Carbonno Verifiable Carbon Platform

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Create Decentralized Carbon Trading dApp, where verified real-world carbon credits from various sources are traded in the form of NFTs and our carbon backed token $CNC.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Plutus Pioneers, residential & commercial solar power/efficiency engineers, utility experts, CS/game theory and cyber security PhDs, blockchain and NFT enthusiasts.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Carbonno is a Carbon Exchange Marketplace dApp.

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 for the trustworthiness of the underlying credits.

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

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

Investors can simply open up the Carbonno dApp and choose to buy carbon credits originating from a variety of carbon reduction projects including but not limited to energy-efficiency, carbon-sequestering, reforestation, solar, nuclear etc.

The native token of Carbonno is called CNC.

CNC is a fungible token that is 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:

• 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 either utility data or revenue-grade measurement of energy usage at the meter level.
• Carbonno Staking - investors will be able to choose a Carbonno Project of their liking and stake in it. Rewards will be calculated based on the specific Carbonno Project's carbon-reduction.

(For business and design philosophy, please dive into our F8 funded proposal $272Bn Carbon Credits on Cardano, current proposal is only for its dapp building.)

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

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 a factor of 15 or more by 2030 and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050 and the market could be worth upward for $50 billion in 2030.

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

We believe that everyone should have access to an asset that is capable of reducing the effects of GHG, 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.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

From business to technology, we believe more problems will emerge as our project progress, while we are working on our MVP, we anticipate the following main challenges.

Business Model

• Carbon credits, carbon neutrality and energy efficiency may be terms not easily relatable to ordinary people or investors. People may have heard of agencies selling carbon credits to corporations, however the whole process is more of a black box to them and they may be totally unaware of the possibility of investing in such an asset. Building a universal carbon trading and investing platform will definitely require to educate the public about the possibilities of investing in something that could revert the effects of greenhouse gases.

Blockchain and Energy Efficient Technology

• Although we have full confidence in the Cardano ecosystem, the whole space is still in its early stages. With the Plutus smart contract architecture still in active development, building dApps on top of it means we might face certain development risks. We are excited about what this project can bring to the Cardano ecosystem/community and we can't wait to move forward.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Q3-Q4 2022

• Webapp UI Design, open to public.
• Carbon NFT design and Minting.
• Carbon NFT metadata patching.
• Carbonno Single Staking Pool Launch.
• Apply to join Cardano Single Pool Alliance.

Q1-Q2 2023

• Deploy Smart contract for $CNC rewarding (On-chain and off-chain).
• Smart contract for Carbon.
• $CNC Utilities for community vote.

Q3-Beyond 2023

• Smart contract audit and testnet launch.
• Carbonno Marketplace and DEX mainnet launch.
• Outreach, collaborations with energy efficiency entity.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Project funds requested: $80,000.

• $8,000 (10%) – UX development.
• $16,000 (20%) – Backend development.
• $20,000 (25%)- Smart Contract development and audit.
• $20,000 (25%) - Carbonno DEX development and audit.
• $12,000 (15%) – Treasury / NFT minting data entry (ICP-bankable energy project data needs to be reorganized in structure to fit with our carbon-offset NFTs)
• $4,000 (5%) - Infrastructure and hosting servers

We are aware that a fully-functional dApp and DEX requires considerable engineering effort and investment, Fund9 will provide us with the initial seed funding in order to move forward from development of our MVP to our alpha version that is open to public test.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

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.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

We will return to Catalyst in later round for further funding if we got funded, except the dApp development, we have visions building up verifiable carbon credit DAO, we will need more funding to propose and explore our DAO protocol in reality, e.i. combine real business from our collaborators.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

• Carbonno branded application lunch
• Minting of Carbon NFTs
• Pre-sales, ISPO of our CNC token
• Regular updates through our social media (discord, twitter, medium and reddit)

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

We believe the success of our project can bring the following benefits/services to the defi-world.

Carbon Credit Trading Platform

• A universal, transparent Carbon Credit Marketplace, where users can trade their Carbon Credits in the form of NFTs with ease.
• A Dashboard that allows people to track energy consumption, carbon credits and rewards.
• A Delegation center where users will be able to stake in existing carbon-reduction, energy-efficiency, reforestation and other projects.
• A Contribution center where energy-efficiency project owners can apply to be onboarded to the Carbonno ecosystem and be rewarded.

Rewarding Smart Contract

• A backend smart contract rewarding $CNC token to users, and handle all blockchain transactions seamlessly. Testnet token $tCNC is available here.
• For the time period, the smart contract calculates all the energy saved from the projects linked to user wallets, convert energy saving to tons of carbon and transfers the corresponding $CNC tokens to the wallet.
• An implementation of $CNC staking.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is a continuation of a previously funded Catalyst proposal. View our previous funded B2B Fund8 proposal here.