Recently we have been part of the Impact Verification Bundle on GitCoin raising funds to work on solutions that bring an additional layer of integrity to projects claims.

For our own part we are working to add legal templates for agreements between landowners and impact certificate issuers. We have also been lobbying the relevant organs here in Ireland to lay the rails for a frictionless EU based blockchain incorporation wrapper.

So whats the problem we are trying to solve for? Essentially its one of trust, especially where blockchain interacts with the meatspace. We learned through our pilot project that you can not use an Ethereum address as a company number. Landlords and businesses need something more to anchor their trust in.

To this end we are looking to make amendments to legislation pertaining to the Co-Operative Societies Bill and how it will ease the administration of Industrial and Provident Societies for blockchain based entities.

More generally as a group we are all working on solutions to Decentralised Measurement, Reporting and Validation - or dMRV for short. BÚAN for example is minting digital twins of real world assets to our treasury which will be used to back impact certificates that businesses and individuals can purchase. There is a multitude of possibilities for how we can develop from there and build a perpetual funding mechanism to expand the impact that we have well into the future.

Ethereum is a vehicle for massively co-operative economic games. We have an open ended, transparent parallel economy on the blockchain which is starting to merge with the real world. While the decentralised ledger that forms the backbone of this economy is itself is a trustless, immutable technology, the quality and provenance of information imputed needs to be trusted. 

Those familiar with the blockchain oracle problem will already know this issue as it refers to the inherent inability to access external data reliably. If we are going to solve for real world problems such as sustainability we need to ensure the accuracy of what we feed it. Impact certificates minted to the blockchain can provide much greater provenance of their claims than a paper certificate in the real world. 

Developing unified ‘ReFi lego’ standards that can provide a composable base layer for dMRV encourages a more holistic approach which doesn’t focus on any one narrow metric such as carbon. Carbon tunnel vision has become a victim of what is known as the measurement problem. Where a measure becomes a target it often ceases to become a good measure as other metrics become peripheral. 

Examples of the measurement problem are many. Within the crypto sphere for example there are projects that will focus on transaction throughput above all else at the expense of decentralisation, security and reliability. This fails to see the forest for the trees and they end up solving for very little, ultimately doing more harm than good. 

The narrow focus on carbon as a metric for measuring environmental impact has had a similar outcome. Carbon sequestration goals have been met with the afforestation of land with industrial scale monocultures creating dead zones for biodiversity and pollution from the fertiliser applied making its way into waterways. Even the needles of non-native deciduous trees pierce the ground and cause acidification of the soil.

By developing solutions to expand the range of environmental data collated we can generate much more tangible impact. Results that can be heard and felt much more than an entry in the carbon accountants ledger. Which isn’t to say that we do not value carbon sequestration but that it is a byproduct of doing the right thing by nature anyway. The benefits are much greater. 

The dMRV building blocks that we are assembling are therefore focused on much more than carbon measurement, although it still plays a vital role in measuring the overall impact of actions. Breaking the problem down in to its constituent parts you can see that between the five projects in this bundle we are covering every aspect of the problem and taking things even further. 

Leveraging crypto we are able to incentivise participation in the dMRV economy in a reliable way increasing the prevalence of environmental data collection. After all you can not improve what you do not measure. 

Impact investors will have much more confidence and enthusiasm for investing if builders like us can verify the outcomes that a holistic approach achieves.