Sustainable Forest Stablecoin

Ekofolio was founded in 2017 with the vision of fighting climate change by creating a marketplace where tokenized Natural Capital assets could be easily traded utilising blockchain technology.

By lowering barriers to entry, increasing liquidity and attracting more capital to traditional asset classes like sustainable forests, we could combat net loss of forest cover worldwide by eventually purchasing and reforesting brownfield and other degraded land.

At that time, Ekofolio's aim was also to bridge the gap between the jargon-heavy early adopters and demystify the technology for the potential 'early majority', which is the main reason why our site is set up to only accept Fiat but issue tokens.

After selling out our proof of concept forest in under two weeks in late 2019, we have spent the past year researching and structuring our token models (see: https://www.ekofolio.com/tokens/ ) and underlying fund to comply with the latest regulation. We have also received a grant from the European Space Agency to develop satellite-based monitoring and reporting of our forests.

Meanwhile, the current boom in crypto markets has led us to three conclusions.

One, many crypto investors who have done well now have a need to park a portion of their assets in stablecoins or stablecoin+ tokens like our EKO (3% growth p.a.) as a hedge against market volatility - and they do not want to off-ramp to purchase EKO.

Two, there has been an explosion in awareness, interest and knowledge of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies around the world, and user acceptance and familiarity is increasing.

Three, network congestion and high gas prices on Ethereum have made our business model unsustainable.
Therefore, we see an urgent need for Ekofolio to achieve the following 4 objectives:

1. Treasury: Enable Ekofolio.com to accept major cryptocurrencies, off-ramp to Fiat for deployment to forests in a timely manner while accounting for market volatility (and issuing EKO commensurate to the final value of Fiat obtained)
2. Frictionless trade: Assess feasibility of issuing EKO and FOLIO tokens on a chain built from the ground up capable of handling institutional grade and volume of transactions. Select and implement. Cardano fits the bill perfectly here.
3. Interoperability: Fighting climate change is going to require planting a lot of trees. Even if we issue our tokens on Cardano, we would like them to be easily traded on other chains as well.
4. Go to market: Increase visibility and engagement with the blockchain community and attract participants and investors. Encourage community involvement in further shaping what FOLIO tokens can do. Sell enough EKO to get the underlying fund started.

We see Cardano integration as key to fulfilling parts of all 4 objectives. For this particular challenge, we are seeking an $50,000 to allocate in the following areas (to be refined):

1. Research and Testing: $5,000
2. Backend/DApp Development and Deployment: $20,000
3. Frontend development: $10,000
4. Content, channels, community engagement: $10,000
5. Legal, fund structuring, accounting, etc: $5,000

KPIs (to be refined):

1. 1,000 account creations
2. Sell EUR 1,000,000 worth of EKOs