CarbonNo Verifiable Carbon Platform

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Cyrus Liu

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

cyrus@carbonno.org

Additional applicants

Kostis Kleptogiorgos, Nikolaos Karagiorgos, Dave Llorens.

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

The transparency of the carbon offsets WILL BE, by its nature, it needs to be.

We will also open source CarbonNo platform source code. However, all the inspection data for the energy efficiency projects will be open to individuals upon customer request due to privacy and compliance.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

dApp

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

We envision CarbonNo as a platform with which individuals, business owners, energy efficiency project proposers, and implementers can engage. Participants can use our platform to verify carbon reduction projects, mint, and register carbon credits on the blockchain; then they will be able to trade those credits all in one CarbonNo platform.

Our goal is to provide a uniform, trusted, and straightforward platform where retail investors and businesses can exchange or invest in carbon credits effortlessly without worrying about the trustworthiness of the underlying credits.

CarbonNo ensures the above by ICP (Investor Confidence Project) verifying submitted energy-efficiency projects that would like their credits onboard to our platform.

All verified carbon credits are then minted as NFTs on the Cardano blockchain and directly linked to their source.

Project investors/users can open up the CarbonNo dApp and choose to buy carbon credits originating from various carbon reduction projects, including but not limited to energy efficiency, carbon-sequestering, reforestation, solar, nuclear, etc.

In the long term, we will release a native token of CarbonNo tentative called $CNC. $CNC is a fungible token used in all transactions in our system. It also lets us provide efficiency upgrade incentives that don't depend on energy utility companies.

CNCs will be earned as rewards through the Carbonno dApp in two different ways:

1. CarbonNo Projects - carbon-reducing building projects registered and verified by CarbonNo will be awarded CNCs based on the amount of carbon reduced. Tokens are only generated when carbon is actively reduced, making it a genuinely carbon-negative token. CarbonNo verifies the amount of carbon reduction through utility data or revenue-grade energy usage measurement at the meter level.
2. CarbonNo Staking - investors can choose and stake a CarbonNo Project of their liking. Rewards will be calculated based on the specific Carbonno Project's carbon-reduction; the staking funds will help develop energy-efficient projects, including implementation, data inspection, and verification.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

Voluntary carbon markets allow carbon emitters to offset their unavoidable emissions by purchasing carbon credits emitted by projects targeted at removing or reducing Greenhouse Gases (GHG) from the atmosphere.

Based on reputable sources, demand for voluntary carbon credits could increase by 15 or more by 2030 and up to 100 by 2050, and the market could be worth upward of $50 billion in 2030.

CarbonNo's mission is to democratize voluntary carbon markets for all.

Everyone should have access to an asset capable of reducing GHG's effects, so we are building CarbonNo to make investing in carbon credits friendly, approachable, and understandable for newcomers and experts alike.

CarbonNo will become a central point for carbon exchange and, at the same time, contribute to the mass adoption of the Cardano blockchain, raising people's climate awareness and making carbon reduction more tangible.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

There are four aspects to measure the success of our project:

1. Community. Any project cannot succeed if nobody believes in the project and is willing to use the product. Building a strong, inclusive, diverse community is especially vital for CarbonNo. Carbon emission and reduction are often intangible to grasp; with CarbonNo reduction NFTs, we believe we can make climate-changing awareness more personal and carbon reduction more tangible. The more people join us, the greener our planet becomes.
2. Verifiable Energy Efficiency Projects. We will be able to onboard energy upgrade projects that are carbon reduction verifiable with hare core utility data. The availability and capability to onboard and verify affiliated data for these projects is a key measurement of our success.
3. Carbon NFT minting and listing. Users will be able to mint carbon NFT directly to their wallet on CarbonNo platform, the website will be able to provide all the details about the carbon reduction related to the NFT, providing abundant source for the users to make their own decisions and to see their ongoing impact on the environment. This is a key feature of CarbonNo platform to be successful.
4. Carbon Credit Registration. Carbon registration involves lawful compliance of business operation, our Carbon NFT shows the proof of ownership in carbon reduction data. Furthermore, in order to use these reduction to offset the carbon emission it needs to be registered with legal entities, the ability to do so is a key measurement to our success.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Following the 4 measurements from the previous section, we list the tentative outputs and results as following.

1. Growing Community. We have built up social media (discord, twitter etc.) to interact with our community, a growing number in twitter followers and carbon NFT holders would be a dirct outputs of our project.
2. Evidence of Verifiable Energy Efficiency Projects. Showing the number and data of ICP verified energy efficiency projects would be a direct output.
3. Trading Volume of Carbon NFT. We have initialized our Genesis NFT collection, more carbon NFT collection released from different energy upgraded buildings will be our direct project results, potentially we would like to see an organic trading volume growth of these collections.
4. Legal Documentation of Carbon Credit Registration. Our co-founders have been trying to consult and document the carbon credit legalization and registration in the energy upgrade space, defining a clear guide line is our optimal results, and it would be benefit the project in long run too.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

We have a diverse team, and founders have experience in different domains, which are critical to the success of CarbonNo.

