[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.
Background Intro:
Trillions of ADA are needed to fight climate change. How do we make sure the funding gets to real projects? How do we create more transparency and trust for money transfer?
Here is links to relevant background information:
- "Global South needs $2 trillion a year to fight climate crisis. A trillion dollars of that should come from rich countries, investors and multilateral development banks, UN-backed report says." (8/11/2022) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/8/global-south-needs-2tn-a-year-to-fight-climate-crisis-report
- "Investors have trillions to fight climate change. Developing nations get little of it" November 9, 20225:30 AM ET https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1134865038/investors-have-trillions-to-fight-climate-change-developing-nations-get-little-o
- "Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
- Carbon Markets and greenwashing: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-12/carbon-markets-draft-at-cop26-prompts-warning-from-activists
- “Corporate carbon polluters plant trees to counter their CO2 emissions, but activists warn against greenwashing and say such afforestation schemes detract from the emissions reductions needed to combat climate change.” www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211111-carbon-offsets-a-booming-market-or-greenwashing
Here is a LinkedIn post by Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard to show the relevance of the topic to CF.
How Earthtrust started?
Earthtrust is a Pond Foundation initiative led by Scott Poynton. Scott is dedicating his life to solving agricultural supply chains & forest conservation key challenges, and in recent years focus on climate change related initiatives through Pond foundation.
Earthtrust was born to build technology solutions to support the work of the foundation and scale climate initiatives. At the end of 2021 a team of product, development and business expertise joined Scott to work on Earthtrust.
As part of the journey we also evaluated how to use blockchain technology and was awarded and completed several catalyst proposals:
- NGO Transparency (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing Video
- 21st Century Agri Supply chains (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing video
- Buy Food & Make an Impact (Fund 9, Dapps products and integrations)
- Closing report
- Closing video
There is extensive work done, collaborating with developers, corporates and NGOs and testing how blockchain can be part of the solution. Scott was invited to share his experience at the main stage at the Cardano summit in Lausanne in 2022.
Earthtrust Today:
Earthtrust is building a radically transparent verification network
Earthturst is a public platform for companies and organizations to prove their claims through radical transparency, data and documentation. Companies and organizations share documentation and data on Earthtrust’s platform to support their claims. Anyone, anywhere can view the claim, data and documentation and decide whether the claim is true.
You can find more information at: https://www.earthtrust.life/ We are working hard on the backend system and expected to launch by the end of September 2023.
We are building Earthtrust platform v1.0. It is an online model that will allow an organization or a company to define a claim and transparently share data and documentation to prove it.
Here is an intro for how it is going to look like:
We are partnering with bold Pond Foundation member companies and partners who believe in the Earthtrust vision and are ready to build this new, radically transparent verification model to create trust and scale impact.
- Partners: https://www.pond.foundation/partners
- Members: https://www.pond.foundation/membership
All the partners and customers we spoke with agreed to use the Earthtrust verification solution once launched.
The focus on this proposal, The solution:
The overall goal with the solution is to enable NGOs and environmental projects to have an easy and cheep solution to sell their services, carbon credits or receive investments in a radically transparent way to be transparent, enable their customers and investors to be transparent and in the end to increase the investment into the real projects that have an impact on the environment.
The solution is made up of four parts; checkout flow, Stripe payment integration, smart contract data capture solution and Earthtrust documentation functionality.
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The checkout flow will be focused on enabling NGO’s and environmental projects to create their offerings for people and companies to buy them through their existing website. It will be state of the art similar to a shopify experience.
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The payment solution from Stripe will handle the last part of the checkout flow and support all major credit card providers. The detailed transaction data, NGO ID, customer ID and goods purchased will be captured and sent to the smart contract solution on Cardano.
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The smart contract data capture solution is build on top of the payment solution and it captures the transactional data, create a hash of it and store it on cardano for proof. The hash will be published on the Earthtrust platform with the corresponding transactional data.
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The Earthtrust platform will contain the documentation from the transaction, and will follow the structure of Earthtrust, be published on both the NGOs profile as a “Sale” and on the customers profile as a “Purchase”.
By having all of this payment documented publicly in a form everyone can understand and review we will create a scalable solution to create transparency into investments made into environmental projects - automatically!
[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
What products and integrations can be developed or improved that will offer more use cases to the Cardano ecosystem that are high impact and drive more adoption?
Cardano.org states: " make the world work better for all" - Earthtrust goal is to do just that by providing radical transparency of impact claims, while using Cardano as part of the technology. As mentioned before this is a huge issue and trillions of ADA should be directed to socials and environmental impact claims in the years to come.
