🌴⛓ Chainletter - a New Eden and a Continued Case for Bitcoin

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🌴⛓ Chainletter

Our weekly newsletter covers Chainforest - a recap of our latest happenings, our members’ accomplishments, our projects to come, and a roundup of the best (twitter) threads and articles sparking conversation within our Discord.

In the past 7 days, 10 new Rainmakers have joined the forest.

The top three channels were: 📈│ charts, 🎨│ nfts-general, and 🎮│ gaming-general.

A Reserve for the New Eden: the Cyrus of EdenDAO interview

Chainforest’s long been interested in projects experimenting with making markets for carbon credits. What feels like eons ago, we all gathered for the chaos of the KlimaDAO launch. Since, we’ve paid close attention to the evolution of alternative projects such as EdenDAO — whose founder, Cyrus, we’re proud to call a Rainmaker.

In this issue, I sit down with Cyrus to discuss carbon markets and the nuances of Eden.

D: So how I understand it is the end goal of EdenDAO is to create a reserve currency pegged to high value carbon assets which will be purchased by either the DAO (on the way in) or by different corporations (on the way out). Is this correct?

C: Yeah so, the end goal of EdenDAO is to create a reserve currency initially pegged to $1 = 1 year of permanence and backed by by high value carbon assets which will be purchased by either the DAO (on the way in) or by different corporations (on the way out).

D: EDN will then become a stablecoin which is used by companies to purchase carbon credits. How will the carbon credits be brought back off line, into the real world?

C: There’s many ways to approach this, and we’re still figuring out what’s best right now. Something that would make sense is that a purchaser would have to redeem their credits with the DAO through a proposal, which could issue a real-world certificate.

D: What makes some carbon assets high value? For example, how do the carbon credits that EdenDAO seeks to accrue differ from those used by Klima?

C: There are actually many kinds of carbon credits. The ones we focus on are removals, which remove carbon from the carbon cycle and heal our planet. In that sense they’re similar to MCO2 (issued by MOSS Earth) and NCT (issued by Toucan Protocol). An analysis of BCT showed that they were mostly emissions reductions credits, not removal credits. Those represent “we threw out less garbage into the atmosphere” credits. They don’t actually represent the healing of our atmosphere. MCO2 and NCT are “nature-based” removal credits, and we could support them too. Nature based credits are one type of removal. They’re like the AAA Prime of the carbon market. The Wagyu A5 are “permanent” removal credits, which we like to focus on. In the traditional carbon markets, these are way more expensive than NCTs and MCO2, and at the rate we’re going, it would take years before it would be profitable for these players to bridge to Klima.

D: How will the protocol integrate with the existing tokenized carbon offsets?

C: MCO2 (issued by MOSS Earth) and NCT (issued by Toucan Protocol) underlying TCO2s would likely be eligible for the global carbon reward.

D: How could projects / people get directly involved? Like say I’m a carbon credit tokenization platform. Where do I fit into the protocol? do I fit into the protocol?

C: Carbon credit tokenization platforms are like carbon credit marketplaces in that they aggregate many projects together, and have access to a pool of real world carbon assets. With our protocol, these folks play the role of carbon chain bridgers — bringing CO2 on-chain. A lot of these folks have to straddle both the sourcing of projects and the selling of these assets. With the Eden Dao Protocol, they could focus just on sourcing qualified projects, knowing that there is a floor price for their assets and a commitment from the protocol to purchase these assets. Eventually, as on-ramps mature, carbon removal projects could communicate with the protocol themselves. Another group of people are DeFi investors. They will be able to purchase our EDN token for $1, LP our Global Carbon Reserve, and participate in platform governance. They legitimize the fact that $1 = 1 EDN, which sets the floor price for carbon.

D: You say reflective liquidity creates a money-source carbon removal market to disrupt the existing money-sink markets. Can you explain this?

