Filecoin Sustainable Blockchain Summit - LATAM - October 2022, 31 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Aligning on a Baseline Carbon Token Standard - Adam Spiers - Selva (Track 2)

Description

Adam Spiers (one of Toucan’s co-founders) propose to co-lead a workshop with conference participants to find alignment on a baseline carbon token standard.

There are many types of carbon credits which can be used in many different contexts, so most likely it is unrealistic to converge on a single token standard. However, if standardization is completely absent, then interoperability and composability become difficult or even impossible. DeFi has already shown the enormous power of composability in harnessing network effects, therefore it’s crucial that we seek to grow the ReFi space in the same way. Through this lens, standardization of carbon tokens is critical to the success of the ReFi movement.

We will build on the work of the Carbon Token Working Group, led by Adam, and Toucan’s experience designing and operating the TCO2 token standard.

- Sustainable Blockchain Summit LATAM 2022 - https://sbs.tech/

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The title of the talk um it might be a bit of misdirection we'll see, might be a trick title to some degree um talking about how do we uh get some more standardization in the carbon token space, so to set the scene?

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uh Carbon tokens are really at the heart of this wonderful um ecosystem that that is rapidly growing around us. We see with all the amazing talks going on here, there's so much activity in this new space and I see the carbon token is one of one of the most important seeds to plant in the ground for all these beautiful flowers, all these refi projects and initiatives to grow. So we need to get that initial seed. You know really nicely uh ready uh to bloom into into flowers.

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But we have a challenge and um it's fragmentation. Basically, um that I mean fragmentation is a risk in in many situations. um In this context, um if we have multiple ways of doing it, then we fragment effort.

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um You know just work: we fragment liquidity from a sort of financial or economic perspective and we damage composability and interoperability, um but fortunately, in this space, um as we know, it's not an issue because we just already have a single token standard, which everyone agrees on, and we even have a nice logo representing that single unified standard right- oh maybe not um yeah, so we already have um quite a few different approaches now, I have to apologize here for absolutely massacring the beautiful brand colors of moss and Nori um and I should also apologize to Flo and probably several other projects that I forgot to put on here or didn't didn't squeeze on.

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um But you know the question is: what do we do about all these different approaches to avoid this fragmentation problem? Well, luckily, there is an expert. His name is uh Randall Monroe, you might know some of you might know him and he's he's produced some very helpful literature, providing advice on this exact topic, so the code is in the room are probably very familiar with this comic, um but this is a common pattern right. So we have lots of standards and everyone is like. Oh it's a mess. We need to.

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You know just condense them all into one and then you're just adding up and end up um adding another standard. So that's great! So how do we add another standard? Any ideas shout out some ideas.

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It's okay, you don't have to um well. Obviously we create a working group right. That's that's how you create standards? um Okay, maybe we don't want 15 standards. Let's be, let's be sensible for a second, but um we have this great working group and it's one of many working groups actually um and and we're you know, there's uh in fact I think it's Marcus here, uh yeah there you go is proposed.

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uh You know sensible thing of let's try and merge working groups together, so we have larger groups of people all trying to align rather than smaller groups.

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um So this this working group I think was founded, or at least co-founded by Luke Schubert from open Forest protocol. Now we have members of the working group in the room um and it it's quite new um and we're you know trying to figure out how to collaborate efficiently together.

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um So I put this um sort of initial home page together um and I took a stab at writing a mission overview, which you don't have to read that um this is just to show you that you know there is a working group there's a home page. It's currently in a notion hosted by my team toucan protocol. Oh I forgot to do the uh the Superbird thing.

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There you go um I had to get that on camera, so that my team is, you know, happy that I'm doing the the brand placement, um so uh so yeah I took a stab at um at kind of describing what's what's the mission, and you know welcome uh suggestions for this. um Here's some background. uh The thing that I want to suggest here and again this is my words- um hasn't been sort of formally blessed by the working group.

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Yet, um but it's essentially that you know the key goal should be minimize: the proliferation of Standards, around tokenized carbon and maximize interoperability and composability uh between well I've, written on-chain, carbon projects there, but I think on chain and off chain, and the combination of the two are really important.

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um So I have some prior experience of working groups and you know quite often they're they're, full of talented and highly motivated people really great people, um but even so sometimes they can look a bit like this um and it can be. It can be hard to sort of herd cats in the right direction and and come up with. You know, useful output.

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um So my thought was: we need a way to coordinate between different groups of people who might see things a bit differently and maybe even speak in slightly different languages, not necessarily human languages, but at least technical languages and I mean vocabulary is important, even if you're speaking the same language.

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um So that gave me an idea and um I guess some of you. Maybe most of you will know what this is. um It's called the Rosetta Stone. It was discovered in I, think 1799 and um it has the same piece of writing carved on the stone in three different languages on the top you have hieroglyphics in the middle is demotic, and the bottom is Greek um and I have a great colleague here.

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Who can tell me whether that's correct or not, although you probably can't read it here and the the fact that it's the same piece of writing in different languages, it meant that Scholars were able to make sense of the hieroglyphic version by comparing it uh with the Greek which they already understood. And then you know we kind of built this knowledge through translation between different perspectives on the same underlying meaning, and so my suggestion was to um bring this kind of approach to to carbon token standards.

