms above (i.e., what is #ReFi), feedback, or article suggestions, I’ll happily reply to any direct emails.

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With love,
Alex Filotimo for the Aera Force DAO
Researching web3 venture investments for a flourishing future

**examples of the startups providing industry infrastructure: data providers like dClimate, decentralized protocols to create new carbon/ecological assets like Regen Network, and tokenized geospatial data from startups like Shamba Network and Astral Protocol.

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This newsletter is for educational purposes only. While we strive for accurate and unbiased information, none of it is verified or intended to help as investment advice.