C: In the real world, corporations and consumers are expected to pay a cost to heal the atmosphere. The upcoming wave of Regenerative Finance DAOs operate similarly, in that they seek to transfer capital from the crypto money bucket into the real world money bucket. The medium for this transformation is the tokenized asset. This is fine, but there’s an opportunity to reframe how we think about carbon altogether. Instead of carbon as a cost, why don’t we think about carbon as a source of money? This idea isn’t as out there as it might seem. It’s inspired by the past really. It’s like how when we found more gold, we felt richer — and we had more “money.” Gold had some properties that made it convenient for physical use, but now with blockchains we’re beyond that. Carbon as a source of money is an interesting one too because carbon removal isn’t an extractive industry like oil and gas — it’s a healing industry. The properly evaluate carbon removal we need the right ruler. You wouldn’t measure length in kilograms, for example. And one of our insights about the carbon removal market is that the underlying “measure” is ton•years. That is, how many tons of CO2 stored permanently for how many years? Our protocol establishes a global carbon reward of 1 EDN for every year of permanence, for every ton of CO2 removed. EDN is minted by the protocol to reflect the value of the permanence of CO2 removals, a value which has never been tokenized before.

D: What do you think the largest challenge facing the Eden Dao is?

C: I think the largest challenge is getting the attention of massive amounts of crypto-capital to participate in the protocol. Attitudes are conservative across DeFi. Carbon is uncorrelated with DeFi, and there’s a lot of money to be made here, which is why countries, multinational corporations, and hedge funds are already racing to get their hands on as much carbon as they can get. Meanwhile crypto-retail is busy buying Pixelmon, you know?

Different Types of Carbon Credits (Eden uses Carbon Removal w/ Long-Lived)

From the Mouth of the Forest

OpenSea Hack

• A phishing attack caused $1.7 million worth of NFTs to be stolen from the OpenSea marketplace.

• Though a relatively small attack in the big picture, OpenSea’s reputation has taken a hit, as several twitter users have complained of the lack of response when submitting a support ticket.

• Amit - @AmitMukherjee mentions that it is illegal to sell a stolen good, so those who purchased a stolen NFT may not be able to resell it, providing a terrible user experience.

• OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer explains the attack in the thread below.

Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth)

@dfinzer

I know you’re all worried. We’re running an all hands on deck investigation, but I want to take a minute to share the facts as I see them:

10:53 PM - 19 Feb 2022

Chainforest’s ETH Vs BTC Debate

• Not your typical BTC vs ETH conversation broke out in Chainforest’s Bitcoin channel

• Discord user joao_beraldo - @0xJ010 asked about innovation in the btc sphere saying it could become a “boomer coin” 

• Knifefight defends Bitcoin saying that its main proposition is being difficult to change, so rate of innovation will always be subpar when compared to Ethereum.

• An interesting article was shared, highlighting the trouble with Ethereum The Trouble With Ethereum

• Yusuf and Knifefight debate ETH vs. BTC

Ukraine Receives Crypto Support

• Ukraine has set up Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets to accept donations to help repel the invasion by Russia. The wallets have received almost $11 million USD as of 2/26/22.

• The request for donations comes from the official twitter account of Ukraine.

• The Ukrainian Digital Ministry would not elaborate on how the funds would be spent.

• A separate Ethereum based token project Help Ukraine ($HUKR) has been set up to donate to Support Ukrainian Sovereignty, which pledges to distribute its funds to various Ukrainian Charities. Almost $300K has been raised so far.

Community Updates

From the Town Hall

• Link to this week’s Town Hall Notes and Town Hall Recording

• The Chainforest fund has taken steps toward officially launching the fund, creating a SVB bank account and setting up legal infrastructure. 

• Once infrastructure is set up, Chainforest can start closing on deals. 

• Greg Bresnitz will be helping with CF’s brand strategy. He has previous experience in helping FWB on their brand strategy. 

In the Community

• Alex @awetterman has been running token sales at CoinList, in addition to being a founding member and gaming lead at Chainforest. Starting next week, he will be transitioning to leading crypto investments and incubations at ac0 (AlleyCorp’s new crypto fund) with fellow rainmaker, Cam Porter. Alex is excited to continue collaborating with the amazing Chainforest community to build and invest in the best projects in crypto.

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