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So I thought what happens if we build a carbon Rosetta Stone and we look at what are all the attributes that we need to describe carbon, whether it's like an individual's certain token um or it's, the uh the project, the carbon project and the carbon vintage that that token is is representing.

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um So you know, we know that there are. There are many different attributes needed to describe these different things so with the Rosetta Stone, by looking at all those attributes and looking at who uses which attributes and how they use them. We can see the overlaps between the different um initiatives in this space, how different projects use the same attributes, how different projects use different attributes? And then, with that knowledge and this kind of focal point for communication, we can work to together towards a shared vision.

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So I put together this um database under the auspices of the carbon token standard working group and it's quite simple, really um and and by the way I'm happy to announce as of right now, it's publicly available it hasn't been. um But this is the um the link here, so you can hopefully go to it right now and you should be able to to actually see it um and I think I have a a timed tweet that should have automatically launched like in the last three or four minutes um on that topic.

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So I'm excited for people to dive in, and uh you know it's just a suggested approach. I don't know for sure if it will work, but I would love people to take a look and contribute, and um you know just see if it works for you. I would love to collect um different people's um usage of all these attributes and then we can compare them and contrast them and we can discuss in a single place.

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What is the best way of expressing all this data so just to take a quick look, um so it's hosted in notion, uh probably because this is web. Three. Most of you know what notion is, but it's uh sort of great online content management system, and it has some really nice qualities that allow us to do this.

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um Maybe there's other better solutions that we could move to at some point, but it was kind of a quick and not so dirty way of approaching this. um So here's an example of a view. You don't need to see the individual details, but the point is it just imagine a giant spreadsheet, and this allows us to take different slices of that spreadsheet um and it will just you know, focus on specific attributes within there.

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So this particular view is um a view of the attributes in the Vera registry and some example, values and an explanation of what each attribute is. So you probably can't read it yourself. So I'll give some examples struggling to read it myself um so project description, for example, some short text describing how the project is creating impact um project developer is the entity responsible for the Project's outcome and the initial recipient of credits upon issuance project location, geographical coordinates of the project, and you know that's that's an example with location.

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Do you do you represent the location as an address, or just a country or a region of the world? Or some you know, satellite like GPS, coordinates or or a link on Google, Maps or something else. So all of these kinds of debates of different ways of representing the same data can be discussed in here um so uh We've recently added the interwork alliance, carbon reference, token and card will remove it unit token attributes. In there um we have obviously representing my organization toucan.

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We have all the toucan on train on chain attributes um the the full databases at the bottom of the page. So you basically see the giant spreadsheet with everything on it and here's an example, uh so we're collaborating with regen Network um on on bridging credits between um the two protocols and as part of that work, we needed to do this mapping between their representation of data and ours.

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So we built a table very like this one, and that was part of what gave me the idea for this whole thing is like well, we can, if we put all of the attributes in a giant database, then we can take slices and we can compare to two approaches and see what are the differences and what are the commonalities?

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um So that's that that's pretty much it for the the Rosetta Stone, um like I, said, feel free to um to take a look yourself, and it would be great for people to contribute. I just wanted to point out that this is kind of like a layer, zero, social consensus model. Where um you know it's about.

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How do we get humans to coordinate effectively, um but we also need machines to coordinate effectively right so I think in parallel, and these can feed each other as we as we agree as humans on the various bits of data that we want to represent in this ecosystem.

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um In parallel, we can construct machine, readable data, schemas um and and do Transformations between them and other. You know comparisons and so on, and you know our friends of Falcon green. Have this awesome project which I see is the kind of the machine version of the Rosetta Stone in a way and I think they? You know there could be a lot of synergies between the two so just wanted to give them a shout out as well.

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um So the summary uh I don't think we need a single standard, but what we really need is well structured collaboration and clear communication across the whole space, and we want to maximize alignment and minimize fragmentation, and once we have that coordination of the human level, then we need a way to express schemas in a machine, readable form for the machines, and we can then we can automate the conversion of data between them and final thought.

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Actually I missed one out, because it's in the title of the talk you know a baseline for all this stuff. Some shared Common Ground would be great, but maybe we don't need a baseline or maybe we could have two or three bass lines, but as long as we can kind of compare them- and everyone is clear what they are, then, maybe that's good enough um and yeah. Finally, you know this, even though it's called a carbon token standard. You know the working group is called that and this talk talks about carbon token, specifically I.

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Think all of this applies to off-chain data as well, um and that's where the likes of uh filecoin green come in. So that's pretty much. It I think um this is the link to the slides, and with that, do we have any time for questions.

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We have time for one.

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Question going once hey I appreciate the sort of uh problematization of the the one standard approach. um Do you think it would be helpful to eventually develop something like an ERC standard, an eip4, a formal implementation of these systems? That's maybe flexible enough to accommodate the different data representations.

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Yeah, that's a fantastic question and I think that goes back to my comment about the Baseline. You know that we could have an ERC standard, which is a baseline And. If you look at existing ELC standards, you get something like erc20, which is like a baseline standard, and then you get all these extensions on top, which you can add in and I think you know there's an analogy here that we could do the same kind of thing, foreign.