ReFi Community Hangout Dec 10 | Toucan Protocol, KlimaDAO + Gitcoin Climate

Transcript (by otter.ai)

But yeah, I'm doing I'm doing great. I was up late last night, diving through all the gitcoin climate projects, getting ready to have this conversation today. And also just really just trying to understand how different groups are using the platform. So it's, it's just inspiring to see. Nice, nice, man. Super exciting. Yeah, you've probably dove deeper than I have. I've kind of spent a fair bit of time putting a couple of grant proposals together and then been blown out of the water by some amazing generous donations and just seeing the incredible power of the the community and the platform they've built. So yeah, super excited to dive into gitcoin a little bit. How's it going today? sigh How are you today, bro?
See if you can unmute. I'm not sure if you can jump on. Just say Hey.
Yeah, dude. Great. I'm actually trying to figure out why this is not coming through my
Bluetooth headset. But yeah, here we go. Nice. Awesome, man. invite you up here as well. Rob dawg. It's hard to scroll through the list of these people. This is so exciting, guys. I'm super humbled and grateful to see all these amazing people here jumping in to check on the refi space.
Will that a couple other people join? But yeah, basically everybody my name is John and I am kind of a newbie to the defy community. But I kind of started looking at this space. Hey, Kevin. Good afternoon, my man what's going on,
too, and my call ended early. So I'm happy to be able to hang out with you all on here and talk about refi stuff. It's gonna be cool. Cool. Super fun. Yeah, I was just giving a quick intro and setting the stage. We're waiting for some of the to Kanak Lima folks to join. But we got here with us Cody Sims from MC J. Rob dog from two can sighs Ziggy, also from kleemann Tao who's been jumping on the to canned stuff. And then of course yourself, which is awesome. And we might have some other people jump in and talk as well. But yeah, I was just saying, in essence, I'm kind of new to the device space and really looks at crypto specifically from the lens of how it could address the climate crisis. And so got onboard the cleanout train relatively early on, not as early as some, but really motivated and inspired by this model of kind of making it possible for people to invest in climate action and make a difference, while also potentially making return on capital, which is really cool. And then sort of fell deep into the weeds, so to speak of the underlying protocol and discovered to can and some amazing people, they're really sort of beautiful, generous, and, yeah, mindful, committed culture. So I've gone pretty deep over the last month or so and just feel like I'm kind of being drawn to the refi ecosystem as a whole. And it feels as though there's this kind of movement happening at the intersection of climate action, and crypto that has a lot of potential. And I think I really wanted to host these community Hangouts. It's just a way to create a safe space for new people to enter for existing people to share what they're up to, to ask hard questions, to look at some of the problems we're trying to solve and the potential solutions we're addressing. And yeah, just be kind of clear eyed about the the state of the world that we live in, you know, I think climate change is quite a overwhelming and daunting challenge at hand. But we've got some brilliant people who are setting their hearts and their minds to this. So the last two couple refi community hangouts were a bit broad and just trying to touch base with you know, everybody in the space here at folks are doing, but I thought in chatting with Cody the other week that it warranted potentially like a deeper dive and exploration to Yeah, dive into some of these protocols and just learn the communities that are surfacing and some of the theories of change. So yeah, that's kind of up to Cody love to hear your background. I've done a little deep what you're doing. But curious what you guys at MC J, think about the whole refi space and just get some context from you.
Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, excited to see such a broad and diverse group of folks that I you know, I recognise quite a few handles in the, in the group here, you know, some folks that are definitely deep down the crypto rabbit hole, and some folks that are very not deep down at all, and I love seeing that type of collaboration come together. And so, you know, for those of you who aren't familiar with the work we do at MC J, or my climate journey, you know, MC J started as my partner Jason, who's who's here in the audience, as his way to explore how someone with a background like him could help with climate change, right? The you know, Jason was a successful entrepreneur who built a mobile fitness app over the last decade or so. And, you know, didn't really know how to how to make an impact in climate and
A lot of what ncj is about is exploring how disparate solutions can come together when people put their own skills to work to try to solve the problem of climate change. And so what's really attracted me to the rebuy space and to everything going on in the crypto world is it is a group of people who, you know, have incredibly deep skill sets in a really unique area, and an incredibly new area, that are trying to figure out how to leverage those skills the best way they can, you know, you don't have to have, you know, have a PhD in atmospheric science to make a dent on climate change, potentially, if you can, if you know how to help change markets, and how to help drive incentive structures, and how to leverage the power of community together to do those things, you know, you can make a really big difference yourself, potentially. And I think that's sort of what we're starting to see. You know, at MC j, we are we're one part community, one part content arm and one part capital source, we invest in early stage
venture oriented startups. And, you know, we're obviously really intrigued by the movement that's starting to happen here. And, you know, the opportunity for, for for folks who are approaching things in a new way that may actually raise eyebrows, frankly, from a lot of the traditional kind of climate community. Because, you know, most of the narrative around cryptocurrency has been around carbon footprint. And but seeing people recognise these tools can actually be put to use in totally different ways. So you know, appreciate you having me on here, John, and really excited to dive into some of these specific protocols and technologies that are making a big difference right now. Definitely. Thanks, Cody. And also kudos to you Jason. For them CJ podcast is actually you guys that prompted me to do the terror due course. And it looks like actually, Kamala is here in the audience, which is amazing. This 12 week, climate action bootcamp has totally changed my life and then such an amazing way for me to really dig into the science and connect with an incredible community of people devoting their lives to the climate crisis. So this is definitely a community effort. And yes, super excited to dive into things. I wanted to give us that 10 minutes to set the stage but let me lay out a little bit of an agenda here and then I've also got, yeah, go for it. John. I'll just say as well like caridade do and MC I'm not part of them CJ team but both turned on doing MC J were fundamental in my own transitions from being a generalist tech person to a climate focused one. So you know, I agree with your with your shout out there to Tara team also. Awesome. Nice, nice, definitely cool. Um, so yeah, the lay of the land today's we're gonna try and wrap up in about 15 minutes is kind of a hard stop if anybody needs to go but we might linger on a little bit. For the next like 15 or 20. We're going to focus mostly on the to Cam protocol and the sort of emergence there. Here we have just invited up, Rafael to speak who's one of the founders of to Ken, and also Rob dog who's joined a few months ago and is making a huge impact and kudos to rob for hooking me in bring me into the to Ken community. But yeah, welcome Rafa How you doing this evening. I know it's late for you. So thanks so much for joining.
