Menthol’s ReFi Guardians

This article contains the first episode of an ongoing series introducing “Menthol’s ReFi Guardians.” This growing list includes ReFi-Projects helping us to achieve our vision by creating fantastic green use cases!

Since it is our goal to offer regeneration as-a-service through intelligent automation solutions for climate action, we enable ReFi projects to revolutionize the existing processes and systems of the world economy. Along this way, coordinating with other like-minded projects is an absolute necessity!

Our first objective is the decarbonization of web3, allowing the highly innovative space to step up as a climate leader in the race towards climate positivity. For this matter, partnerships and interoperability are essential to optimize existing workflows, accelerate processes, and spread network effects and awareness beyond one’s community.

For Menthol Protocol, partnerships are of the highest importance, as we want to offer our ReFi Guardians a customer-centric infrastructure qualifying them to provide an end-to-end solution. Starting with the tokenization of impact tokens on their end while allowing the demand side a fully automated and easy-to-use access: From calculating the remaining on-chain emissions and offsetting them through a “one-time account activation,” powered by Menthol’s CoolBot.

Before an official partnership, one usually goes through some preliminary stages which aim to get to know each other, define common denominators and goals, and enter into a creative exchange that establishes a win-win situation as its primary goal. This preliminary phase of a partnership is exhilarating and has the potential to produce unexpected results time and time again!

We want to take you by the hand today and give you a more in-depth insight into ReFi projects’ collaborative efforts to regenerate the world through a green revolution! Be sure that we will continue the episodes of our ReFi Guardians with new projects, all individually building solid pillars for accepting and disseminating ReFi-driven sustainability and regeneration solutions.

We have been calling these surrounding projects MENTHOL’s ReFi GUARDIANS!

They all have joined the path of the green-pilled, taking a closer look and questioning established systems with the utmost desire to bring disruption straight towards a genuinely regenerative system of public goods.

We all seek to use blockchain technologies to strive for a future in which our mother earth is never again left out of economic value chains, powered by a community of Regens and Degens!

While Menthol is creating an environment for reducing the gap between the supply and the demand side of sustainable and social impact tokens, we establish a win-win-win situation for all parties involved.

On the one hand, our ReFi Guardians on the supply side benefit from our user-friendly effort to automate the offset process and create a continuous ease-to-use business model with strong involvement of their own customers’ communities. On the other hand, the demand side, with an endless list of projects and uses-cases living within the blockchain, all need easy access for their offsetting purposes and are happy to get high-quality tokens.

Menthol in between is capitalizing on the trust and good reputation we do have on both ends while collaboratively building public goods and operating jointly with both sides. While Menthol always acts from the customer perspective, which includes Mother Earth(!), seeking the best market players to offer impactful green assets, we use our protocol as an automated procurement and regeneration system.

Right from the start, Menthol Protocol is planned to evolve into a DAO, having a shareholder-less Foundation as the legal entity already in place. Menthol’s COOL token will allow governance to create an actual regeneration layer for web3 and beyond, substantiated and interconnected with intelligent climate-tech infrastructure.

We are building a team of experts and will initiate open working groups across project borders in a highly inclusive way tackling and solving the issues ahead of us.

Looking at the ReFi Guardians, one essential group of value providers can be identified: Tokenizers of carbon- and other impact credits. These projects play an essential role, as they aim to solve fundamental issues of current market dynamics. Through the power of web3, they bring liquidity, automation, transparency, and trust into a carbon credit offsetting market which exists already for 20 years. They have done remarkable work by getting the market fundamentals up and running in a more efficient and accessible way. Still, one problem is the certification of carbon credits through third parties, which are of limited group and efficiency. For instance, you need a six-figure budget to handle the certification costs while only being allowed to apply for certification if you have more than 100 ha. Next to substantial trust issues in respect of the authenticity and the true impact of carbon credits on the market, the methodologies at the current state are very questionable and turn out to be a bottleneck at a critical point in the race to reach a climate-positive future.

Regarding carbon credits, different categories exist: carbon reduction, avoidance, and removal. Latter, reducing the carbon right away and subsequently are of great importance. Given our golden hour, it is of utmost importance to unleash the different solutions in an impactful, synergetic, and holistic approach.

Also, we are not only talking about carbon credits but of an ever-growing spectrum of impact tokens, including biodiversity- and renewable energy credits. But let us not hold you back any longer: We are now happy to introduce you to Menthol’s ReFi Guardians!

