Aera Force is proud to announce the fund’s first investment into the Open Forest Protocol (OFP). OFP is a layer 2 solution built on the climate-neutral NEAR blockchain, unlocking incredible capacity in scaling monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) for countless global reforestation projects - one of the key forces in combating climate change.

Existing MRV processes are tedious, lack standardization, and can be operationally taxing to conduct. This has historically prevented many projects from qualifying for carbon offsets, as only the largest programs received sufficient visibility and resources to dedicate to proper establishment and maintenance.

Now, utilizing OFP’s decentralized web3 toolkit, project operators can leverage a variety of utilities to streamline the MRV process for reforestation projects, all while providing an immutable record of project progress. By providing project operators the resources via applications, dashboards, and a decentralized validator network to publish project progress to the blockchain, OFP is unlocking the growth and potential of critical small-to-medium reforestation projects all over the world.

Further, by employing blockchain technology, transactions can seamlessly cross borders in an international market, unique incentive structures are enabled via tokenization of assets and rewards, bespoke governance structures can be crafted and implemented, and barriers to accessing marginalized global communities are all but eliminated.

Aera Force is thrilled to back OFP for not only the work they are doing in advancing efforts toward a net-zero future, but for the driving forces behind the output that align with our investment thesis and overall mission. Aera Force backs outstanding founders with the ability to execute and deliver, and trusts in the deep experience – across both environmental/reforestation and blockchain protocol development – of the OFP team. Aera Force further seeks to support sustainable business models built for long-term adoption and growth, and focuses on a cross-section of projects that leverage the power of web3 to address today’s most pressing problems with meaningful, scalable solutions. We see the rise of individually manageable, independently monitored, non-commercial reforestation projects as among the most crucial elements in reducing the current trajectory of global warming, not to mention one with the most potential growth velocity.

In short: we couldn’t be more excited to be an official partner along OFP’s pathway into the future.