Short-term goal: facilitate cross-chain collaboration between climate focused projects in Cardano, Celo, Polygon, Cosmos, & other earth-friendly blockchains.
Short-term solution: host a Planet Positive NFT Hackathon this spring aimed at bringing together the ReFi community, with a focus on cross-chain solutions. Host another hackathon in Summer 2022.
Long-term goal: build useful tools and infrastructure that add value to & integrate into existing ReFi projects & ecosystems.
Long-term solutions:
- Work with Eco Labs team + Return Protocol team to build automated carbon offsetting tools for on-chain activities. This will provide cross-chain solutions for NFT projects, DAOs, or other web3 organizations to make their on-chain activities carbon neutral or negative, by integrating with existing on-chain carbon marketplaces within the ReFi ecosystem, such as Toucan Protocol (polygon), Regen Network (cosmos), Nori (polygon), KlimaDAO (polygon), and others.
- Explore the formation of an open source data collection & verification application with partners at Common Action, Avano, & BasinDAO.
Right now a community in ReFi is growing fast, VCs are coming in and funding projects left and right, & there is a massive appetite for chain agnostic collaboration, there is very little tribalism, because the people involved are focused on real world problems like solving climate change. At this point Cardano has a very limited reach in the ReFi community. These solutions will encourage Cardano based projects to get involved in ReFi, and ReFi projects building on other chains to connect with & integrate with Cardano.
Number of proposals including participants from other blockchain communities
More than 20. I've already put together a survey for participants of a potential hackathon, with 20+ responses. There will likely be more than 20 teams participating
Number of technical implementations connecting Cardano to other blockchains
+1. via the cross-chain carbon offsetting tool
Projects and dApps from other chains implemented on Cardano
Solutions from the hackathon may yield 2-4 projects to implement on Cardano. I know of a handful of ReFi solutions that should exist on Cardano, just a matter of connecting the right people, which a hackathon is great for.
Number of events / workshops / sessions arranged with other communities
+2 Spring hackathon + summer hackathon
Number of permanent initiatives with cross-chain teams (members from different blockchain communities together)
+1 for sure, but potentially more.
For the hackathons: main challenge is organizing & coordinating a smooth event that encourages & fosters collaboration, which I am working with people far more experienced at organizing and participating in hackathons than I to help my get this just right.
The risk is lackluster participation. I am confident this won't happen, but it's a risk.
The challenge for the carbon offsetting tool is making it cross-chain. It's a difficult and complex problem to build something that is simple & user friendly, that can be done on many chains at once, but the team at Return Protocol has already made progress on this front.
The risk is that this tool is not finished on time or exceeds the budget. Catalyst funding will not be the only source of funding for this project, so I am confident we'll be able to achieve it, just not confident in how long it may take.