Flow Carbon

Flowcarbon is a pioneering climate technology company that brings carbon credits onto the blockchain. Its mission is to make carbon markets accessible and transparent, enabling the efficient and early flow of capital to be invested directly into projects that combat climate change. It is committed to driving a real impact on people, biodiversity, and the planet.

The already announced partnership of Menthol Protocol and Flowcarbon will make it easy for different types of entities to fully mitigate their carbon impact by offsetting the balance of emissions that cannot be further reduced, also known as “hard to abate emissions”.

Furthermore, the partnership illustrates the ability of blockchain technology to unlock and rapidly multiply positive social impact: Menthol Protocol’s tools can be integrated into any facet of the web3 tech stack, including applications and entire blockchains, to automatically calculate the entity’s carbon footprint and purchase a corresponding amount of qualified tokenized carbon and renewable energy credits.

Flowcarbon, as one of the leading providers of on and off-chain carbon reduction solutions, will be one of the first token providers who will benefit from this groundbreaking technological invention.

We hope this article could give you an insight into our already vast network of green asset providers. In the following article, we will look at the demand side of impact tokens and give you an idea of how diverse and numerous the use cases can be.

The Regen Network

Regen Network’s infrastructure originates digital carbon assets in the Interchain economy, unlocking web3’s regenerative finance.

They motivate land stewards around the world to sequester carbon and improve biodiversity. To enable a smooth onboarding of suitable projects, Regen launched the “Regen Registry,” which is an ecosystem service operating in the voluntary market. It aims to support climate action by accelerating the adoption of nature-based solutions, regenerating and restoring natural ecosystems. Pulling on a combination of tools from Web3 and open source movements, Regen Registry aims to democratize and invigorate regenerative finance by empowering communities of earth stewards, scientists, technologists, and climate entrepreneurs to govern the systems used to create new ecological assets.

In order to power Regen Registry, the project has created the so-called Regen Ledger. Regen Ledger is a public proof of stake (PoS) blockchain developed with the “Cosmos Software Development Kit” (SDK) built for verification of claims, agreements & data related to the ecological state. Regen Ledger enables multiple registries to communicate and transact, producing a public environmental accounting system.

REGEN is the native governance token of Regen Network. Assuming the token holders stake their tokens, the token allows one to participate in the governance of the chain, receive block rewards and their share of the inflation mechanism. As the native token for Regen Ledger, REGEN must be used to pay for transaction costs on-chain, commonly referred to as gas, which is required to transfer REGEN. Future utility of the token is connected to the issuance, governance, curation, auditing, and exchange for eco-credits.

Menthol’s interaction with Regen is rather apparent than complicated: as a middleman between the supply side and the demand side, Menthol is seeking a qualitative Network of green asset ramps with certified regenerative projects.

Solid World Dao

Solid World DAO is tackling two of the major challenges the offset market is currently facing, scalability and liquidity.

Their incredibly skilled team is building a framework to scale the carbon market into a planetary powerhouse. Their mission is to build a core infrastructure to make forward carbon markets as liquid as possible & thus, de-risk carbon credit investments!

As a first step, they create a transparent market situation by enabling the pre-funding of high-quality sequestration-based carbon projects to help them get off the ground. The process of selecting suitable projects and certifying them naturally precedes the financing. Nevertheless, the provision of funds for such projects in the initial phase is literally the be-all and end-all.

In a second step, their platform will also facilitate the commodification of carbon credits and provide much-needed liquidity to the carbon economy.

Additionally, their users can trade many types of forward carbon credits from agricultural, reforestation, and blue carbon sources.

We are delighted to say that we have already entered into an official partnership with Solid World.

Menthol Protocol will engender users of Solid World DAO to fully automate their offsetting efforts.

Our partnership is hence fully aligned with our shared goal of making regeneration scalable.

Solid Word Dao said in an earlier statement: “Menthol’s work to counteract blockchain emissions is very important to the ReFi mission, and we are happy to partner with them as they build their protocol. We look forward to seeing all of the COOL innovations they bring to the space!”

Nori

Nori is creating a marketplace for carbon dioxide removals. They are building an infrastructure to measure & monetize carbon removal activities, with a focus on soil-carbon sequestration & regenerative agricultural practices.

There exists more than just one method of removing and storing carbon. While Nori aims to serve all methods within its marketplace, the currently available methodology is the US Croplands Methodology, which farmers can use to get paid for additional CO2 removal.

