This Week in Web3For Good
A weekly roundup of the ways Web3 tech is being used to make the world a better place.
I was in Cambodia during the summer of 2019, working with local small holder farmers and learned that Cambodia has two seasons: the dry season, which lasts from December to April, and the wet season, which is from May to October. Rice is their main product and given that rice requires a lot of water, it is a staple of the rainy season. Due to the lack of rainfall that year, many farmers lost entire crops and while there were some private companies that we engaged with that were open to working on some form of crop insurance, the implementation of it was not really in practice which meant that these farmers suffered a major setback with nothing to fall back on.
Crop insurance helps protect farmers by insuring them against losses due to environmental causes, but often this insurance is prohibitively expensive. Hence, when I found out about Ethrisc, an Ethereum project that provides affordable crop insurance to smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, I was very excited and this pushed me down the web3 and climate change rabbithole.
Etherisc and microinsurance issuer, ACRE Africa have processed insurance payouts for some of the more than 17,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya. As part of the initiative, smallholder farmers are reportedly able to pay as little as $0.50 in premiums to receive coverage for crops adversely affected by climate change — Kenya has been previously hit hard by both droughts and flooding.
Traditionally, Web3 has a bad rap when it comes to the environment particularly due to the energy intensity of mining bitcoin; however, exciting innovations that could drastically cut down on energy consumption could provide support to those impacted by climate change and create a global market for carbon credits. This week, that’s what we are looking into - the impact Web3 can have on the fight against climate change and the scepticism surrounding it as well.
As always, we’d love to know what you think and what you’re learning. Send us an email at web3forgood@gmail.com to share.
Xx Abeera (&Sam)
What’s Inside
📣 Latest News
📚 What We’re Reading
🚀 Opportunities
📡 On Our Radar
🌊 Deep Dive - Could Web3 be a Net Positive for the Advancement of Climate Action?
📣 Latest News
Ripple Co-Founder Backs Controversial Campaign to Move Bitcoin to Proof of Stake
African Digital Art Network Launches Nandi NFT Marketplace on Celo
OpenSea Announces Solana NFT Integration On Their Marketplace
Washington State Passes Bill To Study Benefits of Blockchain Tech
📚 What We’re Reading
ETH in Mellieha is a six minute documentary about a project in the ancient village of Mellieha on the island of Malta to blur the digital and the physical. A local artist was commissioned by a private client in London to create an original painting that would be minted as an NFT… and burned. Though the point isn’t exactly clear (yet?), the documentary and its focus on the artist herself is intriguing. If video isn’t your thing, you can read more about what happened, here.
Ugandan artist Tru SSeggujja speaks about why artists are the new rockstars and Web 3 could be a playground for African artists. “That’s the beauty of web3, it doesn’t discriminate.”
Web3 salaries for rank-and-file devs reportedly range from $300,000 - $750,000 a year for totally remote, flexible positions. Can Web2 companies compete?
Alcoholics Anonymous: the original DAO? AA is an example of what a public good protocol could look like; it’s just governed with a social contract instead of smart contracts.
Enthusiasts believe DAOs could eventually replace traditional companies as sort of new-age co-ops. Here’s what it’s like to work at a DAO.
Decentraland hosted the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week. It wasn’t perfect, but it’s a sign of things to come.
Museums around the world, struggling to stay afloat financially after the COVID-19 pandemic, are turning to NFTs to fund their cultural missions.
🚀 Opportunities
Apply: DoinGud is hiring a Freelance Content Writer (remote)
Learn: Adventure Quest Intro to Generative Art is a 10 week, 10 project online generative art course that teaches kids ages 8-18 and adults real world coding
Apply: ImpactMarket is seeking volunteer ambassadors. Bring whatever skills you have to the table, and they will find a way for you to contribute.
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📡 On Our Radar
The Royals is the “first luxury NFT to showcase African culture, provide authentic IRL experiences on the continent, and host exclusive events.”
