SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
Nick Zwaneveld is Founder and CEO of Coorest, a Chainlink BUILD project that tokenizes green assets. Coorest’s NFTrees initiative utilizes Etherisc’s carbon offsets insurance, which is powered by Floodlight’s geospatial weather data delivered onchain via Chainlink. Zwaneveld sat down with Malandrino to discuss how tokenizing green assets with Chainlink oracles benefits the planet alongside developed and developing economies.
Zwaneveld explained how Chainlink allows Coorest to connect green tokens to real-world assets. “Chainlink allows us to bring satellite data onchain, in this case biomass data from our satellite data provider, and the smart contracts basically consume that data in order to mint tokens and it happens all through Chainlink oracles.”
NFTrees allow farmers and forest preservation organizations to tokenize ongoing CO2 capture from their trees. In the event of tree loss confirmed by satellite data, an insurance smart contract pays out the cost of replanting trees and replacing their tokenized offsets. Tokens can also be attached to crops, benefiting both investors exposed to a farm’s yield and farmers, particularly those in regions without access to traditional forms of capital and insurance.
“People from unbanked areas or developing countries can basically now access global capital on the blockchain because now investments can flow more easily into projects or into real-world assets, skipping this whole legacy financial infrastructure,” Zwaneveld explained.
The beauty of this system, in his view, is that everyone everywhere in the world can access the same technology.
“Right now, we have onboarded nine projects ranging from China to Argentina, because blockchain is a global financial infrastructure allowing us to basically do this anywhere in the world.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Nick Zwaneveld.