CarbonNo DeFi Carbon Credit Market

I. Introduction

Hello, Catalyst community, 

We have been working on this project since the start of 2021, please see our whitepaper here. https://carbonno.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/White-Paper.pdf

We appreciate your time in reading our proposal and look forward to your feedback. CarbonNo founders came up with the idea for a carbon-negative coin in 2017 when the explosive growth of cryptocurrency "mining" was consuming an impossibly large amount of electricity because of a large amount of computing required for proof-of-work blockchain verification. At the time, the technology to create CarbonNo did not exist, but now, with everything in place, CarbonNo has a carbon-negative coin that creates a direct incentive to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The CarboNo team has been working on this project and white paper for almost a year now. We have worked hard to bring a carefully thought-out proposal to the catalyst and hope you enjoy participating in this journey. The full white paper is attached below; here we present a short summary of our plan.

II. CarbonNo Mission

CarbonNo's mission is to reverse the effects of global warming. We achieve this by using blockchain technology to create a new standard, the CarbonNo standard. This allows us to properly register, track, and incentivize carbon offset projects and at the same time create a marketplace where anyone can trade and invest in carbon credits. The CarbonNo ecosystem consists of the following components:

• The CarbonNo Standard - A carbon credit standard backed by blockchain technology and based on provable and quantifiable measurements.

• CarbonNo Coin (CNC) - An incentive token used to boost early adoption of carbon offsetting measures.

• CarbonNo Carbon Credits (CNFTs) - A digital Carbon NFT (CNFT) representing 1 metric ton of CO2.

• CarbonNo Platform - A platform used for buying, selling, staking, and verification of carbon credits.

CarbonNo is aiming to reduce building carbon emissions, which account for 40% of the total energy consumption on the planet. We believe that by reducing this type of emissions we can create a positive impact and at the same time promote changes that can reverse the environmental destruction we are currently facing.

3. CarbonNo Team Overview

We believe that an idea is only as good as the team that is backing it. We have an amazingly diverse team that is passionate about blockchain, cardano, and the environment.

Our team members have founded companies that are leaders in their industries, they have developed protocols adopted by utilities, worked on constructing the two largest solar plants in the world, helped various nonprofits and humanitarian efforts, and pioneered energy efficiency and carbon offsetting measures.

We have Plutus Pioneers, PhDs in several scientific fields (computer science, cyber security, cryptography, and game theory), electrical engineers, electrical contractors, industry-leading experts in energy and energy efficiency, commercial/industrial/residential solar, utility experts, and carbon offsetting experts. 

4. Issues With Today's Carbon Credit Markets and Carbon-Offsetting Projects

The world's carbon credit market is broken. While the technology used in buildings has made leaps and bounds in efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the carbon offset markets are essentially the same as the day the first carbon credit was traded. They are unverifiable, rife with fraud, and generally untrustworthy. As a result, carbon offset markets have stagnated in a murky, "wild west" environment. Until carbon offset markets can produce robust, verifiable, trustworthy, and consistent credits, they will remain underdeveloped. Stagnated and scarcely used carbon offset markets fail to enable a healthy trading economy with the high volume of activity required to move the needle on climate change.

The demand for carbon offsets is immense and increasing rapidly. However, supply cannot meet demand until carbon offset markets become a large-scale, verifiable, and accountable marketplace. It has to be a market that people can trust and that industry can build upon before carbon offsets can start to have a positive sign for the environment on the climate change scale.

How do we get there? CarbonNo equates the energy reduced in registered building improvements to their respective equivalent amount of carbon reduced. For example, consider two identical LED lighting retrofit projects in identical buildings, where one building is in a utility that gets its power from mostly clean hydropower (like many parts of Washington), and the other building is in a utility that derives most of its power from coal power plants. They both save the same amount of kilowatt-hours, but the prior should receive significantly fewer carbon credits than the latter.

5. CarbonNo Solution

Our goal is to provide a uniform, trusted, and impartial ecosystem for carbon offset markets in order to boost trust and early adoption of carbon reduction initiatives. These include but are not limited to carbon reduction initiatives such as Energy Efficiency (EE) projects that result in fewer carbon emissions and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) initiatives that capture carbon through processes such as afforestation, reforestation, coastal enhanced weathering and more. With better technology, easier access, and transparent monitoring of these projects, we can garner more public interest resulting in more investments being made, leading to a carbon-neutral future, sustainable and environmentally aware development.

One of the most important aspects of halting climate change is the reduction of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Throughout recent years, mandatory and voluntary carbon credit markets have seen unprecedented growth, constantly adding new market entities and various offset mechanics. The rapid growth rate in tandem with the diversity, and lack of widely accepted standards and regulations, rendered the market difficult to understand and track. This polyglossy of various standards inhibits markets and provides for a problematic trading environment making it hard to track carbon credits, identify their source, legitimacy and verify their amount or authenticity.

An important method to achieve carbon emission reduction is by achieving better energy efficiency. This can be accomplished by reducing energy consumption by upgrading various technologies. Recent technological advances in everyday devices, such as energy-efficient lighting, HVAC, controls, and sensors, can have dramatic effects on the overall energy use of buildings. The recent drop in the cost of production of such technologies, coupled with rising energy prices, have made those building improvements also cost-effective, which has a large multiplying effect on the adoption of these measures.

6. Progress so Far

Our team has already minted test CNC/CNFT tokens on the Cardano testnet. In addition, the functionality of our smart contracts responsible for calculating CNC rewards by transforming power consumption from KWh to carbon, has been tested on Plutus.

We have currently approached more than 100 commercial customers interested in joining the CarbonNo platform and begin receiving CNC rewards based on their carbon reduction. We would like to note, that unlike a "user" or a person, commercial customers are much harder to gain interest from, have larger impacts on the environment, are more reliable, and account for 40% of the global energy usage.

7. Detailed Plan

CarbonNo will develop its ecosystem based on the following components:

#1. The CarbonNo Standard. The system by which the value of a carbon credit is defined in terms of metric ton of carbon reduced (CO2), for which credits can be awarded. CarbonNo offers a new standard for calculating carbon emission reductions based on energy efficiency upgrades for buildings.

For existing credits that want to be converted onto the CarbonNo platform, CarbonNo will work with existing leaders in the carbon offsetting space that recognize the flaws of existing measures and wish to improve offset accuracy. Projects are verified based on existing global standards, such as the VCS (Verified Carbon Standard), with CarbonNo stakeholders verifying the projects to be on-boarded onto the blockchain and CarbonNo spot checking for accuracy.

#2. CarbonNo Coin (CNC). This is an incentive token that is awarded for a specific amount of carbon reduced by a carbon-reducing building project registered with CarbonNo. CNC tokens are only generated when carbon is actively reduced, making it a genuinely carbon-negative token. CarbonNo verifies this amount of carbon reduction through either utility data or revenue-grade measurement of energy usage at the meter level.

#3. CarbonNo Carbon Credit NFT (CNFTs). Develop and implement carbon credit standards for digitally traded carbon credits through NFTs. By doing this, we wish to achieve the following goals:

• Transform existing legacy credits into digital NFT format.
• Store carbon NFTs on the Cardano blockchain.
• Monitor credits transparently and automatically, making it impossible to double-spend or counterfeit credits.
• Generate verified carbon credits from EE upgrades and carbon-sequestering projects.
• Democratize the carbon credit and the EE market allowing everyone to invest in a carbon-neutral future.
• Each customer, once verified, can obtain one CNFT per metric ton of carbon reduced.

#4. CarbonNo Platform. This is a blockchain-based carbon trading platform that allows users to:

• Register/Verify new CarbonNo projects.
• Trade carbon credits (CNFTs) or CNC.
• Stake/Invest CNC coins to one of our Proof of Energy (PoE) stake pools and get rewarded for doing their part to reduce carbon.
• Monitor projected reward distributions.

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I confirm that I have:

_Received emails from communications@iohk.io

Confirmed

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"Submitted this proposal to only one challenge"

We only submitted this to the "Boosting Cardano's DeFi" campaign.

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"Included identifying information about all proposers"

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"Broken down the budget requirements"

$12,500 - Full-stack developers to enhance our (pro-bono) founder developers build out the NFT trading platform.

$7,000 - Competitive awards for open-source contributors on our network.

$5,500 - Establish initial contacts with carbon credit generators to seed the marketplace.

"Definition of success after 3, 6, and 12 months"

"Defined expected launch date"

Team Members

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 lifetime. Cyrus holds a master's degree in information security, and he is now pursuing his Ph.D. with a research focus in programming languages, formal verification, and program analysis. He developed a sensitive API monitor for the Android mobile network and a binary de-compilation toolchain, the first automatic verification tool that combines binary analysis with formal methods. His ultimate goal is to help the world with secure and fair systems, and blockchain technology is bringing his goal closer to reality.

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Dr. Ioannis Agadakos

Ioannis is experienced in both academic and corporate environments. He served as an Advanced Computer Scientist in SRI International, tackling hard cybersecurity problems during his three-year tenure. He is currently a research scientist in Khoury College of Sciences at Northeastern University, working in neural binary analysis and software hardening. He holds a U.S. patent, and his research is published and awarded in top-tier conferences in software hardening, system security, deep learning, and the Internet of Things. He is well-versed in all phases of software development and has worked with a plethora of teams with diverse backgrounds. He holds a Ph.D. from Stevens Institute of Technology, a B.Eng, and an M.Sc in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete.

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Dr. David Perlman

David worked in information technology and database development for many years before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he leveraged behavioral economics and game theory to study attention, emotions and identity in the neuroscience of mindfulness. Subsequently he worked in the User Research team at Twitter, and as a data scientist and consultant on emerging information threats at Leviathan Security Group. He has presented on social media and influence campaigns at SOCOM SOFWERX, the Black Hat conference, Naval Postgraduate School, CDANS, Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL), and has been interviewed in publications including the Wall Street Journal. He is also lead author of the first discussion of social media and influence campaigns in the Strategic Latency book series published by LLNL, and published an article on the mathematics of modern big-data marketing in Cyber Defense Review. In 2021 he combined his knowledge of incentive-compatible economic systems with the principles of social engineering in information security to develop the technology of Validated NFTs (VNFTs), which he brings to the team at CarbonNo.