The SheLeads collection was created by the gender equality activist and UN member Goli, an Iranian immigrant forced to flee her country due to her activities towards criminalizing child marriage and fighting for gender equality in Iran.
Museum of Freedom is a curated collection of NFT’s evoking for change, advocating for justice, inclusiveness and equality that can be viewed via any traditional screen or a VR headset.
MOVΞ is an innovative Web 3.0 health and fitness platform accessed by holding a Membership NFT.
ClimateDAO takes a much different approach to fighting climate change by focusing on activist investing as a means to enact social change. It aims to pool together money from contributors and use the funds to purchase shares in publicly traded companies, and use these positions to enact strategic change in the companies through proxy voting, initiating shareholder proposals, and advocacy.
EarthFund is a DAO governed by the 1Earth utility token that organizes a decentralized community to tackle humanity's biggest problems. The platform enables token holders to vote and crowdfund projects such as the EarthFund Carbon capture project.
Ballermoon propels blockchain tech adoption in underserved communities through NFTs and Learn-to-Earn platforms.
🌊 Could Web3 be a Net Positive for the Advancement of Climate Action?
Conversations around Web3 and climate are heated; while there are exciting projects, the traditional narrative is negative due to the energy extensive Proof-of-Work process.
Shifts in blockchain tech could make web3 more climate friendly particularly with Ethereum’s shift to Proof-of-Stake.
Regenerative Finance is a movement that aims to price nature and carbon with a move towards nature backed stable currencies.
Alternative capital raised through the sales of NFTs could help fund climate action.
Critics of Web3 often point to the enormous, negative environmental impact that blockchain technology in its current, most common form (Proof-of-Work) has. This is a huge challenge, and one that many are actively working to address. The Tezos blockchain, for example, has emerged as an energy-efficient competitor to Bitcoin and Ethererum. Voice is building a carbon neutral marketplace that promises to be environmentally responsible. Ethereum has promised to upgrade to the less environmentally-taxing Proof-of-Stake protocol. Looking to the future: If projects like these are successful and it is possible to use blockchain technology in a way that is climate-conscious, the role that Web3 technology could potentially play in coordinating collective action toward climate change could be huge. The action needed on a global scale, as things currently stand, can feel daunting. Which is why Web3 projects that organise and reward citizens in the fight against climate change might soon flip the script when it comes to the current narrative surrounding Web3 and Climate Action.
The Financialization of Everything
Through web3 and its protocols, there is the ability to “allow one to put a price on more things, more easily, and buy and sell these things, ranging from the rights to owning digital files, the right to one’s future income, or the right to spend an hour with someone and ask them anything they want.”
In terms of climate action, there has been a failure to accurately price negative externalities for e.g: greenhouse gas emissions. While the climate impact of every product or service could be priced into the product, this is easier said than done given that there is no standard way to determine the impact. While centralised authorities like governments or other global institutions can enforce standards of measuring externalities, Web3 allows the opportunity to provide an incentive, or “enable markets that ascribe value to this climate impact, or the lack thereof, simply due to its scalability and flexibility that couldn’t be matched by a carbon offsetting verifier”. Regenerative Finance is a movement to proactively price nature and carbon. For example, KlimaDAO is a Regenerative Finance Web3 project that aims to drive climate action and distribute rewards via a carbon-backed, algorithmic digital currency. As KlimaDAO appreciates carbon assets, companies and economies have to adapt more quickly to the realities of climate change and make low carbon technologies and carbon removal projects more profitable. The goal is that eventually, the KLIMA token (each backed by real, verified carbon assets) will function as a truly sustainable asset and medium-of-exchange with real planetary value.
Another interesting project to mention here is the Celo Climate Collective which is a coalition of organizations “working at the intersections of web3 and climate action.” The aim is to build the capacity for regenerative applications on the Celo blockchain, and to ultimately back Celo stablecoins with tokenized natural assets.