Thanks for making this happen.
Yeah, it's Friday night, right? Like COVID makes it possible that we have
and we spend Friday night in front of a computer or have a fight up.
Whether that's a blessing or a curse. Yeah, exactly. I tried to join you on my computer, but I can I can request to speak
thanks. Thanks for making us your kick back and chill Friday night Raph. Yeah, no.
Cardio.
Here again. I mean, yeah, we spoke. We could go on. More or less. Yeah, we on the 90 Minute MC J podcast with the two cam that just went out yesterday. So everyone should follow along with that if you want to dive even deeper. Definitely. So yeah, there's a good piece of content there. Everybody go check that out MC J podcast, but love to hear from you, Ralph about
kind of why you decided to do this. What was the underlying motivation? Like how did this all start? And you have started there and I'd love to hear some of what you're excited about and where you feel this is headed.
Sure.
I mean,
I think quite honestly, part of this was born out of so I fell down the rabbit hole John 17. Like so many.
And I'm an energy engineer by training and I might not the thing that everybody worked on 2017 when they were in
Energy and crypto was this like peer to peer energy markets use case. And
while it was super, I mean, it was super interesting. And I learned a lot about like, blockchains.
I always got this, like, pushback from friends that like, are mostly like environmentalists that, you know, crypto car is so bad for the environment for work. It's I mean, everybody here knows that it knows this field. So
this, this was really frustrating, because I personally think that, you know, climate change is the biggest coordination failure of our times and huge governance problem, and that these technologies that we had, we have these tools that we have at hand here are probably
the best shot at addressing some of these coordination failures, right. And so, when, when I when I talk to, you know, when I tried to explain that to a lot of people, like, I couldn't really point to real projects that would make that it would prove that point. And I got, I was really, I was really interested in Taoism since 19.
And I,
again, so then I started looking at the climate crisis thought, okay, what can we do with ours, and then that's where I went to London, like East London was like, February 2020. And I hacked together the first version of co2. So to toucan is the hackathon project, that kind of now is, runs under the too comfortable name. And what we did back then was basically, it was very similar, honestly, to what we what we've built now, just in a much more, like, you know, hacked together version where essentially was easier, like bringing carbon credits and chain, and then writing a solidity modifier that would allow smart contracts automatically offset themselves to create what we call green smart contracts. And that was really, for me to start up this completely different journey, which was carbon markets. And I have to admit, I was quite naive two years ago, when I entered carbon markets, because
it's, you know, it's, it's very complex.
carbon credits are not the same. There's like, compliance market says voluntary markets. And then within these markets, there's so many, like differences, etc. So I spent the Big time,
big chunk of time, I think, nine months inside of a venture builder in London called deep science ventures,
which really gave me the time to look at this problem space, like web three and climate, and we're, you know, what are the leverage points that we can kind of push to, like, really make an impact? And, yeah, that's also where
our co founder, James kind of joined the journey. And we spend a lot of time in, in a room with 13, whiteboards, and just
cranking out ideas and like, looking for the sweet spots. And
yeah, after that time, and there was some frustration in between Not gonna lie. We we joined kernel,
the good guy and fellowship, which is been an amazing journey for us. Like, that's where we find
just a community of like minded people, the right, you know, talk, talking about culture, like the right culture have
the right mindset of like, collaboration hands.
Yeah, that's where big part of the early team essentially came together.
Together with the other John John X, who was a mentor of Colonel who's on the team and who's like, leading articles, like community effort, and yeah, that's where we basically
yeah, worked in the first version of the app that you can protocol hand in hand, obviously with, with the team at Canada to launch together in Yeah, it's October, it started long ago, even though it feels like a long time.
I stopped here before going, it's nice. I realise I've been talking.
That's perfect. That's absolutely, exactly. That's how many here and I so appreciate that. You've emphasised the kind of temptation as a builder to look at the complexity of the carbon market. And, you know, it's hard. There's a lot of different nuances going on. But I commend you guys for slowing down and really taking the time to understand the space because I think, at least from my perspective, some of the decisions that you've made at a protocol level in terms of architecture really do seem to lend itself towards being very flexible and meeting the needs of the supply side of the carbon market. And then now this new demand side that's being created in defy I'm curious to hear how you sort of articulate your theory of change, right?
For, like, we understand that climate change is really an issue of coordination and also governance. You know, everybody who's watched cop 26, or any of the previous ones have seen that nation states really aren't set up to solve this type of problem. It's kind of the sweet spot for, you know, the kryptonite for the nation states, so to speak, like, why tokenizing carbon? What about that? Changes? Something about financing in the climate crisis? In your opinion?
Yeah, I think it's a complex answer.
