🌍 Venturing in ReFi #24
Your 5-minute deep-dive into regenerative web3 startups
Happy Thursday!
Below are your curated articles and global #ReFi news. This week, we specifically cover:
🌱 Practical pluralism
🌊 The Future of ReFi (an investors view)
💸 Crypto-enabled Universal Basic Income
We’re excited to profile and invest in this emerging sector with you. Let’s dive in:
Global Ecosystem News 🌊
Fundraises
☀️ Reneum, a Singapore startup building a marketplace for on-chain renewable energy certificates, raised $4.1M in a pre-seed round led by Ajeej Capital.
🛒 IMPT.io, a Web3 platform that allows consumers to trade carbon credits, raised $5M in the pre-sale of its IMPT token.
🦦 Otterspace raised $3.7M for an NFT product to “definancialize” web3 by enabling necessary NFT infrastructure.
Ecosystem News
💸 Celo Foundation announced its pledge to contribute "2% for Web3 Impact," starting by helping onboard 100+ investors into the Web3 space.
🔆 Reneum, a Singapore-based startup building a marketplace to sell tokenized energy credits globally, is hiring for a fully remote Social Media & Content Manager role and a Senior Solidity Dev role.
♻️ Ascend Performance Materials, one of the world’s largest nylon producers, launched a pilot program using blockchain technology to trace the lifecycle of their 100% recycled polymer products.
⛅️ Hyphen, an aggregator of real-time global carbon emissions data, announced they launched on dClimate’s decentralized climate data marketplace.
🌉 Thallo, a London-based Web3 startup, partnered with carbon marketplace Biocarbon Registry to announce the world’s first two-way carbon bridge, allowing users to transfer carbon credits on and off-chain.
🍣 SushiSwap, a leading decentralized exchange, launched a “Carbon Offset” option, allowing users to offset their transactions’ carbon emissions automatically.
📊 KlimaDAO, a carbon-backed currency project, released the Klima Data Carbon Dashboard, allowing people to visualize useful data about on-chain carbon credits.
Newly Launched Projects 🤔🚀
🧩 Supermodular.xyz launched their software development studio building regenerative Web3 projects.
🤝 ReFiDAO launched a new season of Founders Circles, online groups to help founders of ReFi projects collaborate. Apply here for more info.
🟩 Celo, a leading ReFi blockchain, launched “Impact Cards” NFTs that automatically update to reflect users’ contributions to impact projects.
⚡️ ecoPros, a Berlin startup “leveraging DeFi to fund renewable energy projects,” released their litepaper.
🌟 Regen Network, the longest-running blockchain project for carbon assets, launched Regen Marketplace to make it easy to trade their carbon credits.
Founders, feel free to DM our editor a project on Twitter @AlexFilotimo
Curated Readings 📚
1 - Enabling Universal Basic Income w/crypto
In 2020, impactMarket set out to distribute money to global communities in need. Since launching in 2020, the tool has distributed over USD 2.1M* worth of Celo.
The company raised $2.1M earlier in 2022 to scale further. The podcast linked above outlines their product, and you can learn more in a strategic announcement they released last month.
*including $50 from our editor, Alex.
2 - Practical Pluralism 🌱 (6-minute read)
Pluralism is the belief that an ecosystem is better with diverse ideas, cultures, or approaches.
In this article, leaders in the Ethereum ecosystem implore crypto companies to make pluralism a core design value. How? Design systems where the best products and multiple options can co-exist (think, not Apple).
They predict web3 will change effective business strategy — forcing companies to build systems that willingly avoid monopoly benefits. While doing so reduces the maximum possible value one innovation/startup can capture, the authors believe it creates higher-quality products and more resilient ecosystems.
Why should crypto entrepreneurs care? Diversity creates anti-fragility — if any one piece of infrastructure or source of demand fails, others take its place. Diversity also encourages other forms of life. Much like a small town vs. a thriving city, the more stores there are, the more industries (insurance, entertainment, sports) will thrive in the area.
Some say that our economy will increasingly emulate natural principles (i.e., this TEDx Talk from a prior newsletter). Building for pluralism instead of monopolies is one example of the patterns we find in evolution.
3 - The Future of ReFi — Investor Slideshow (5-minute read)
Jahed Momand — another ReFi investor @Cerulean Ventures — shared his slide deck covering how he suspects #ReFi will evolve.
He believes local communities and individuals will let us solve various climate challenges.
How does blockchain enable that? DAOs will let communities easily set up and distribute incentives, decreasing the cost of cooperation.
Exceptional extras
Want to build a startup in ReFi? The ReFi DAO supports our industry’s founders.
If you’d like a regular carbon market analysis, Toucan Protocol runs the excellent deCarbonized newsletter.
Feel free to reply with feedback, suggestions, or articles for crypto/climate investors. 📩
With love,
Alex, Yoshi, 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.