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Nikos Karagiorgos

Nik is passionate about innovation and reform that minimizes the carbon footprint. He has widespread experience working in the energy sector and was involved in billion-dollar solar projects such as the Genesis project in California and the Solano project in Arizona. Nik co-founded EverWatt, a leading Energy Service Company that provides energy-efficient lighting upgrades for commercial projects. Nik oversees the design, engineering, and manufacturing of energy-efficient products. Furthermore, he drives strategic partnerships, guides new opportunities, and manages the licensing relations in Asia and the United States. Nik first got involved in crypto in 2010 and Cardano, specifically in 2017.

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Konstantinos (Koss) Kleftogiorgos

Computer Science Ph.D. researcher/ Software engineer. Koss has worked on security projects for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Koss has studied cryptography and has a Master's degree in distributed systems/ networks. He has a passion for blockchain, while his main research focus is operating systems, cyber/ systems security, and reverse engineering.

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Dave Llorens

The CEO of EverWatt Lights and an electrical engineer. Before EverWatt, started One Block Off the Grid and raised $6MM from NEA, which sold to NRG in 2014 for $120 million. Before that, had started solarpowerrocks.com, which sold to Solar Reviews, Inc.

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Cyrus Liu

Haskell/Plutus developer, second cohort Plutus pioneer, computer scientist. Cyrus has a Ph.D. with focus in programming languages, formal verification, and program analysis. He has developed artifacts in malware detection (data-driven and machine learning), binary verification (mathematical

logics), hybrid analysis of program transformation (synthesis), and published peer review papers on top of them. His ultimate goal is to help the world with secure and fair systems, and the blockchain technology is bringing his goal closer to reality.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

Our ultimate goal is to build a platform where individual, business owner, energy efficiency project proposer and implementers can engage with each other seamlessly. Participants can use our platform to verify carbon reduction projects, mint and register carbon credits on the blockchain, then they will be able to trade those credits all in one CarbonNo platform. We already have achieved a MVP version on our current site, learning that overall goal is feasible, for this proposal, we mainly focus the following 4 measurable aspects mentioned in previous section:

1. Growth the community.
2. Inspect more energy upgrading project based on ICP methodology, which can be validated by project utility data.
3. Verify energy saving data, calculate and mint carbon NFT collections, which is easy to validate by the collection volume. (we have our genesis collection ready.)
4. Carbon credit registration, we tend to document legal procedures in energy efficiency space, which cab be validated in our blog release/CarbonNo wiki.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Q4 2023

For the first 3 months, we would like to build up a new web UI and implement both fron-end and back-end:

1. Month one: Webapp UI Graphic Design, landing page, project listing page, carbon NFT minting page.
2. Landing page implementation.
3. Energy efficiency projects listing page implementation.

We have some premiliary design as shown below:

• Project listing/management desgin:

• Overall CarbonNo statistics page:

Q1 2024

4. Month 4: ICP new energy project and list it on the web page.

5. Month 5: Develop carbon NFT minting page for the listing projects.

6. Month 6: Document/register minted carbon NFT as carbon credit.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Q4 2023

For the first 3 months, we would like to build up a new web UI and implement both front-end and back-end:

1. Month 1: Full UI graphics accessible to the public.
2. Month 2: Verifiable energy savings data, clean and easy to interpret to the public.
3. Month 3: List our genesis collection on the project listing page.

Q1 2024

4. Month 4: Verifiable energy savings data, clean and easy to interpret for the public.

5. Month 5: User will be able to connect with their wallet and mint carbon NFT directly to the wallet.

6. Month 6: Release out carbon credit registration legal procedures.

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Usually we the UI desgin, front end and back end development requires different skill sets, we tend to allocate the resource as following

• 10% – UX development.
• 40% – Frontend and backend development.
• 20% - NFT minting development (including carbon metedata and art generation).
• 20% - ICP verification for the energy upgrade projects.
• 10% – Carbon credit registration legal consultancy.

We are aware that a fully-functional dApp and carbon trading functionality requires considerable engineering effort and investment, Fund10 will provide us with funding to build the three core functionalities of CarbonNo platform: Carbon snapshot overview, project listing, and carbon NFT minting.

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

We list the main resource required for this particular proposal:

• We need at least two servers to run our website, and cardano nodes.
• We need full-stack developers and UI designers to make the website functional, which is the core, therefore we distribute 50% of the funds to this part.
• ICP verification for energy project usually takes over a year to collect the data, and clean the data afterwards, since our co-founders have already on going business in this domain, we will be collect the data faster, but still the huge amount of data, and process requires a loft resources, we dedicate 20% percent of the funds to it.
• NFT minting and development requires blockchain professionals, therefore we dedicate 20% of the requested funds to it.
• We know overall consultancy would cost $7000, therefore we dedicate 10% of the requested funds to it.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept