🌍 Web3 for Climate #19
Your 5-minute deep-dive into regenerative web3 startups
Happy Thursday, investors and builders,
Below is your five-minute read of global #ReFi news and curated articles. Today’s content includes:
🧑🔬 A new, potential field for blockchain markets
📚 A review of a metaverse book
🍻 Updates from a recent #ReFi industry conference
Huge thanks go to Yoshi from the ThoughtFloats Twitter account. He helped curate the fundraising news. If you want to hire a US-based writer who understands #ReFi startups, he’s your guy 👀
Here’s your snapshot of our burgeoning ecosystem:
Global Ecosystem News 🌊
Fundraises
💹 Vosbor, a blockchain-based marketplace for bulk agricultural commodities, unveiled its flagship trading platform and announced a $7M seed round led by Lux Capital.
🌲 The US Endowment for Forestry and Communities received a $250k grant through a USDA Forest Service grant program to develop a blockchain network for tracking wood supply.
💸 ixo, an impact-focused blockchain, was awarded a $200k grant from Coinbase Giving to aid in the development of ImpactDAOs through the ixo Launchpad.
Ecosystem News
📣 ReFi Podcast launched its second season!
🌏 Vlinder Climate pledged to fund 50k CO2 tons of forward carbon credits to the Solid World DAO Mangrove Pool, dedicated to restoring degraded mangrove ecosystems in Southeast Asia.
🤝 Moss, a carbon tokenization protocol, announced a strategic partnership with Regen Network. Moss will use Regen’s secure and sovereign blockchain to issue, track, and retire carbon credits.
⏩ Toucan Protocol partnered with Ivy Protocol, an on-chain climate crowdfunding platform, to develop infrastructure for the forward carbon credit market.
📢 Verra, the largest carbon credit exchange, launched a public consultation on how they plan to work with third-party crypto instruments.
✅ KlimaDAO, a protocol selling carbon offsets, partnered with IdentDeFi to create a KYC solution that allows compliance checks for private digital assets.
🌐 Open Earth announced a partnership with UNFCCC. Using Open Earth’s blockchain and AI research, United Nations Climate Change plans to promote the use of innovation and transparency for climate action.
♻️ TRST01, a blockchain solutions provider, announced a partnership with EcoEx, a waste management marketplace, to create a plastic removal credit system.
Newly Launched Projects 🚀
🔄 Genuine Way, an Italian supply chain traceability platform, started using blockchain.
👩💼 ReFiJobs.com and CauseArtist Media launched a Regenerative Finance job board to connect top talent to careers in this sector.
⛓️ Estonian startup Coorest was awarded a social impact grant from the Chainlink Community Grants Program to develop a dApp for issuing and trading CO2 tokens.
🌳 Open Forest Protocol launched the OFP mainnet on NEAR Protocol. Forest projects may now register for access to carbon financing.
💻 Enrex released the Enrex NFT Offsetting dApp. NFT projects can now easily calculate and offset their minting process or the carbon footprint of their entire collection.
📜 DaX Digital Assets, a Brazilian NFT marketplace specializing in sports and entertainment, announced that it plans to offer tokenized carbon credits as NFTs.
🌱 Trusted Seed, a community supporting “the advancement regenerative economies” launched its Trusted Seed dashboard.
⚡ DeepMarkit announced the launch of its carbon offset minting platform, MintCarbon.io
🙈 Redemption DAO made headlines globally as a quickly coordinated effort to save the Congo Basin from being auctioned off to oil companies.
(Editor’s note: Their goal was to raise $150M over three days, until community hiccups halted the development.)
Founders, feel free to submit your project here.
Weekend Reading 📚
Impact certificates is an emerging topic of conversation amongst web3 founders. Effectively, could you create a market using tokens that reward impactful behaviors? That already exists for carbon credits. Would people want to buy a “proof-of-impact” token that represents “lifting a person out of poverty” or “giving homeless people a home for one year?” Creating a free market for impact is hard to imagine, but it could spur $BBs of more capital going into effective philanthropy. The article delves into the nascent space, broad potential, and some of the risks.
2 - Book review of ‘The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything’
Citi and KPMG recently predicted that the metaverse could generate as much as $13 trillion in revenue per year by 2030. Are you interested in this topic but do not know if you want to read an entire book? A business strategy writer breaks down the most popular metaverse book in this article.
3 - #ReFi Summer — a recap of startups and investor sessions at the Paris Celo Conference
The article here is less useful for people theoretically interested in climate crypto. Instead, it is a helpful update for founders enmeshed in the industry. Climate Collective (a Celo fund that gives grants to natural-capital startups) summarized #ReFi founders’ takeaways from the Paris conference.
Many of the quotes (i.e., from Ed @Allegory and Ikarus) speak to the immense progress in the ReFi industry this year. #ReFi started as mere murmurings late in 2021 to see a variety of emerging funds (Allegory, Aera Force, Eniac, Magic VC, Draft VC) and hundreds of startups (i.e., profiled in a variety of industry maps) focused on this ecosystem.
Fun extras
If you’re looking to build a startup in ReFi, the ReFi Roundup focuses on helping our industry’s founders.
If you’d like a regular analysis of on-chain carbon markets, Toucan Protocol runs the excellent deCarbonized newsletter.
ReFi Podcast’s first episode is a discussion with Magic Ventures’ partner, Simar Mangat. It covers his journey and the last 20 minutes is an inspiring call to action for regenerative finance founders.
If you have questions about the terms above (i.e., what is #ReFi), feedback, or article suggestions, we’ll happily reply to any direct emails.
With love,
Alex Filotimo and the Aera Force DAO
Researching web3 venture investments for a flourishing future
P.S. If you want to contribute research into web3-climate investing, feel free to contact us or contribute to this open-source insights repository.
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.