Blockchain is now on the front line against climate change
Blockchain technology is spurring more carbon credit trading while lowering costs for young investors to get involved, says Stefan Rust of Sonic Capital, in a special Forkast.News interview.
【 Published by Forkast | Editor: Forkast.News 】
Blockchain technology provides the “perfect answer” to some of the most pressing environmental issues faced by our planet today, but innovation in the open-source world may be moving too quickly for state-governed markets to keep up with, said Stefan Rust, the former CEO of Bitcoin.com.
“There’s the voluntary market and then there’s the governed market,” said Rust, now the CEO of Sonic Capital, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “The governed market is really going to struggle with keeping up the pace of this industry.”
Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — which enables nations around the world to trade emission reductions — has yet to be agreed upon as the Covid-19 outbreak led to the postponement of the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) that was initially scheduled to take place in November 2020. The session has now been rescheduled to November 2021.
While the recent bilateral agreement between Peru and Switzerland to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may have kickstarted the international transfer of mitigation outcomes (ITMO) as detailed in Article 6, the private sector has been moving ahead on its own to lead voluntary efforts to reduce global carbon emissions.
Tech giant Microsoft plans to be carbon-negative by 2030, while rival Apple has also committed to reach 100% carbon neutrality for its supply chain and products by 2030.
In the cryptocurrency world, payment platform Ripple also recently pledged to be “carbon net-zero” by 2030.
“We believe there’s an enterprise element,” Rust said. “You’re seeing that chain happening in the enterprise space and that demand is going to result in the adoption of these voluntary carbon credits.”
Blockchain, Rust added, could also be a potent weapon for battling environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in other ways. He points out that it is more profitable for the cryptocurrency industry to be carbon efficient.
“There have been a number of reports on Google that have identified the sources of that electricity for the proof-of-work mining, is generally from underutilized electricity, e.g. electricity that’s being generated and not pumped into the grid,” Rust said. “[Miners are] using water where it’s cold and where nobody else goes.”
Blockchain technology and tokenization are also enabling companies like Sonic Capital to offer funds with lower investment minimums — which in turn may be more affordable for millennial and Gen Z investors interested in putting their money into ESG causes.
“So people with a lower appetite, they don’t want to put in ten million dollars, they can put in five thousand dollars — that’s the minimum investment.” Rust said. “We can now facilitate that, thanks to the blockchain and it being tokenized, our cost of maintaining a fund, providing all the transparency, the disclosures, the onboarding, all of that is far more cost-effective.”
According to a recent study, 90% of surveyed Gen Zers believe companies must act to help ESG issues while 75% do research to ensure a company follows through its promises.
Watch Rust’s conversation with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to hear more about how the tokenization of investments can help discourage bad actors in the carbon credit market and how investors can make money from saving the planet.
Highlights
- How blockchain can address ESG issues: “Blockchain is the perfect answer to a large portion of the problems. Governance in smart contracts, you’ve got it on the blockchain, immutable, there’s no better truth machine than the blockchain itself. And then you can address all of the inclusion elements around social, which is addressing social inclusion so everybody can participate in it.”
- Increasing demand for tokenized investments: “Combining that sort of desire at a consumer level with that of an institutional level to invest via security tokens or via tokens into our fund, we can by combining the two together, focusing on maybe institutional sort of grade investors or qualified investors, we could actually make the availability to buy into early-stage venture companies to lower grade investment appetite.”
- Criticisms on crypto’s carbon footprint: “Miners are generally heavily reliant, I think up to 80% on renewable energy. So they’re all using water where it’s cold and where nobody else goes. From that perspective, there is another angle, or they’re close to solar power plants where there’s, again, can’t get it into the grid in time, it’s not being consumed appropriately. But there’s room for improvement.”
- Younger generations taking charge of their own future: “So people with a lower appetite, they don’t want to put in ten million dollars, they can put in five thousand dollars — that’s the minimum investment. We can now facilitate that, thanks to the blockchain and it being tokenized, our cost of maintaining a fund, providing all the transparency, the disclosures, the onboarding, all of that is far more cost-effective.”
■ Source: Forkast
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