Keep calm and plant trees: Announcing Flyingcarpet’s work on cryptographically verifiable carbon credits via a new project with tree-planting company EcoTree

2019 has been yet another busy year for Flyingcarpet (FLCA). In this post we’ll introduce some recent developments and announcements, starting with a new project that we have been working on over the past few months with EcoTree and supported by the European Union via Ecosys Group. We are excited to share the details about this development below.

About EcoTree

EcoTree is a French company making planting forests accessible to everyone, with a dual objective of providing a financial yield to investors from responsible forest logging, alongside certified carbon removal embedded in the forest growth. EcoTree has full visibility on the forests they buy, plant and maintain, providing certainty to their investors regarding the trees they finance on their platform. EcoTree has just raised a 3million euro round of funding, enabling it to expand into other markets in Europe (for now) and expand the solutions they offer.

Ecology & FLCA

Planetary reforestation represents promising potential for slowing climate change. Recent research from ETH Zurich showed that 2.2 billion acres of land exist globally where new forests could be cultivated — potentially capturing two-thirds of carbon emissions caused by humans.

FLCA views reforestation as a highly viable countermeasure against the impending threats of the climate crisis. As a provider of geospatial analytics, FLCA is in a unique position to enable an array of forestry-based preservation use cases. By collaborating with EcoTree and leveraging their forestry tracking and verification mechanisms and expertise, FLCA is poised to deliver a first-of-its-kind reforestation product — enabling verifiable carbon credits, climate-related prediction markets, and more.

About the project

EcoTree has chosen FLCA as its blockchain partner to implement a project that enables its operations to become more scalable and transparent through various applications of blockchain technology. This project is funded in large parts by the European Commission.

The project is split into 3 phases:

• Phase 1: register immutable information on-chain into smart contracts

Our first objective is to make EcoTree blockchain-compatible by registering its portfolio of forests onto the blockchain, and thereby enable new applications for their platform in the future. After a new forest is acquired, sufficiently surveyed, assessed, and restored by the team, the forest is added via the intuitive EcoTree Asset Creation Dashboard UI that FLCA is building for EcoTree. The dashboard records the forest along with its corresponding metadata (e.g. size in hectares, location, etc.) inside a blockchain-based smart contract. Recording the immutable information that describe the forest, including types and number of trees, is the first step in enabling the tokenisation of EcoTree assets.

Below is the high-level architecture upon which FLCA will help EcoTree mint its own digital assets on the blockchain.

High-level architecture

• Phase 2: build a dashboard for exploring these forestry assets

Next FLCA will build an exploration dashboard to provide both the EcoTree team and EcoTree’s users with an accessible purpose-built interface for browsing all of the on-chain forest smart contract data and records. Via the dashboard, users will be able to view and explore all of EcoTree’s forests, their history, and insights surrounding their revenue generation and CO2 sequestration potential. Insights and data displayed within the dashboard will consist of a combination of EcoTree’s off-chain database forest information verified via FLCA’s smart contract-based data-verification hashes, delivered via an in-built Chainlink integration. This in turn will facilitate the auditability of EcoTree assets both on- and off-blockchain. EcoTree has already obtained certification from the AMF, the French financial market authority, using various auditing methods, so in this first instance FLCA will enable the digitization of the exploration of such audited records. In the future this will make it easier to verify at scale the veracity of such records and ensure they remain traceable through their full ownership lifecycle.

• Phase 3: Ownership transferability — towards fungible carbon removal assets

EcoTree would like to be able to easily transfer the ownership rights of those digital tokens backed by real assets. That is where tokenization becomes most useful: FLCA will assist EcoTree in providing transferable ownership, making ownership rights for example tradeable between participants on the EcoTree platform. In the future, we could even imagine that these tokens could become fungible with other carbon removal marketplaces outside of EcoTree’s own, if and when more standards emerge in this market. This enables EcoTree to be future-proof and evolve along with the market for CO2 sequestration, while keeping its current business model that combines the economic benefits of sustainable forest management with additional CO2 sequestration (see graphic below extracted from their website).

• Phase 4 and beyond: backing tokenized real-assets with data using distributed Proof of Observation verification

There is likely to be a fourth phase to ensure integrity between customer profiles and custodianship of tokenized assets corresponding to the purchase amount of carbon removal. As mentioned above, tokenized assets could potentially even be made fungible with new carbon removal markets that are emerging across different marketplaces (see for another example our Medium post on Reforestum).

As we explained in that post, FLCA’s Proof of Observation (PoO) is another potential integration that will enable dynamic verification of the state of specific forests using machine learning on satellite imagery. This, in turn, will help reduce the costs of verifying that assets are in line with EcoTree claims, ensuring long-standing integrity. Satellite verification executed via FLCA using mathematical models could further drive new norms for verification and data-proofing of real assets like trees. A recent project with Gnosis (pm.flyingcarpet.network — currently only available via MetaMask) to build a geospatial prediction market for real assets is bringing us one step closer to this vision.

Towards a greener, data-driven future

At FLCA, we are on a mission to help some of the world’s most ambitious projects to achieve their vision while reaping the benefits that distributed marketplaces can bring in terms of data verifiability and integrity. We are proud to be working with EcoTree on this EU funded project, and we look forward to collaborating and learning with them how blockchain applications can play their part in helping solve the largest puzzle in human history.

With assistance from Julien Bouteloup and Leopold Joy