Initially we target the voluntary emission reduction (VER) market, but can potentially expand this to the compliance-driven side of the market later.
Our target users are:
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Businesses which directly cause and/or indirectly facilitate CO2 emissions, and wish to offset in order to adhere to corporate values, improve their public image, and ultimately hit climate targets and achieve tax rebates.
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Public sector organisations which directly or indirectly cause CO2 emissions, and are under pressure from their governments who are behind plan on hitting the climate targets they pledged to in international agreements
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Individual personas (listed in the chronological order we expect them to emerge):
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Dani, the technically-minded early adopter of web3 who is actively working in a blockchain startup
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Nick, the Blockchain influencer who runs a DeFi website / blog and is a strong Ethereum advocate
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Frank, the blockchain investor who sees potential in CO2ken
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Lisa, the college graduate who works on web3 research for a non-profit think-tank and helps edits a weekly blockchain newsletter read by thought leaders in government and the private sector
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Alice, a non-technical consumer who wants to offset the CO2 emissions caused by her holiday flights, but has heard disturbing things about the trustworthiness of many carbon retailers
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**Public sector organisations and businesses are struggling to:
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maximise the "bang for buck" of their carbon offsetting budgets, by avoiding expensive offsets in which many intermediaries take a slice of the pie
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keep track of all their offsets while avoiding spending significant time / money on additional accounting
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prove to external auditors that they have offset CO2 emissions directly caused by their internal processes
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integrate offsetting into their existing products and services, so that their customers can in turn easily perform offsetting
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ensure that all these offsets go to trustworthy offset projects
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Individuals
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Dani needs to strengthen the value proposition of her startup's product, and expand the horizons of what she can achieve with blockchain.
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Nick is struggling to find compelling new use cases for Ethereum, which he needs to drive more buzz around the ecosystem and attract more readers to his website.
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Frank is fighting to get ahead of other VCs by finding exciting new projects with bold visions and a large target market. He wants to achieve ROI whilst investing in ethical and sustainable ventures.
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Lisa wants to exceed her manager's expectations by finding surprising new blockchain projects and explaining their near- and long-term value to her public and private sector readers within their own organisations.
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Alice is bewildered by the various carbon offsetting options available online, and needs to find a way to offset her own CO2 emissions which she can trust will be held to the highest standards.
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We are building the open carbon accounting ecosystem needed to achieve our vision of global carbon neutrality by 2040.
By building our platform on blockchain, we can simultaneously solve the key problems which plague the traditional carbon offsetting industry:
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Lack of reliability and accountability
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Too many intermediaries in the value chain causing money "leaks" and other inefficiencies
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Fragmentation of carbon markets
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Difficulty / inertia in building new products / services which bring offsetting to a larger audience
Please see this mindmap:
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Depending on your point of view, building anything on blockchain arguably entails some inherent risk.
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Even if blockchain succeeds long-term, there is no guarantee that Ethereum will be a long-term player (although of course we believe it will).
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The DAO will need to be backed by a legal entity, for which there is little precedent. Getting the wrong setup could expose the founders to undesirable liability.
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DAO structures and the underlying technology are still relatively immature, and historically have had security bugs and other vulnerabilities exploited with disastrous consequences.
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Fixing the crypto-economic model (including CO2ken price, and potentially bonding curve parameters) correctly will be a challenge. Getting it wrong could prove extremely expensive.
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Building a reliable oracle to import CO2ken prices and other data into the blockchain has all the standard challenges inherent with oracles.
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Building an open platform allows others to take our Open Source code, replicate what we have done, and potentially take a chunk of our revenue. However this could also be viewed as a successful outcome in that it validates the business model and further increases offsetting activity.
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Similarly, choosing the wrong Open Source license could provide too much or little restriction in terms of what and how components could be built on top. However this should not be hard to mitigate.
We have several very clear metrics of success:
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Number of offset certificates purchased and used to mint CO2kens via our Carbon DAO. This measures how much additional demand for offsetting our platform is incentivising.
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Number of CO2kens retired. This measures the net figure of emissions offset through the platform.
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Number of DAO members. This measures engagement and confidence on the investor / supply side of the platform.
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Number of users of the offsetting smart contract. This measures engagement on the demand side of the platform.
Our platform is fully based on Ethereum (currently only on the Rinkeby testnet). All our code is on GitHub.
Our Carbon DAO is built on top of DAOstack. To achieve this, we extended DAOstack with a new CO2ken plugin which is already merged into the upstream DAOstack codebase.
Our smart contracts are written in Solidity.
Our demonstration frontend was coded using a
combination of Webflow,
DappHero, jQuery, and our eth-co2.js
JavaScript library which is
based on ethers.js.
Our offsetting leaderboard also uses Webflow, DappHero, jQuery, and additionally uses a dedicated CO2ken subgraph on TheGraph.com to extract historical offsetting data and display totals per user.
Please see our full product roadmap.