A key part of adoption is that the project is being incubated by an organisation active on the Climate change project and many of its clients and partners on the ground have already agreed to be part of the project. This is important for adoption as well build the technology and solution together with the market.
Our go to market approach starts with transparency of claims about money transfer, which is traceable and will have a huge impact as it is relevant for all organisations. The pond foundation will be an example organisation to apply radical transparency and we expect many more to join.
Therefore this proposal supports the challenge objective for a thriving ecosystem of different products and integrations for the community to use that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralised providers.
This proposal cover:
National governance systems - New governance systems for nation states
Climate Change - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues
Marketplaces
Business solutions - Software products, data management, process management, data management solutions (CRM, ERP etc), privacy products.
Why is it important (from the challenge)?
Cardano needs innovations and solutions that help the ecosystem reach its potential and help improve the systems we use across the world.
As explained, Earthtrust is well aligned to this objective.
[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Some of the metrics that will be measured will include:
- Number of organisations using Earthtrust
- Number of claims verified
- Number of organisations adding the payment solution
- Number of times payments is being done
- Amount of money being sent to organisations
We will also measure the impact of the model on the organisations & companies:
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Feedback from companies and partners participating in the program
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Articles and media posts published
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Feedback on social networks for the articles (sharing, comments)
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Traction by companies & partners contacting us and deal flow
[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
You can see from the reports provided for projects done so far the level of information provided to the community. "The 21 century agri supply chain report" was set as an example for a closing report by the Catalyst team as presented in one of the town halls.
- 21st Century Agri Supply chains (Fund 8, Nation building Dapps)
- Closing report
- Closing video
As the Earthtrust product aims for transparency, once we launch the platform, the aim is to have Earthtrust also as one the companies in the platform and sharing full details of use of funds and activities.
Ongoing information is also going to be presented in Social networks and especially linkedin, for example is a recent post that mention Earthtrust model to start creating awareness for the solution
[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?
The team has been working for several years and already showed high performance in previous proposals. Climate change, agriculture supply chains, carbon markets are all huge problems but also with great potential. Our team includes combined expertise of: "boots on the ground" working with related projects, experience UI & technology teams and business development expertise for social impact. Above all, the mission to bring transparency and traceability of environmental projects is what brought us together. While we closed the projects a while ago, we kept working and based on the learning we are looking for the best path to make Earthtrust success.
[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?
The reason for us to build Earthtrust is because we want to fight climate change and social inequality. We want to do this by diverting, and thereby increasing, investments into the true environmental organizations that every day work to fight climate change and social inequality.
Success will be to provide a simple to use yet radical way to show transparency of climate change related projects. We will fully enable the Pond Foundation and many of its partners and customers and will get traction & interest from more customers.
[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.
Main activities:
Milestone 1, 4 weeks, Architectural design
- Project initiation and project plan
- Core team setup and partnerships
- Use case definition
- Concepts and ux initial sprint
- Architectural proposal
Milestone 2, week 5-8, Technical solution design
- UX & UI design mockups for both checkout flow and Earthtrust
- User tests
- Technical solution design for smart capture contract
- Technical solution design for Stripe payment solution
Milestone 3, Payment solution and smart contract
Week 9-12
- Ecosystem stakeholder tests
- Checkout flow ui design
- Earthtrust ui design
- Build smart capture contract
- Build payment solution
Week 13-16
- Build smart capture contract
- Build payment solution
- Build UI for checkout flow
- Build UI for Earthtrust
Milestone 4, week 17-20, testing with partners and customers
- Build smart capture contract
- Build payment solution
- Testing initial solution with partners and customers
- Build UI for checkout flow
- Build UI for Earthtrust
Milestone 5, week 21-24, testing with partners and customers
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Finalise and test the full solution
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Bug fixes
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Full scale test with partners and customers
[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.
Main deliverables
An easy to implement website solution for NGOs to sell their services, carbon credits or receive investments in a radical transparent way where all transactions and identities are documented on Cardano and on Earthtrust.
Milestone 1
- Use case definition doc
- Concepts and ux initial sprint results
- Architectural proposal
Milestone 2
- UX & UI design mockups for both checkout flow and Earthtrust
- User tests report
- Technical solution design for smart capture contract
- Technical solution design for Stripe payment solution
Milestone 3
- Checkout flow ui design
- Earthtrust ui design
Milestone 4, week 17-20, testing with partners and customers
- Build smart capture contract
- Build payment solution
- Testing initial solution with partners and customers
- Build UI for checkout flow
- Build UI for Earthtrust
Milestone 5, week 21-24, testing with partners and customers
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Full scale test with partners and customers
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Closing report
[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.
