Sneak peek into Impact Self
Dottyland co-founder Ketly Freirik had a thorough chat with Jimi Cohen on his Max Impact episode recently — about what we’re building at Dottyland, why, and how.
You can read a part of our convo here. If you’re up to listening to the whole hour, you’ll find it here, from the halfway mark.
Jimi: I love hearing people’s web3 stories. How did you start moving toward the wild world of web3?
Ketly: One of the main things that really grabbed our attention was the evolution or even disruption of identity in web3, what forms it can take and where it will go. There are the identity vehicles that we know today but there will be new formats in the future. We gravitated towards it because we had thought a lot about how to make individual impact a fundamental part of our everyday lives. It’s not about doing one climate-positive action in one app and receiving rewards for that in silo. It’s about how can we, in the largest possible way, integrate this into everything we do.
We want to see individual impact as part of identity that we carry with us daily. We call this on-chain representation of one’s impact an Impact Self. It needs to be functional and really beneficial to you. Contrary to what many people think, individuals do have power in addressing the climate crisis. This year’s IPCC report says that lifestyle and behavior can result in 40–70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in tandem with the right policies, infrastructure, and technology. So it is very much in the power of individuals to be part of the change, to drive the change, but today we don’t have sufficient incentives in place to change behaviors of individuals.
Essentially, we want to mobilize consumers to climate-positive behavior. It goes for everything from reducing consumption, demanding access to higher quality, considering our footprints, etc. Everything that’s part of our daily lives.
Going back to the roots of our skills as founders — consumer psychology — it’s clear that the average person doesn’t change their behavior unless it’s easier, it’s cheaper, it’s better, and even better if you get paid for it! If we’re talking about mass change, people are incentivized by benefits.
Jimi: When you talk about functional identity, what do you mean?
Ketly: It’s not just some information about you that sits somewhere, but it’s something that you are incentivized to use actively on a day-to-day basis. For example, by guaranteeing better access to certain services. Better impact should offer better terms for loans. Having worked with credit scores in our previous fintech lives, we have a strong hypothesis that better impact is in correlation with better credit behavior.
Also, it can serve as a social signaller in different formats. It’s been very interesting exploring what’s alongside physical and current social media identity, also the redefinitions the metaverse brings. What sort of identifiers and signallers can you carry with you? It’s actually very exciting because the space is changing, opportunities are changing and you’re not so limited by the physical world anymore. You can’t carry something above your head in real life, but it might work in a metaverse and include a range of discounts and other privileges — real tangible benefits alongside these social signallers.
This is what we mean by functional. It’s not passive, it’s something that you actively use for your own benefit. We see it as completely owned by the individual, for the owner to decide whether it’s public or private, or whether they want to show it to specific service providers.
For this to work, we need to add as many behavioral data sources that are measurable and verifiable as possible. Our goal is to make the Impact Self work for its owners.
In the beginning, we’re using one score, but in the future, it can evolve into different formats and various subsets of data. For example, you might be okay sharing your on-chain impact but maybe you don’t want to share your off-chain impact.
Jimi: What kind of impact or actions are you trying to incentivize through Dottyland?
Ketly: We’re working with environmentalists to decide what are meaningful impact activities to include. We’re launching our first closed beta next week, which takes into account on-chain carbon offsetting. So if an individual has done carbon offsetting, they can claim their Impact Self! In the beginning, we’re specifically looking at NTC and BCT token retirements and calculating the impact score against an average yearly footprint of an individual. This is just a proof of concept to look at this first verified measurable activity.
We’re keen to hold on to the fact that whatever is part of your impact score and identity, it’s verifiable and measurable. In the beginning, of course, this will restrict what can we look at.
There are other solutions, also in web2, where there’s a lot of self-reporting, saying, for example, I walked there instead of driving. For us, for individual impact to hold real value, it needs to be verified and measured, otherwise, anyone can come and say that they’ve done something, and claim the rewards. And that would affect the value of that identity.
As the next step, we’re going look at other climate-positive activities that are verified and measurable. For example, For Trees Club is planting trees and issuing proof that someone has in fact contributed to the tree-planting initiative.
Jimi: Love it! What kind of web3 applications are you looking to integrate now and what’s your vision for that in the future?
Ketly: I’m hoping that the range of web3 applications six months from now will be significantly wider than today. Currently, we see one of the use cases is access to DAOs. DAOs are working on reputation models and ways of evaluating different metrics that they want to measure, based on which they evaluate DAO members for certain tasks, bounties, teams, etc. So this is also where someone’s impact score can be a good use case for values alignment and trust.
Also, we’re actively talking to DeFi organizations to look at how to integrate this impact score into evaluating someone’s creditworthiness to issue under-collateralized loans. Most of the loans today are over-collateralized and take into account no other information than how many assets you own. But DeFi could use the hypothesis that your impact score has a strong correlation to better credit behavior.
Really interesting use cases in the near future lie also in web3 socials. Aside from just having a badge or other signal on your profile, which we’re currently also looking into, what sort of forms could it take? How could impact be integrated into socials other than just the signaller? Can better impact score be part of the algorithm by multiplying the value of upvotes or collects?
It’s early days for most web3 applications and everything is possible at the most fundamental level! It wouldn’t probably be so easy at this point to go to Twitter with this proposition. But it’s potentially easier to participate in the actual building of the algorithm, for Lens, for example. So it’s really interesting times now, where you can be part of building web3 and really be on constant lookout, how can impact be integrated here? This is our everyday — to look at everything that’s being built and how can it be fundamentally integrated. If this sparks something, do get in touch! We’re open to any kind of ideas and really believe that everything in the web3 space right now is actually possible and doable.
Jimi: Amazing! Yeah, I can imagine a dynamic NFT on your profile in different virtual worlds and how it can digitally change and demonstrate your impact. Is that kind of what you envision?
Ketly: Yes! I also believe that this is just the first iteration of that, like everything in web3, we will begin to see where it can really go in a couple of years. The format we’re putting the Impact Self and impact score now is a non-transferable dynamic NFT. So it’s something that can be easily used across different applications in a very standardized and simple way. It can be taken from a DAO to a metaverse in one form or another, and gamification can be added around that as well.
It could also hold a collection of all the proofs of impacts that you have in one neat format. It’s a question of how to organize meaningful parts of your wallet that you want to see and use and have ownership of. There are several issues to be solved along the way, which we also see as an opportunity to innovate and help find solutions for all SBT and NFT issuers. This is a very interesting corner where’s lots to do, and we want to be part of that!
Jimi: I think this is really amazing what you’re building, because identity and telling the world who you are, influences our actions a lot. People want to one-up and show their trophies. This identity signal would influence people’s actions! I think the more we can identify with a certain positive persona, the more we can live up to it, and the more we can make those things happen in real life. So I’m excited about what you’re building!
All right, closing thoughts? One thing you want to leave the people with here today.
Ketly: It’s important to believe that change is possible. It’s sometimes easy to forget this, but I think one of the really good things about being in this web3 ReFi space is seeing others also building towards the same goals. So take in this collective energy and keep going!
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