Hosts: Jason Jacobs & Cody Simms
Guests: Fred Fournier & Michael Kelly | Co-Founders | Open Forest Protocol
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[4:32] FF: “For me Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is basically an intention first, more than a technical product, a web 3 product, a community, whatever you want to call it. […] It's more the intention of helping people on the ground that basically don't have access to funding and support today in the forestation industry.”
[5:15] MK: “From my angle […], Open Forest Protocol is really a digital system for coordinating the preservation and reforestation and […] for that matter, all things in terms of the ecosystems evolved in forests, in a distributed manner. So what we're really trying to do is to build a system on a global level, where forests from all around the world can be preserved, can be funded, and can be supported so that they stay in the ground, they don't get cut down or burned or destroyed or commercialized.”
[11:22] MK: “The toolkit, so to speak, for what you can do with a web 3 or crypto project has really expanded massively in the last two, two and a half years. So when the original white paper that we wrote was […] put together, it was very one dimensional. It kind of was made for a single company to plug in and collect data and put data on chain to show someone else what was going on. As crypto has evolved and you have things like NFTs now, you have cheaper protocols with cheaper transaction fees, you have DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) infrastructure for governance, we […] thought, okay, you could do a kind of standalone one off application, or we could go big and try to build kind of a protocol level solution, meaning something that encompasses multiple different projects all in one and is kind of a much bigger machinery that would have to be built. And so […] we met at the right time for when crypto was finally kind of reaching that tipping point in terms of buildability.”
[13:13] MK: “The simple version of what we're doing is we're creating a digital validation infrastructure. So a place where people can connect digitally, and either affirm or deny data that is sent to this validator on the blockchain. And with that kind of core, you can think of this as like the sun, the center of the solar system, we then have forest projects mint NFTs, and upload data to this validator and a set timeframe. And when the validators approve the data upload, meaning that the data upload is correct, that data gets written into the NFT metadata. So ultimately in kind of very big general terms, we're writing the very, very first ugly infrastructure for some type of record keeping system between a forest project and an on-chain validation infrastructure, where basically a collective group of people will stake on outcomes of what's the correct outcome.”
[18:09] MK: “From a financing point of view, you can take money, put it into a pool, or put it into a smart contract and say, if this project is successful in their third or fourth data upload, release $20,000 to them. If this project is successful in their seventh or eighth data upload, release $30,000 to them. So you have some type of really on chain results based climate finance, and then in the crypto world, you can go absolutely wild with that, where you can plug that into a DAO, you can plug that into an NFT marketplace, you can plug that into an individual NFT’s artist revenue stream. […] What we're ultimately trying to do is to put kind of the infrastructure, the pipeline in place for people to say, we want to buy up an Amazon hotspot, and we want to be able to basically buy it and fund it. And ultimately also get carbon credits for it on a 15 year expanded timeline, purely done via smart contracts without having to worry about too much paperwork, or too much white tape to cut through.”
[38:29] MK: “If you believe in the future of nature based carbon markets, and you believe in the future of on-chain data management, you should take a close look at OFP. Because what OFP is ultimately doing is straddling both of those macro trends.”
[40:12] MK: “The business of planting trees is going to be one of the most incredible commercial opportunities for the next 25 years. That's really the gap of what we're doing. Our protocol success hinges on the belief that there is an appetite in the world to preserve forests in the form as they stand today. And there's an appetite in the world to monetize the carbon sequestered by the forests, and to care about keeping these forests in the ground.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify (Original Title: "Startup Series: Open Forest Protocol")
🕰️ 45 min | 🗓️ 01/13/2022
✅ Time saved: 43 min
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