Crypto being a planet killer is the popular narrative set by incumbents or as Nicholas Nassim Taleb the writer of Black Swan calls them Intellectual yet Idiot. But if anyone actually tries to dig deeper, web3 has had a way more positive effect on the climate than most of the traditional finance and tech world. Bitcoin has moved way more money efficiently which the TradFi world would have taken years and magnitude orders of carbon footprint. And of course, the ftx collapse had a severe impact not just on the market cap but also on the inspiration of builders and the mental health of the ecosystem but web3 is stronger than ever with even more builders working on the initial visions of the crypto pioneers.
6 of the 10 biggest blockchains out there are either carbon neutral or even carbon negative meaning that they offset more carbon than produced while acting as an open system to access finance and web3. But certainly, the most positive effect is being made by REFi aka Regenerative finance a sub-ecosystem in web3 which is leveraging blockchain to create positive externalities that in turn add positive value to the world solving some of the most pressing changes like climate change and ecological disasters Carbon offsetting is one of our biggest bets against climate change but we have no way of verifying whether they are truly making the impact! Due to the lack of disruption n Democratisation, carbon markets have been infested by corruption and middle management
The size of the global carbon markets has increased drastically but some researches show they may be less than half as effective as ought to be! If we truly wanna make an impact, ReFi is one of our biggest tools.
And the size of voluntary markets is growing by a huge margin & for most part of the world, the carbon market is inaccessible.Do we really think without some fundamental change we are going to make it?
One of the main goals of REFI is to solve the problem of the traditional carbon credit market and work towards building a Solarpunk Future! Refi Solves 2 of the biggest problems ->
Transparency and Accountability - Blockchain being this decentralized immutable ledger that anyone can read and verify has led many projects to bring carbon credits on-chain so they could be tracked and their impact could be measured. Every Single carbon has its history which can be seen and never be tampered with.
Availability -> Just a few years ago if any entity had wanted to buy credits and offset the impact they would have had to meet a million brokers and officials which truly limits the outcome to only a few large organizations. With many protocols like Toucan, one can buy tokens and burn them offseting the carbon immediately without the need for any documents or 3rd party Interactions. This truly shows the revolutionary impact of refi!
Memes-
Memes power narratives and movements & they are what made crypto what it is today, refi is trying to tackle the older narratives of degen standing for Degenerative or someone who is crypto to leverage for returns with regen for regenerative!
These factors can make REFI one of the most impactful use cases of web3 but Most of the Founders in this space are building beyond just carbon tokenization!
Projects like Kula with their Theory of Change help build a sense of belonging in the ecosystem with the help of art and storytelling to build change makers who think globally and act locally!
Atlantis is working on building systems and infrastructure to align incentives and help institutes coordinate better to offset their climate impact with the help of their "proof of impact" . They building a decentralized bounty dashboard that works as a coordination point for someone who can offset carbon and someone who wants to offset carbon. The progress is tracked on chain with smart contracts and parties.
Digital Gaia is creating a decentralized environmental rating system/agency that leverages local data and the latest advances in active inference machine learning to create a rating that’s more attuned to local characteristics while maintaining a high level of environmental integrity. Thus solving the problem of old impact certificates from centralized accreditation.
To share just the magnitude of amazing ideas coming to life in the ecosystem , linking the refi map made by folks at Climate collective https://kumu.io/climate-collective/web3-climate-map#main/internet-of-energy
There are so many projects working from building IOT sensors for better impact verification to DAOs helping build a totally new state of scientific research.
Why You should Build in REFi
Even for a degen looking for returns , investing in regenerative projects could be potentially a good bet because of the rate of growth of the space and product market fit. most of the tech needed build these systems is already there from data to smart contracts to sensors everything is already it just needs minds that put it together to bring ideas to life!
PS: Thanks for reading! lemme know how I could have done it better
Sharing some links if you wanna dive deeper
https://blog.refidao.com/