So, there's a couple of dimensions to it. The first one is
Poconos carbon is
it's really just the first kind of building block that can
unlock so many other use cases, right. And the first big use case that we've seen as carbon as a collateral, which was, you know, beautifully pioneered by chemo, and which, which we now realise it's not the only protocol, that is it has interest in carbon as a collateral asset. And so
to kind of wrap that into context, so carbon offsets of carbon credits are really just
positive externalities packaged into interesting. And the use case, the only use case today that we have for these positive externalities is, is to match it with negative ones, and to call it carbon neutral. And
if you if you look at the concentration of carbon, the atmosphere today, like we understand that it's not enough today to think in terms of carbon neutrality, you know, we have, like, we have to remove a lot of carbon that has already been emitted. And in my opinion, what we have here we have an opportunity in,
in crypto to embed, like regeneration into the fabric of the economic activity, right and into the fabric of this of these protocols that you're building. Right. So this is for one kind of internalising the cost of carbon, but also going beyond that, which is basically kind of making the economic system right now that is being built on chain regenerative by design. And this means like taking a small portion of the value that has been created and kind of reallocating it, redirecting it towards regenerative practices, and kind of closing the circuit like, you know, most of our economy has been built on extraction. But we forgot to put something back right, put something back into the comments. And so
that's kind of like the high level stuff, right? And how do we achieve that? Well, we achieve this by having composable money neighbours, and carbon credits took us carbon credits are one of these warning labels that make it easy, right? That make it easy. And to do that, that makes easy to burn these carbon credits on chain generate, like, you know, proof that something has happened. And there's like a
carbon has been pulled out of the pulled out of the fold out of circulation for good. And so that's really how I look at it is that we have to, we have to use these tools that we haven't had to generate more supply, right. And so I think there's a big opportunity, like
project finance, kind of really using the capital that is in crypto to finance the production of more positive externalities. And then I see, like, all these incentive mechanisms that exist in crypto, just like means to kind of close this loop and kind of permanently have the client create carbon sinks that locked the carbon away for good. And
so the opportunity here that we have is yes, as I said, carbon has a natural carbon acid as a building block format, tempers, applications current as a building block for and as T's
but carbon also just as a treasury asset, right, as a
diversified or like maybe non correlated asset for, you know, protocols to, to hold the credits. And because at the end of the day, I'm super bullish on carbon as a as an asset class, right. And everybody is, and this is why it keeps rising.
But it's really hard as an individual to invest in carbon. The price is, and that's because this market is so hard to gain access to.
And it's kind of protected by some of these, like some of the intermediaries that are currently in the market. It's really hard as an as a retail investor to invest in
the growth of carbon or like to be long carbon essentially.
Yeah, there's sorry. So can I can I just sort of recap and encapsulate what I've heard here sitting it's really interesting, you know, so the first thing is that you've actually created programmable money backed by carbon, right?
Like by tokenizing carbon, you're creating a store of value in a medium of exchange that is correlated to people sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. And, you know, mitigating or preventing emissions, right, which is really an incredible building block in its first place. But you're not the first ones, right? There's other people who've tokenized carbon in the past. And so I think there's some really interesting nuances here in terms of what you guys have done that seems to have worked. So the sort of carbon as money is one thing as a sort of general concept, things really important to get across for people looking at refi from the outside, it's transparent, it's programmable. And it's like you said, it's a building block. It's a Lego that you can do different things with, you can build protocols around cleaner dollars, just one instance of what you could do with carbon as collateral. And then the second thing is, Adobe is also Kiva. Kiva for me is money, right?
Yeah, I mean, I agree with like, car car. I mean, money is such a broad term, right.
Sorry, you want to interrupt here?
The, this is really what a lot of Akiva that. It's,
we can, we can, but by putting carbon into the treasury of Cuba, we can trigger a gold rush on carbon, actually, right? Because you can use you can use carbon as a you can bond carbon against
to get to the discount prices, right. So
this is very similar to how you know, back in the day, people were going to find in Kohl's and like bringing to their banks and getting dollars in exchange.
Yeah, anyway.
There's just no, it's cool. Super powerful concept. Yeah, it's super powerful concept. So one is, you know, carbonised money, and we seeing what, you know, the PCT in this primitive. And also creamer can do with that. But the other is that we can create protocols that make the flow of this money regenerative by nature, like you said. So it's not only the thing that's moving, but also the system that controls the flow. Whereas in our current system, you know, the flow of money is really tending to accumulate to a small few, you know, exacerbating the accumulation of wealth and elites. And it seems to just continue financing fossil fuels and failing to account for these negative externalities. So I think for me like this really was the vision that I was looking for, as I go into into defy was like you could design a completely regenerative system, that's an alternative to the monetary system we have today that just isn't working for our time. And I think carbon as money is really the vehicle that will enable us in this age of transition, like Charles Eisenstein talks about and so, yeah, super excited about this. I just wanted to touch on that piece. And yeah, I'll leave it from there. Cody, I don't know if you want to check in on anything on that. Yeah.
I think, you know, we'll obviously spend more time on the carbon money side, and really, what I view as the demand side of, of what you've enabled with too, can, as we dive into clean that here a bit in a bit, I'd love to hear more from you on the supply side, you know, when it comes to carbon
today, there, you know, when you look at large orgs, who are trying to buy carbon, you know, for their own netzero needs universally be here, there's not enough.
There's not enough high quality carbon out there. Right. And so, you know, in the startup world, like what I see at MC j is just incredible innovation around companies doing really amazing things for carbon removal, that are high quality nature based solutions for for carbon removal. And I'm curious how you think about the supply side? And what the role of on chain is for accelerating high quality carbon trading?
Yeah, so retirement, probably more and more accurately, yeah.
