We helped to make Devcon VI climate friendly. The 228 individual addresses which contributed in the dApp helped to retire (offset) over 400 tons of carbon by supporting a carbon project in Peru. Not only did the participants help the climate, but they also got a POAP or even a second one for participating.

Story

disCarbon started as a project from the ETHAmsterdam hackathon in spring 2022. We wanted to build a project which mitigates climate change on blockchain rails. We built a minimal flight offsetter to see how on-chain carbon certificate retirements work and what needs to be done to actually make Devcon VI climate friendly. Afterwards we submitted a devcon improvement proposal (DIP17) to scope the work. In parallel we started building a dApp for Devcon VI in Bogota. A few days before Devcon we launched the Climate Friendly Devcon VI dApp. Each participant could claim a POAP if they wanted which was smoothly handled by our backend. We, disCarbon, did no take any fee from this whole process as the goal was to build a maximally transparent and maximally simple dApp as a prove that on-chain carbon is a simple way to help mitigate climate change.

Participation

On October 4th we started distributing the link to the dApp among early testers (Devcon Team and Toucan) and also offset our flights and participation at Devcon VI. On October 7th the official Devcon VI email got sent to all attendees which resulted in a huge spike of dApp users. Over the Devcon week from October 9th to 16th we had a continuous stream of dApp users which is remarkable as the week was very packed for most users. Tweet storms, banners at the event location and mentioning the dApp at talks captured the attention.

On October 26th the Devcon team sent out a tweet to remind people to help to make Devcon VI climate friendly and the same with an email on November 14th. Both of these communications resulted in a spike of participants.

Vote on the carbon project we want to support

After Devcon VI all participants could vote on which project we should retire carbon credits from. We chose 3 projects. The Cordillera Azul Project from Peru got the majority vote and so we retired carbon credits from this project.

If you are wondering about the small differences in the numbers plotted here and from the snapshot vote, the reason is here we filtered for actual users with a corresponding POAP. This filtering does not change the outcome, just shifts the percentages a bit.

Some additional info

Pick up rate

The pick up rate is around 4% meaning that 4% of all Devcon attendees offset their climate impact. This is in the expected range. A recent study found that 4.46% of airline passengers offset their flight. These flight offsets are often directly available in the booking system. Our dApp on the other hand was external to the booking system and we nevertheless reached about the same percentage of users. This means the dApp has been pretty successful. What were the factors for the high pick up rate despite the additional steps a user had to go through. We guess the following reasons have been quite high up:

• POAP incentivization. one user explicitly told us he does not care about the climate he just wanted the POAP.

• Low price. On chain carbon prices are about a factor of 5-10 lower than in the traditional market despite having a similar or even the same projects available to choose from. Removing the middle man makes a difference.

• Simple and easy dApp. For people with a wallet on polygon chain the whole process was fast and reliable.

• The Ethereum community has a large group of Refi enthusiast.

• The virality of social media definitely helped to convince people to participate.

• Using the blockchain. On-chain carbon retirements are a relatively new application so some participants were definitely curious about how it is done.

Tokens used for participation

The dApp was running on the polygon blockchain as we were using the infrastructure from the Toucan protocol. We allowed users to participate with Matic, DAI, USDC, WETH, NCT and WMATIC. Most people used Matic to participate with a small fraction using DAI, USDC and WETH.

Why not more statistics?

You might wonder why there are no other statistics than these. Where are the airports people departed from. What were the flight classes used. The answer is pretty simple. We can't. The dApp is a proper dApp with data avoidance in mind. The Dapp is running on each indviduals machine without any backend communicating with it. All the choices like flight path, flight class etc. are only ever used locally on a participants computer to calculate the total emission. Therefore, we cannot know these parameters. The only thing going on chain is the address and the carbon amount it offset. This minimal data was necessary for the POAP backend to issue POAPs to eligible addresses only.

Summary

disCarbon's Climate Friendly Devcon VI dApp managed to accumulate and offset over 400 tons of carbon from more than 220 participants. The pick up rate was in the expected range. To make it easier for people to participate an carbon offsetting scheme could directly be integrated into the ticketing in the future.