Why Is Jasmine Building On A Blockchain?
As a climate startup, a lot of people are surprised to hear that Jasmine has a blockchain at the center of our technology stack. But for us, it’s always seemed the natural choice for coordinating billions of people to achieve the transformation the green transition demands. In hundreds of conversations since founding Jasmine, we’ve crystallized the reasoning behind that intuition:
TLDR: Building on a public blockchain helps Jasmine launch faster; grow faster; and mature faster.
Launch Faster
The core value we need to deliver users is the ability to exchange energy attribute certificates (EACs). The engineering lift to do that with blockchain is much smaller compared to doing it without blockchain.
Two important examples: In an on-chain market, participants bring their own identity (“address”) and assets (“wallet”) with them. We don’t need to engineer or integrate with any centralized settlement and clearing systems because we get those “for free” by building on a blockchain. This faster build also means faster feedback and faster iteration.
Grow Faster
By building on a public blockchain, we unlock a unique source of EAC demand. Anything you want to do with an EAC off-chain, you can still do once it’s on-chain. But there are ways to use EACs on-chain that do not exist off-chain. For example, blockchains and the apps that run on them can build energy attribution directly into their code — but only if the EACs are on-chain. A user can borrow against their REC inventory in apps like AAVE — but only if the REC is on-chain.
This demand unlock will grow the liquidity of on-chain EAC markets faster than an off-chain market.
Mature Faster
“Mature markets” let you do a lot more than just trade A for B. Functions like leverage, debt, shorting make markets more useful and prices more accurate.
By building on a public blockchain, Jasmine is inviting everyone to build applications using our format. Once an EAC is on the blockchain, anyone can build on it without our permission. The whole maturity of DeFi (debt, leverage, DOA’s, etc) is immediately available to anyone with a EAC in their crypto wallet.
If we were building a centralized exchange, we would need to build all of this financial maturity ourselves. That would take a really long time.
Climate dMarkets
Markets and blockchains are the best tools that we have for climate-scale coordination. Markets have repeatedly been critical in solving the coordination problems underneath some of our biggest climate challenges. Now, in the face of climate change, the largest most important coordination challenge of human history, we are building our platform on blockchain because it enables us to move with the urgency the problem demands.
Not convinced? Tell me on twitter.
Want to learn more? Join us on discord.