The overall process for creating NRTs is divided into five basic steps:

1. Register: Projects are created when a supplier provides sufficient data on carbon removal.
2. Estimate the impact: Once project data is completely entered, an independent 3rd party estimates the carbon removal amount. Nori is not involved in generating a project’s carbon removal baselines and estimates to avoid conflict of interest.
3. Project Verification: In order to ensure the NRTs represent real carbon removal and storage, Nori requires independent 3rd parties to verify the carbon removal project data and provide credibility. Nori approves reputable verifiers in existing registries to review a supplier’s project data.
4. Token Creation: Nori uses the carbon removal estimates generated by the carbon quantification tool to determine how many NRTs to create for a project. They generate one NRT for farmers for every tonne of removed CO2 and stored in soils for a minimum of 10 years.
5. Sell NRTs: Buyers purchase NRTs directly from the supplier, while 100% of the total price goes to the project itself, and 15% transaction fees are added on top.

Nori and Menthol are sticking their heads together to announce something great soon! Stay tuned!

Klima DAO

KlimaDAO is the center of a new green economy. Built on the energy-efficient Polygon network, KlimaDAO uses a stack of technologies to reduce market fragmentation & accelerate the delivery of climate finance to sustainability projects globally.

The DAO sells bonds and distributes rewards to KLIMA holders (the in-house token). Every bond sold is added to an ever-growing green treasury or improves liquidity for key environmental assets.

Every KLIMA token is backed by a real-world carbon asset. Tokens are used to offset carbon emissions, interact with DeFi applications, and get exposure to the rapidly growing global carbon market.

Klima DAO strives to give Web3 builders and users the opportunity to participate in the carbon market through the KLIMA token. KLIMA tokens are:

• fungible: per the ERC20 token standard
• backed: by at least 1 tonne of tokenized verified carbon offsets locked in the KlimaDAO treasury
• useful: holders of KLIMA will have the ability to vote on Klima DAO policy

Therefore, the DAO serves the role of a decentral bank, governing the monetary policy of this new carbon-backed currency, just as a central bank governs the monetary policy of a fiat currency. Over time, the project will build an economy around KLIMA by driving adoption and unlocking growth of the crypto-carbon economy.

By developing KlimaDAO on transparent and open-source infrastructure, participation from Web3 developers, carbon projects, and climate experts will be welcomed to both build this new economy and be rewarded for their contributions.

Menthol is taking this friendly invitation for granted and will continue to develop common goals and intersections.

Toucan Protocol

With been in the field of ReFi since the beginning of 2020, the Toucan Protocol is one of the early birds within the green-pilled movement.

Toucan builds a planet-positive economy, a public infrastructure enabling a new money lego: programmable carbon. By improving the infrastructure for environmental assets in Web3, they help to solve key market issues:

• Fragmentation
• Inefficiency
• Lack of uniform data
• Limited access

Their so-called “Carbon Bridge” allows anybody to tokenize carbon credits & make them available in the emerging world of DeFi. Further, programmable carbon empowers builders and innovators to integrate climate finance into the very fabric of economic transactions.

After extensive development and iteration, Toucan launched in October 2021 as the infrastructure provider behind the BCT-Token (Base Carbon Tonne; their first carbon reference token). This was released together with KlimaDAO, the first platform ever built on Toucan’s Web3 carbon market technology.

Moss Earth

Moss Earth has specialized in certifying projects focusing on preservation & natural regeneration, reforestation & carbon sequestration.

Using blockchain technology, they enable the traceability & transparency of their MCO2 Tokens.

As the Regen Network, Moss Earth is selecting reputable environmental projects that aim to reduce or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases as a step against climate change. In doing so, Moss Earth has specialized in three different segments:

1. Preservation of Native Forests / Deforestation Prevention (REDD+) — These projects reduce greenhouse gas emissions by conserving large areas of forested land and preventing forest degradation. These projects also help to preserve local fauna, flora, and water resources. They generate jobs for local communities through monitoring, patrolling, and sustainable forest management.
2. Reforestation and Natural Regeneration — Projects that sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through reforestation with native species. In addition, they help rebuild local biodiversity, increase green areas and create ecological corridors, help to maintain water resources, and generate jobs for the local community.
3. Credits Generated by Carbon Sequestration — Sustainable agriculture captures significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil. We work with projects that promote sustainable agriculture via agroforestry systems or reduced use of chemical fertilization, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Similar to RegenNetwork, Menthol Protocol relies on trusted and reliable supply-side sources. Moss Earth is currently establishing its good reputation in the rainforests of Brazil and is one of the driving forces on the subject of regeneration in this region. Projects like this make our network so valuable and give us confidence that our efforts are going in the right direction through such impeccable groundwork.

We hope you enjoyed this introductory article to the world of Menthol’s ReFi Guardians!

Stay COOL!

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