So
as you said, right, there's just not enough supply, there's not enough supply of high quality stuff, right. And this is part of the theory of change from Cuba to kind of increase the price so that it becomes lucrative for
like high quality carbon to
to scale, right, in order to scale carbon removal, for instance, we need higher prices. So I personally think that the market the carbon market,
especially around carbon removal, it's going to develop into a futures market if I mean you could argue that it already is right. Most of the most of the supplies bought up for the next two, three years or more. So
I think NodeJS was kind of proven the point that like on chain carbon markets is a thing and that there's demand coming from on chain but also hopefully demand that will come from off chain via who will use these like
permissionless markets that that exists on chain, we can use, we can use that to finance hopefully, the generation and the scale carbon removal and other like high quality forms of carbon carbon assets. So this is, in my opinion, kind of the, one of the aspects is to kind of create,
to close the circle, right, right now we, we tokenize. And we kind of we, we have created the, like half of the circle, which is we created the solution for the product, which is like we tokenize a product of these projects, like now, the next thing is to how do we also find in some of these projects in the first place.
And
I think what's going to be important there is that a lot of these new carbon wallet companies, for instance, they don't want to go to Vera, or some of the like other standards that have like very long cycles and like, are very bureaucratic.
So I think in the context of these, like more data driven
technologies, I think we can use, you know, tools that are
21st century tools.
But essentially, we want to, I think we can get straight into the
notion of full on chain registries do you think is, is closer than probably most in the carbon markets recognise? Totally, I mean, it's even without carbon removal, it's already big, like, even with like, just Article Six of the Paris agreement. And I mean, we have Joseph here in the in the audience, so maybe he can speak to that as well. But it's just,
it becomes more more complicated, because, you know, climate change becomes a really important agenda point on like, national level. And so you have governments freaking, sometimes carbon markets that are like have their own rules, and they're like, specific jurisdiction. And so essentially, these registries struggled, because they, some credits are allowed in some, in some markets and other credits are not allowed in other markets. So I think we really need that like neutral,
kind of macro registry, if you want that can create like, that allows it to create a proper interoperability between all of these credits between these markets. So
I think totally,
totally love it. Thank you so much, Raph, before we switch over to cleaned out, I want to spend a good 15 minutes diving into cleaning it out and then cap off with gitcoin to really feel like gitcoin is kind of the heart of the defi ecosystem. And I've just been amazed how gitcoin and Colonel and everything I'm doing is interwoven into everything that I've seen that is having great impact. But first, I just wanted to chat with you, Rob dog, I have to confess, like, I've worked with a lot of people in the startup space. But Rob has absolutely blown me away is the most profound operator I've ever met in my life. And he's totally redesigned the onboarding system to can some great job of creating. Yeah, frameworks make it easy for people to join in and start contributing in this amazing movement that Raphael just described. Love to hear your thoughts, Rob, about the kind of organisation shape and the culture that we're creating and what you're excited about internally at to Ken, and context to the mission that we just heard from Raph.
Thanks a lot for that, I think, in terms of what we're doing really is trying to build this ecosystem. And I think there's currently the infrastructure but ecosystem and I think was really incredible with the team. We've built the toolkit, this is just a lot of really awesome builders who have come together. And I think we're trying to try to build their cities ecosystem, I think we're in a pretty good spot, because we've been able to attract so many builders, we're really trying to have that sort of builder mentality of creating new things, and really moving things forward in a very pragmatic way. I think we're in such a big problem. And I think we have just among people who are excited about you know, coastal.
Nice, awesome. And just kind of one of the things for me is just the sort of the culture of communication and openness and honesty and kind of a recognition that if we're going to build regenerative systems using technology, we also have to have a kind of regenerative place within ourselves and a lifestyle that's sustainable and a piece of work that sustainable. I know it can be super intense working in crypto, the information flow is overwhelming. There's so much going on. But yeah, love this space to can that seems somewhat distinct from other protocols and defi that feels very human to me. And yeah, I've been really grateful for what you've done there. Go did you want to touch off anything onto him before we switch over to Komodo
Yeah, I mean prompt, I'd love to just hear, you know, for, you know, a good half of the folks listening today who, you know, don't work in a Dow or you know, are new to, to this whole crypto space and how it can help with climate change, maybe just describe at a high level, like what what an organisation as a Dow looks like, how is the day to day decision making done? How is how is governance done? Just to give people a flavour of it?
I mean, can it's not a Dow yet so an ingredient, we believe that being out of stocks, and I think we're still we don't claim to be
sort of setting the groundwork for being a decentralised organisation. So I can speak to that. I mean, I think the the main differences, I mean, if you're creating decentralised organisation a bit, I mean, you have to create
a bit more autonomy. And I think it's really important to have leadership at all levels of the organisation. I think it creates more flexibility and autonomy, of course, but but it also creates a pretty big coordination challenge for more smoothly planned and decentralised organisations. I think, also, the other thing is
decentralised organisations are highly fragmented across the world subluxated and have to rely more on for example, asynchronous communications, and that's one key thing, like have things be more documented, a bit more, can't rely as much on meetings and so forth. But yeah, I think a lot of the principles organisations still apply. I think there's a lot of similarities, though, there are some those distinct differences that come with that sort of flatness of the scripts. And it feels like one of the things I've I've really observed, you know, for, for organisations like yours that really operate in the truly decentralised nature is the ability for people to kind of onboard themselves as collaborators before they're, you know, and actually be contributing to the core of what you're building without, you know, being quote, unquote, you know, an employee or sort of onboarding them in any way. And, you know, maybe it would just be helpful for folks listening here to understand, you know, what, what that looks like, at the earliest of stages, and maybe even for you all, as to kind of like, how you identify how to how to how to how to onboard people as contributors. And then when you make How do you make the decision of like, sort of bringing them into a core part of the team, potentially?
Yeah.
Super interesting. I think that's a really good point. I think they're like, consider autonomy with onboarding, I think that stems partially from trying to have a lot of things documented, and doing people ability to by themselves to be able to become a productive part of the team and be able to contribute in different areas.
