Please describe your proposed solution.
Background Intro:
Trillions of ADA are needed to fight climate change. How do we make sure the funding gets to real projects? How do we create more transparency and trust for money transfer?
Here is links to relevant background information:
- "Global South needs $2 trillion a year to fight climate crisis. A trillion dollars of that should come from rich countries, investors and multilateral development banks, UN-backed report says." (8/11/2022) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/8/global-south-needs-2tn-a-year-to-fight-climate-crisis-report
- "Investors have trillions to fight climate change. Developing nations get little of it" November 9, 20225:30 AM ET https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1134865038/investors-have-trillions-to-fight-climate-change-developing-nations-get-little-o
- "Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
- Carbon Markets and greenwashing: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-12/carbon-markets-draft-at-cop26-prompts-warning-from-activists
- “Corporate carbon polluters plant trees to counter their CO2 emissions, but activists warn against greenwashing and say such afforestation schemes detract from the emissions reductions needed to combat climate change.” www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211111-carbon-offsets-a-booming-market-or-greenwashing
Here is a LinkedIn post by Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard to show the relevance of the topic to CF.
How Earthtrust started?
Earthtrust is a Pond Foundation initiative led by Scott Poynton. Scott is dedicating his life to solving agricultural supply chains & forest conservation key challenges, and in recent years focus on climate change related initiatives through Pond foundation.
Earthtrust was born to build technology solutions to support the work of the foundation and scale climate initiatives. At the end of 2021 a team of product, development and business expertise joined Scott to work on Earthtrust.
As part of the journey we also evaluated how to use blockchain technology and was awarded and completed several catalyst proposals:
- NGO Transparency (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing Video
- 21st Century Agri Supply chains (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing video
- Buy Food & Make an Impact (Fund 9, Dapps products and integrations)
- Closing report
- Closing video
There is extensive work done, collaborating with developers, corporates and NGOs and testing how blockchain can be part of the solution. Scott was invited to share his experience at the main stage at the Cardano summit in Lausanne in 2022.
Earthtrust Today:
Earthtrust is building a radically transparent verification network
Earthturst is a public platform for companies and organizations to prove their claims through radical transparency, data and documentation. Companies and organizations share documentation and data on Earthtrust’s platform to support their claims. Anyone, anywhere can view the claim, data and documentation and decide whether the claim is true.
You can find more information at: https://www.earthtrust.life/ We are working hard on the backend system and expected to launch by the end of September 2023.
We are building Earthtrust platform v1.0. It is an online model that will allow an organization or a company to define a claim and transparently share data and documentation to prove it.
Here is an intro for how it is going to look like:
We are partnering with bold Pond Foundation member companies and partners who believe in the Earthtrust vision and are ready to build this new, radically transparent verification model to create trust and scale impact.
- Partners: https://www.pond.foundation/partners
- Members: https://www.pond.foundation/membership
All the partners and customers we spoke with agreed to use the Earthtrust verification solution once launched.
The focus on this proposal, The solution:
The overall goal with the solution is to enable NGOs and environmental projects to have an easy and cheep solution to sell their services, carbon credits or receive investments in a radically transparent way to be transparent, enable their customers and investors to be transparent and in the end to increase the investment into the real projects that have an impact on the environment.
The solution is made up of four parts; checkout flow, Stripe payment integration, smart contract data capture solution and Earthtrust documentation functionality.
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The checkout flow will be focused on enabling NGO’s and environmental projects to create their offerings for people and companies to buy them through their existing website. It will be state of the art similar to a shopify experience.
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The payment solution from Stripe will handle the last part of the checkout flow and support all major credit card providers. The detailed transaction data, NGO ID, customer ID and goods purchased will be captured and sent to the smart contract solution on Cardano.
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The smart contract data capture solution is build on top of the payment solution and it captures the transactional data, create a hash of it and store it on cardano for proof. The hash will be published on the Earthtrust platform with the corresponding transactional data.
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The Earthtrust platform will contain the documentation from the transaction, and will follow the structure of Earthtrust, be published on both the NGOs profile as a “Sale” and on the customers profile as a “Purchase”.
By having all of this payment documented publicly in a form everyone can understand and review we will create a scalable solution to create transparency into investments made into environmental projects - automatically!
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
What products and integrations can be developed or improved that will offer more use cases to the Cardano ecosystem that are high impact and drive more adoption?
Cardano.org states: " make the world work better for all" - Earthtrust goal is to do just that by providing radical transparency of impact claims, while using Cardano as part of the technology. As mentioned before this is a huge issue and trillions of ADA should be directed to socials and environmental impact claims in the years to come.
A key part of adoption is that the project is being incubated by an organisation active on the Climate change project and many of its clients and partners on the ground have already agreed to be part of the project. This is important for adoption as well build the technology and solution together with the market.
Our go to market approach starts with transparency of claims about money transfer, which is traceable and will have a huge impact as it is relevant for all organisations. The pond foundation will be an example organisation to apply radical transparency and we expect many more to join.
Therefore this proposal supports the challenge objective for a thriving ecosystem of different products and integrations for the community to use that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralised providers.
This proposal cover:
National governance systems - New governance systems for nation states
Climate Change - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues
Marketplaces
Business solutions - Software products, data management, process management, data management solutions (CRM, ERP etc), privacy products.
Why is it important (from the challenge)?
Cardano needs innovations and solutions that help the ecosystem reach its potential and help improve the systems we use across the world.
As explained, Earthtrust is well aligned to this objective.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Some of the metrics that will be measured will include:
- Number of organisations using Earthtrust
- Number of claims verified
- Number of organisations adding the payment solution
- Number of times payments is being done
- Amount of money being sent to organisations
We will also measure the impact of the model on the organisations & companies:
- Feedback from companies and partners participating in the program
- Articles and media posts published
- Feedback on social networks for the articles (sharing, comments)
- Traction by companies & partners contacting us and deal flow
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
You can see from the reports provided for projects done so far the level of information provided to the community. "The 21 century agri supply chain report" was set as an example for a closing report by the Catalyst team as presented in one of the town halls.
- 21st Century Agri Supply chains (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing video
As the Earthtrust product aims for transparency, once we launch the platform, the aim is to have Earthtrust also as one the companies in the platform and sharing full details of use of funds and activities.
Ongoing information is also going to be presented in Social networks and especially linkedin, for example is a recent post that mention Earthtrust model to start creating awareness for the solution