Earlier this week, Chainlink Co-Founder Sergey Nazarov tweeted that hybrid smart contracts have a net positive effect on the environment. He pointed to highly automated carbon tax credits using oracle network-verified data as one of many benefits.
Today, Chainlink announced it has awarded a Chainlink Community Grant to Green World Campaign (GWC), which aims to demonstrate how hybrid smart contracts can reverse the harmful effects of climate change. The grant will help fund AIRS, a hybrid smart contract application that uses satellite data to automatically dispense financial rewards in the form of tokenized regenerative carbon assets to those performing successful regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture practices boost biodiversity by creating agroecology systems that increase communities’ income and nutrition as well as the soil’s ability to “draw down” CO₂ from the atmosphere. Scaling global regenerative agriculture efforts to meet the mounting threat of climate change requires participation from individuals, communities, corporations and governments.
Hybrid smart contracts solve problems, such as high administrative overhead and slow program creation/enactment, that prevent large corporate and government organizations from employing adequate regenerative agriculture. By combining blockchain-based automation and transparency with verified off-chain computation and real-world data, hybrid smart contracts can issue payments and penalties that incentivize sustainable consumption and increase accountability.
The AIRS hybrid smart contract application stems from a collaboration between Cornell University, Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), Green World Campaign, Green World Ventures LLC, Green World-Kenya, ETH-Zurich and ESRI. It achieves an unprecedented level of low-overhead automation and transparency by using Chainlink oracles to source and analyze ground truthing and satellite data, which triggers automated rewards payments to proven stewards of regenerative agriculture.
Of the Chainlink Community Grant, CEO of GWC Marc Barasch said, “By using blockchain technology and Chainlink oracles, we can distribute rewards to good stewards in a more efficient manner that is easily verifiable by all stakeholders, which only further incentivizes people to participate knowing their labor and capital generates verifiable results.”
GWC plans to launch an AIRS pilot in Kenya, where it previously inaugurated the country’s first successful community-based complementary currency. The Chainlink Community Grant will help scale the success of AIRS as a powerful tool for converting regenerative agricultural outcomes into financial instruments throughout the world.
To learn more about GWC, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.