There's
fluid aspect of where you don't have like doubt, oftentimes, like an employment contract, and you're there for like nine hours per day like it is, I think, a lot we went through your work is a bit more fluid in terms of, you're vibing with different people, you're excited about different things, and you come and go to different basis. And I think there's a big role for for most of these organisations like ours, to have a space for people to come and contribute and come and help and it doesn't have to be there. No, they have to do this like all the time, they can do it part time, and so forth. So they'll be really valuable member of the team. I think there's a lot of aspects there and bringing people in to see more of the core of the team and so forth. I think, to me, that's some extent like there's all synergies with traditional organisations, there were
two to foster a certain culture, you can't just let everyone in and you have to.
And I think having people contribute is a great way to also get to know people get to know how they work, and be really comfortable with bringing them on later, you know, as the wrap up their contribution. Thanks. Thanks, Rob dog. I love it. And so I've been super impressed. Go for it. Because Rob dog is the perfect example of just a quick story. Because we were launching the protocol. We were like, the whole team was in Lisbon.
It was mid October we weren't nice we didn't have time to check this court.
And do like the community work that we needed to do and Rob dump was in the discord I was just running the show like literally straight up is the only guy in
this whole the whole communication and
so we decided hey, let's get rolling over
this dog from the
math right and I'm sure you didn't ask for permission either. He didn't
love it. Love it. Great. I'm just conscious of time here. We spent a good good chunk on two can we can go super deep. There's an hour and a half podcast on McG if you guys want to learn more. Check that out. Definitely were listened to sigh thank you so much for coming on board. I am really grateful to have you You're also very
interesting and unique because you're bridging the gap between to Canada and claim a Dow. I'm curious briefly before we dive into the crema Dow stuff, what brought you into this space? And why claim Adele?
Hey, how's it going everyone.
So I have a background in deep tech, primarily, machine learning is applied to advertising markets, which is a unique kind of market. I'm really fascinated by resource allocation, just generally, I think that's probably one of the most important aspects universally.
And so I kind of come to the space with that perspective. I first came, like many of you through Olympus,
you know, I became really fascinated how Olympus was applying game theory to essentially asset capture.
In the case of Olympus, of course, they're focused on on stable points.
But then, when I learned about claim a doubt, using that same mechanism, but applying it to tokenized carbon, it really like it really just lit something up inside of me.
Because I think, generally humans have not invented a better method than a market to align incentives.
And a market growth is literally defined by the growth of its participants. And as was mentioned here, traditionally, these carbon markets, in particular, the voluntary carbon markets, they're, they're siloed, they're opaque. And when but when we bring, or when we bridge those offsets on chain, instantly, all all those walls fall.
And so that's how I was, I came to space. And it just, you know, as soon as I learned about cleaning out,
and to cat and what they were doing, I just immediately dived into all the materials just spent, you know, a solid chunk of time over many days, just really grokking everything that was that was happening there. And at the end of it, I fully drank the Kool Aid, and I knew I had to be a part of it. So cool, man, it's been really great seeing you take leadership in the contributor, discord and Klieman Tao. Obviously, you've got a lot of experience and expertise. And yeah, it's just been one of the funnest parts for me is seeing these amazing people with random zombie avatars come in and run stuff. So it's been really cool. I'm curious to see like, what evidence Have you seen that claim it out is actually moving towards its mission of raising the price of carbon, and you know, the price of chemo has gone down by like, 80% over the last month? Like why are you still so heavily motivated in this space?
Yeah, so I mean, generally, in terms of price, I'm not too bothered by that right now. I mean, generally, in the macro, we're kind of in a risk off environment.
And when you look at just, you know, kind of the device space overall, everyone's pretty red.
And then if you look at Olympus themselves, they're down, but they're down less than, and I think that kind of makes sense. Because the backing there are stable coins. But if you look at crema, in terms of kind of overall risk, we're right there on the edge, right, in terms of actually using markets to make a real world impact.
So already, if you kind of imagine the difficulty of understanding Olympus, you have to extend that difficulty to clean up, but really clean was not about the price. Right? What I think what's important is to keep your eye on the total amount of, of tokenized carbon that Colima is capturing within its treasury.
Because if you believe that they the value of carbon is going to increase over time, then it's not so much the price now of what claimer that you should be concerned with. It's the total amount of, of tokenized carbon that's been that's in the treasury. And that gives you a proxy for, you know, the upside value of what claimant is doing over time. So that's, you know, that's that's kind of just where I'm focused. I generally have a long view anyways. I mean, we're super early,
everywhere. So I mean, there's tonnes of upside in crypto generally. So yeah, I'm not too concerned about it. I mean, I think, you know, talking about the value of the tokenized carbon.
You know, there's some really encouraging numbers out there already in terms of the impact that Clevedon has had.
You know, and to Ken has had on on
The Voluntary Carbon markets
for those familiar
the with SP global, they have stated that just in November,
the floor prices surged nearly 63%. And they attribute that directly to the activity to Cannon cleaning. And there's also that carbon carbon pulse report that DICE has shared that specifically mentioned to kind of claim it. So it's working basically. And what I mean 63% Is, is pretty high uptake in terms of a lift of the for price of carbon, like, this is a lot more than I thought any of us expected.
For a two to two month old project to be featured in a query report, it's pretty, pretty incredible. Right? Yeah, I mean, we're so early, right. And so obviously, I totally expect volatility to to affect us more, for sure.
But I mean, already, even at the price, the current prices of VCT, just to kind of put this in perspective, right? Imagine you had,
you know, a few acres of pine forest, right, and you wanted to cut those trees down those logs down and process them and sell the wood, the amount of profit that you could take per acre over a 25 year period, which is the amount of time it takes for these trees to mature, it's already more profitable for you just to go out and try to claim offsets by not cutting down those trees, just purely based on the price today, over, you know, a 25 year period. And I say that because you start to see that with a creasing for price, it starts to become a lot more advantageous globally, for people not to exploit the land,
and instead use the land to to capture positive externalities. And that's, that's the plan, and it's already working.