The concern with these types of voluntary carbon markets, however, is whether or not the actual climate benefits will ultimately be measurable, verifiable, and tradable.
Capital to Fight Climate Change
Web3 is a response to traditional finance and capital allocation and hence, allows the opportunity to think innovatively on how to fund regenerative finance projects. For example, 100,000,000 Mangrove Project is a collection of creative work that will fund the planting (and protection) of a vast number of mangroves with proceeds from the sale of artwork. The NFTs are short films gifted by artists Saiful Haque, Filippo Nesci, and Jan Urschel. Each designed a dynamic NFT, starting with one single static frame, mimicking the common NFT jpeg images we see today. Each time one of these NFTs is resold, it will incorporate more frames, until the films are revealed and Regenerative Resources has received enough funding to grow 100 million mangroves. As Neal Spackman, founder of Regenerative Resources Co. and the sponsors of the mangrove project notes, “the digital surface has barely been scratched” when it comes to employing decentralised web technologies to fund environmental projects.
While this is a new existing way to fundraise, there are also individuals who are making great gains on cryptocurrencies who want to invest in climate action which provides access to a large, new pool of capital that might think a bit differently than their predecessors.
While Web3 and NFTs particularly have exploded over the past year, the actual impact of such projects is sometimes unclear. And as much as finding some that do good is exciting, there is still room for some scepticism. Save Planet Earth sold a single carbon credit as an NFT for $70,000 but Chloe Farand’s research depicted that SPE’s claim that it had contracts to plant over a billion trees in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives were baseless. The people working with SPE seemed to not truly understand the carbon market, but had still entered it via the crypto space, seeking returns. This is just one example, however, it reminds us that there remains a need to exercise caution.
Those investing in these projects with the intention of creating real impact want them to be reliable, verifiable, and interoperable with existing or upcoming projects. This is also where individual due diligence comes in by asking for project roadmaps and questioning them to ensure their credibility.
Extensive Energy Usage but There is Hope…
Encryption is one of the underlying foundations of Web3, and it helps secure the flow of information and ownership of digital assets without requiring middlemen. For almost all blockchains, this process takes up computational power which is incredibly energy intensive. Currently, the proliferation of blockchain technologies is outpacing the world’s transition to renewable energy. While Ethereum is incredibly energy intensive, blockchains such as Cardano validates transactions with lower energy costs. It uses Ouroboros which dubs itself as an environmentally sustainable, verifiable Proof-of-Stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees.
“The Merge” is a much anticipated move in the space, which will officially mark the switch for Ethereum (which currently has the second highest market cap) to Proof-of-Stake from Proof-of-Work. Under PoS, Ethereum uses as much energy as the entire country of Libya (!!), and it has come under great scrutiny due to environmental, scalability, and security concerns; however, blockchains running on PoS guarantee faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient transactions.There is a push to have Bitcoin move to PoS with Greenpeace USA, Environmental Working Group and other climate organisations launching a campaign this Monday, with plans to run ads in The New York Times, Politico, and elsewhere, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. However, while it will make it 99% greener, Bitcoiners believe that PoW is a key part of its value proposition and important for its security and decentralisation.
Even with the hype around NFTs, there are people who refuse to participate in them because of how energy intensive they are. However, even in this case, NFT artists have leverage to push for change. If marketplaces for NFTs don’t start to meet their demands, artists could start minting their NFTs on marketplaces using cleaner cryptocurrencies. There’s already an artist-led effort to raise money to reward people who can figure out new ways to make crypto art more sustainable. Anyone who wants to support those artists by buying their work can migrate along with them to less polluting platforms — or maybe just buy a physical copy of their work.
Web3 has potential to play a role in the fight against climate change, but it is still in its nascent days and there is a lot to figure out. There is a lot of promise in the multiple projects cropping up which is exciting, but it is also up to individuals and organisations to do their due diligence and hold them accountable to push for credible social impact.