As mentioned in the last months we are working hard to develop Earthtrust and expect to launch the service by the end of September. Part of our further finance plan is based on engaging for solution co-design corporate clients that wish to become transparent about their impact claims. Examples include whatif-foods.com, or durrell.org. We are also discussing revenue models with the clients which will include a dedicated % of the claim amount to the verification service provided by Earthtrust.
[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?
Scott Poynton, Project Lead
Experience:
Scott is a real social and environmental leader for the last 30 years. He created an NGO named The Forest Trust (currently www.earthworm.org) and his estimated positive impact is for about $ 2 trillion of supply chains and millions of hectares of forest. He is now on his biggest mission to mitigate climate change.
#Scott is already involved with the Cardano community. He presented at the Catalyst sustainable goals event: Cardano & Climate Change:
(00:30:18 Corporation, Trust and Blockchain, Scott Poynton). He is also part of an important related fund 7 funded proposal, the Cardano Carbon Footprint: cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385045
Links: <https://www.scottpoynton.com/about-1>
For more information please visit:
Magnus Edvard Nielsen, Product lead
Experience:
Magnus is a product lead with 10+ years experience in building technology products, teams and companies in both B2B and B2C. He has a strong focus on lean methodologies; build, test and learn to stay close to customers, new market trends, increase product quality and speed of development. A Strong passion for web3, complex digital products, getting from “zero to one” and building a sustainable future for our planet.
In June 2019 travelled to Indonesia for research on Indonesian farmers within rice, coffee, coconut sugar.
From 2017-2021 Leading the innovation team, at one of the biggest blockchain based PaaS companies within digital supply chains named Tradeshift. The innovation team's two focus areas were decentralised technology and environmental sustainability.
Links: www.linkedin.com/in/magnusedvard/
Adrian C. Prelipcean, Tech Lead
Experience:
Adrian is a tech lead with 10+ years experience in building technology products, teams and companies in B2C. He founded and was the CTO of Airmee (2016-2023), a tech driven logistics company, taking it from a two founder team to over 100 employees with operations in 3 countries and with an enterprise consumer base including Amazon, H&M and Apotea. He is passionate about building efficient teams and stable products, with a core focus on innovation. He obtained a PhD in GeoIT and Transportation from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (2014-2018) for building machine learning based scalable systems for city-wide population movement analysis. Most of the research performed is available either as open source products or as open access publications.
Currently, Adrian is advising and / or involved with multiple startups in the fields of environmentalism, circular economy, transportation, geoinformation systems and machine learning.
Links: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianprelipcean>, https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=qqVY_iYAAAAJ&hl=en, <https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/person.jsf?pid=authority-person:32330>
Zoltan Tran, Frontend Engineer
Experience:
Zoltan is a seasoned engineer with 6+ years of diverse experience working with tech startups in Denmark, Ireland, the UK, and the US. He is a clean code advocate, but also believes in balance in software development. In 2022 he helped deliver Pool Marketplace, the world's first zero-party B2B data marketplace. His main focus is efficiency and building a product users will love. He has a passion for using technology to combat climate change and has contributed to grassroots organizations such as Earth First!, Anonymous, Plant Based Treaty.
Links: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoltantran/>
Yoram Ben Zvi, business models lead and connect to the Cardano ecosystem
Experience:
20+ years of business experience working with technology companies (strategy, partnerships, investors). In the last years, Yoram is focused on combining impact and business. 4 years ago he left his comfort zone and worked for 2 years for an NGO Earthworm.org focusing on sustainable business models across agriculture supply chains.Yoram is very active in Catalyst as a CA, successful proposer, and at Cardano4Climate. Yoram is part of the AIM team and is involved with the Catalyst SDG tool cardanocataly.st/proposer-tool-sdg/#/ (which is included in the proposal process) and the catalyst alignment to SDG research.
Yoram was working on a related project in Indonesia for one year with Earthworm.org together with Magnus and understand the opportunity and the importance of impacting the agri supply chains
Links: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoram-ben-zvi-446836/>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAPUIlLFYio>
[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?
This Dapp is being developed/incubated within Pond Foundation as an answer to a real world huge problem and a big business opportunity.
There is a lot of value in developing the solution already for clients and partners, as done in this case, so it could be tested on actual use cases.
Doing it with a reputable person like Scott Poyton will help to validate the solution and create interest by other organisations. Our goal is to revolutionise the impact claims ecosystem and Cardano will be part of the enabling technology for it. What reasons impact initiative have not to be transparent? So we do believe many companies will come on board.