Fine, when I think about sort of, I take a step back and look at the big picture of what Kleem is trying to do. I feel like what's happened over the last few years is really, you know, decentralisation has kind of put the soul of money up for debate. You know, money for most of human lifetime has been backed essentially, by whoever has the strongest military power. And you would argue that Bitcoin, actually decentralised money and backed it by the power of compute and energy, which is why it has a huge carbon footprint, because it's actually backed by energy utilisation.
And cleaner is sort of asking a different question, which is, what if money was backed by nature and carbon, and I'm interested in how you and the team talk about that, and think about that, and how much that informs, you know, sort of your, your, your daily roadmap, as you're in the deep weeds of, you know, creating rat state crema, and all the, you know, incredibly technical defi work that you're having to do? You know, it would be I think, interesting, just to hear a little bit about the philosophic the philosophy behind it.
Yeah, so, I think, you know, with claims specifically, we're, we're really, I think we're really drilling into the power of the underlying growth of a PCT for each state climber or claimant.
And so, if you step back, actually claim a in particularly state claim is a hedge on tokenized carbon, right? Essentially, cleaner is paying you to to custody your, your tokenized carbon within Komodo
which, which really helps to align the idea of a continuous offsetting programme. So, you know, as an organisation, you would you know, that the price of carbon credits are probably gonna increase over time. And you know, that, and there's one idea where you just go into the market today, and, you know, anticipate your needs for the next few years. And you just buy a bunch of credits. And that's definitely a balanced strategy. And then you just, you know, offset periodically, according to your needs or your pledge. But what Cleveland Dow is really innovating here, is this, is this, this mechanism to custody,
that tokenized carbon so that you actually get gain a hedge on the tokenized carbon market as a whole. I mean, today, climate I was really focused on BCT. But, you know, in the near future, you're going to see different types of, of tokenized carbon being bonded into claims
from all different types of sources, you know more are going to be coming online from from to can. Different types are going to be coming online from to Cam. And eventually over time, you'll see that other bridges will be established to help bring other types of credits into the market. And so just in theory, it's always going to make more sense for you to hold stay cleaner as a hedge than it would be just just the the raw
tokenized carbon itself.
This is back to Rafael's point that we're we're, you know, we're sort of at the point of inevitability that they're going to be on chain entire registries that are created in the in the, you know, in the coming months and years.
This is such a powerful concept. So I obviously love that. And I think the folks that trust swap seems to have grasped what you just described, which is super cool. I'm conscious here, I really want to make sure people get an opportunity to dive deep into get coin, I'm happy to stay after if people want to go deeper into cleaning down. There's like an infinite black hole here. It is absolutely fascinating what's happening in this space, but also to say that I'm interviewing Archie and Dionysus who messaged a bit ago saying apologies, they couldn't show some of the founders that cleaned down on Tuesday as a part of the refi podcast. So there should be a kind of next step deep dive into crema that will explore some of this stuff in greater detail. But sighs This is awesome. Feel free to stick around if you got time? If not, no worries, but there's so much stuff we could jump into. I'm loving it. And thank you for jumping on board and giving us the confidence that you have.
Oh, yeah, totally. And I'll be happy to stick around to answer questions. No worries. Cool. Awesome. Yeah, Kevin. You guys still hanging out here? Thanks for sticking with us.
Or if Kevin other Scott's here. Hey, Scott from gitcoin How's it going, man?
Hey, how's it going? Just listening to the conversation. It's been awesome. And I feel like we actually have a movement around this now, which is kind of amazing. So refiling concept. I feel like 612 months ago, it's just like, so much further along now than it was then. So just great to be here. Awesome, man. Thanks. Um, did Kevin have to bounce? Or? I think he did just two years together. Instrument call but okay. Can just like yeah, definitely rankings. Great. Thanks so much, Scott, I don't know you super well, but super grateful that you've carved time out. Love to hear a bit about you and your background, how you got into Bitcoin? And after that, maybe touch on the mission and the change that y'all are trying to make in the world? If that's right.
Yeah, definitely. I'm definitely the less Twitter savvy of the two I I'm a co founder, alongside with Vivek and Kevin of a coin, I actually kind of started in the space with a similar vision and mission around like, how do we pay open source developers and I came at it in 2016. From like, a very, at the time, everything was basic, but a very basic lens of like, maybe we can do, you know, like swaps of like, equity between, like founders of like open source software companies, and the Dow hack happened, no one wants to talk with us for a while, of course, we're like, well past that. Now. But yeah, I mean, since then, a lot of my work has just been, how do we think about, you know, growing this, like scope of stakeholders we work with, on the Bitcoin side. And that's just been like, you know, dealing with folks like the magic partners, dealing with folks like, the kind of like developers going into some of our places like Colonel, which I'd mentioned earlier, and I too, can has been, like an amazing, almost just like case study of like, what can happen in that environment?
And, yeah, that's kind of like, a lot of my history in the space. There's like, a lot of details that I probably will skip, just to be mindful of time. But it's, it's been a really great journey, just to see, you know, when when we started sort of thinking about this stuff in 2017 18, definitely felt like that the focus was on d phi and d phi, you know, obviously being not antithetical to refi. But just very focused on like, the what, not really the why. And I think now we've, we've gotten to this point, where we're just like so much further along. And ultimately, the bigger question now that I'm loving to see in this particular thread is, you know, what mechanisms can we use to fund not even just necessarily the climate but just solving broader social problems that historically have not actually been solvable by traditional institutions? And that's kind of what crypto is about to me, you know, at scale. It's just, it's all coordination, as Kevin would say.
Yeah, totally. It's it's such an interesting piece and also
recognising the importance of open source software plays in enabling this kind of coordination. And it's been a real mind shift to me, you know, coming from a web two world with closed walled gardens and, you know, as seeing open source really provide a core framework for all the web two companies. But then everybody at some point creates a ring fence and says, This is ours, you know, this source codes now for access, and we're gonna monetize the content and the community in it. And it seems like what you guys have done by creating a business model for open source software is really accelerate that adoption, in fact, generous spirit of like, I'm going to build this because I'm interested in it. And I only want to do this part, well, I'm going to build in such a way you can interact with this whole other ecosystem. And so it's been fascinating to see, it seems like you guys really have been a kind of core part of the theorems growth from the beginning. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts around the whole, like quadratic funding quadratic voting model in this particular goal to fund open source projects. Because when I first glimpsed what it does, and what it prevents, it was quite a sort of new milestone for me and understanding how we can change the systems of how we fund projects and how we make decisions. I'd love for you to unpack what is quadratic funding, how it can be applied to voting and governance and how you use that gitcoin? In terms of fulfilling your mission?
Definitely, yeah, and I mean, what sort of software is really the MVP of everything that we do in crypto, and I think, I think most people recognise that, but often, I think we especially like, you know, if you go back, actually, there's a lot of great books on the history of the web, just going back all the way to like Tim Berners Lee, and that whole sort of like web one era, like no one really was like, pushing for,
you know, the idea of like, open source software after about like, the 1980s, late 1990s, like, early 2000s, most of the time, like that was just like centralization, and like closed source taking over and like, becoming the major like piece of what ultimately became like the Facebook's, and the Googles, and so forth. And so ultimately, that's now something that we're like, re visiting, and like, undoing, in a sense, and like, that's why I think we've had the successes, partly because, you know, not just Are we like, you know, we're just not, not just supporting open source software, if it's open source software, is something that like we have, it's like an ethos, and it like, is, is a fundamental why of, you know, crypto of web three. So that, to me, is is one big piece. But quadratic funding in particular is a really interesting kind of expansion on this general principle of decentralisation, which is, okay, if we have all these currencies, we have all this capital, how do we actually allocate it in a way that is, you know, actually democratic, that is distributed according to the will of, you know, the public and the public is a broader concept that's very complicated to get into, because as folks like Toby shore, and I've mentioned, Publix depend on, like, the context or like sphere in which you're, you're living so like, do you live in New York, like New York is like its own public sphere, there's a local government, there's all these systems involved, that you have to interact with. And in web three, the public is really, you know, not just token holders, it's also everyone who uses web three. And so the question becomes, well, you know, and the reason that's important is because it turns out that if we can, you know, harness the power of tokens to power, that whole group, and we actually ended up with a world in which we have more people creating more complementary tokens, which then kind of like fuel this ability for us to coordinate better. And so project funding basically, in a nutshell is just, you know, if we want to take a pool of funds and distribute it to a group that may or may not have a token, because we don't know yet you know, where they'll go with their project. We are really focusing on as much as we can on like the earliest stages of open source software projects before they've been able to like decide on like model or path. There's certain things like Lima Dow or like to can, which are doing an amazing job. And in sort of becoming, like Dow like structures. I think that there's projects like ethers js, for example, which are like much more core software, that probably wouldn't make sense to become a dowel. So the question is, across all those projects, how do we decide you know, what needs to be funded? And quadratics funding basically, is metallic and Benwell. And so we hit six saying, well, let's just take basically the square of the sum of square roots of contributions, which just means let's like not consider the dollar amount donated each project and giving it like a given period. Let's just consider you know, the number of donations that are being made. And let's consider that take the like calculation, and then distribute some pool of matching funds from all the projects that have succeeded in the space over you know, whatever period of time
And we'll allocate that at, you know, the end of, say, a two week period, which is what we do. And so that's been really useful, just in terms of signalling, what does the community care about, and we're not being opinionated about what the community should care about in the process, although we obviously have, like, some criteria around like, things that are, you know, promoting web three values, like decentralisation, or like open source software, and so forth.
You know, those are things that are also decided, in our case, actually, now by the community, through data as well. So there's sort of this, I guess, like the summary, like an easier way to say this, there's an evolution of, you know, moving from a very small NVQ imagine, like, you have like a city council, you have like, maybe like five friends, and you like, hang out at a bar and decide, we're gonna start like a club. And then you like, slowly scale out to like 100 people to 1000 people, the skills and like types of governance you need are very different scales, we've kind of gone from, you know, just a few people to massive like, kind of organisation, but our principles, and the way in which we do things hasn't changed, because quadratic funding, kind of like enables us to kind of, I guess, deliver this sort of like signal to the community at large at scale, if that makes sense.
Scott, just to sort of dive into a specific use case, like I, I wrote a big tweets, dorm, on, on on Bitcoin and the whole climate grant programme that you launched as part of gr 12. Last night, actually, and I was in there messing around and funded a couple of projects where I put $25 Each into them. And then you know, as you go to checkout, right, gitcoin says, hey, you know, these two projects, which you're $52 out of pocket, or 50, to die out of pocket, are potentially going to drive 650 something dollars worth of value to the projects you've chosen based on the the quadratic matching on the back end, which I think is so powerful.
A question I have for you is on the on the front end of choosing, and, by the way, for folks who aren't familiar, like right now, as part of the latest gitcoin matching rounds, there is a specific set of projects focused on climate change that also, if I understand correctly, have a specific match dollar amount allocated to that, that chunk of 23 grant proposals that are in there. And I think you guys just got a big anonymous donation of a billion dollars focused specifically on climate change projects to
it looks like not every one of these projects is necessarily a web three project, like some look like, you know, political action groups or or social action groups around climate. And I'm curious, you mentioned there was a dowel that helps make the decisions on what comes into the system to begin with. I'm curious if you can share a little bit more about how that works.
Yeah, definitely. Actually, there's a few really good points you brought up, one of which is I definitely should have mentioned that, yeah, we have a climate round going in particular, thanks to the efforts of thema Tao, and to Ken and others who have supported that. And the matching funders for theirs. For those rounds. Like to Ken is a great example of this in particular, because, you know, going through kernel is sort of like the starting point for them in a lot of ways. And then they're coming back and giving back to the community through this matching pool. And that cycle is like what we want to see in web three, that's like the sort of like refi, like virtuous cycle that I think we can kind of create through these projects. So that's just like, awesome. In terms of the Can you
can you pack a current kernel, for those who aren't familiar with it, just to explain it before you move on to the next point. Yeah, so kernel is effectively a learning community, it's just kernel community. And the way it works is basically, it's an eight week programme, which is pretty much just like, A flat, table, like, kind of adventure in whatever direction you really want to take, based on the syllabus actually put together by Andy Ted Hope, who is just like, amazing, as a thinker in the space overall, and has just like, written this really beautiful, like sort of series of almost essays around different topics that he and others in the kernel sort of, like, stewards for think are relevant for, like people new to web three to learn. So it's kind of just a way for people to get engaged in the space and start to understand what's really going on. And yeah, it's, it's been like a great place for us to like, just sort of see, you know, where the space is going and to sort of like help shape that in more of a refi direction hopefully.
And, and ultimately, that's where the climate round sort of idea came from. And part was is like sort of motivation to think about things like education as public goods to think about things like climate is public goods, because what you know, open source software is just one public good that crypto and web three rely on so when we talk about like, you know, when I said you know ethers js is the sort of core primitive well
Like in another sort of sense, like climate is pretty much a core primitive, as well. And I think that ultimately, what we're trying to figure out is, how do we actually, you know, sustain things that, you know, one gitcoin itself needs to, like continue existing, but also what web three needs to continue existing. And that includes like, you know, climate change. Vita Tao has helped with the longevity round. And then the Etherion Foundation has helped with a crypto advocacy sort of regulatory reform, based around with groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation, and so forth. So that's been just a really good like, kind of way for us to expand beyond the scope of just open source software and try and think about, you know, going back to that question of like, the public, like, what other public's we, we actually serve? So?
Yeah, to not get on too much of a tangent. Like, I think the, the big thing for the climate round right now, like is, you know, we wanted to focus on organisations that are both web three native and who are just doing work in climate and web two generally. And we, we hope that this can help kind of provide a bridge between the two. So like, more projects, like, you know, Klymit hour or two can can start to get involved in sort of, like, the conversation with web two organisations and vice versa. Because ultimately, like, that's what we're seeing a lot of ways with, like, you know, Facebook, starting meta, or whatever. But that's not what we actually, like, probably want. So we probably want there to be more like, you know, the rainforest foundation collaborating with, like organisations in web three, and that sort of thing. So just thinking through, like, how do we act as that bridge, you know, to public goods, organisations that otherwise wouldn't have a chance to really get involved. And I also just very quickly want to shout out to Xavier, from all for climate who has done like an amazing job getting one of those folks into the round. And I know he's in the audience. They're
amazing. Yeah, awesome. Maybe Maybe that's, that could be the sort of the thing we can we can close on with with with this amazing overview, because I know we're kind of hitting over our time limit here is, is, you know, for folks who have an aspiring climate project, you know, if they submit to be considered for your next wave of, of climate grants, what does that look like? Like? What should they expect? And kind of what's the decision making process look like on the Bitcoin side?
Yeah, so we run the rounds every quarter just to be mindful of like, the community's bandwidth, we don't want to like, run them continuously, just to prevent, like burnout or like, prevent, like, the possibility civil attacks, which is a lot to dive into just with with the time we have, but the piece I would really hit home would just be
go to get coin.co/grants/new, just like, Philip, it's, it's a very brief. It's a very informal sort of application, which is just give us you know, what you're trying to do the description, basic information. And then we go through with a downward stream to help sort of like review the validity of the grant, we help to understand, you know, does it fit into the criteria, the eligibility policy, that the work stream is set up for a given round, and generally speaking for climate, you know, if you're doing something that is web three native or is like web web to sort of ative, but with sort of some traction, we're very interested in having you involved in that round. And an excellent will be probably in March of next year, pretty early on. So if only plenty of time to kind of like get a sense of how you can get involved and like how to prepare in terms of like promoting your grant within the round and that sort of stuff, as well. Super cool. Love it. And just as we provide an opportunity, if anybody needs to bounce out from those who are speaking or hosting, whatever, feel free, but I recognise a lot of people here a lot of energy, I'm having fun. And so I'm happy to stay here for another half hour or so. And we can open up questions from the community. But just want to say Scott, I'm super grateful I was a recipient from Yeah, the gitcoin round so far for the refi podcast, and we've just posted a refi spring which is like a collection of events across 2022 in cities all around the world to kind of facilitate meaningful safe conversations like this one about the intersection of climate action and crypto communities so super grateful and was like crazy surprised when some anonymous dude called moments dot eath donated $10,000 to us and wrote this like crazy post so stuff can happen stuff going up and I definitely should shout at the moment. It's just he like, or I don't know, moments collective as an organisation. They're all anonymous. I don't know exactly. But the the group is just amazing in terms of the support they provided. And it was totally out of the blue like it. I didn't expect that at all to happen. So just thank you