Stellar Community Fund

By Stellarcarbon

Stellarcarbon

SCF #11

$37.0K

Legacy v3.0 Award

Awarded

Stellarcarbon provides transparent nature-based carbon offsetting with proof of retirement on Stellar and in the Verra Registry.

Products & Services

With Stellarcarbon, anyone with a Stellar account can do a voluntary carbon offset that is registered both on-chain and off-chain. We have been building the infrastructure needed to connect legacy carbon markets with the new digital economy taking place on public ledgers. Other companies building on Stellar will be able to integrate our backend service into their products and services, to give users easy access to carbon offsets. On top of this infrastructure, Stellarcarbon itself wants to develop and launch a retail shop for carbon offsetting aimed at individuals and businesses.

A major problem that voluntary carbon markets have faced over the past decades is low trustworthiness, on both the supply and demand side. While several governance bodies have stepped up to increase the integrity of carbon markets, it is still possible for providers to offer carbon credits without any oversight. Stellarcarbon addresses this problem by only working with a subset of VCS and CCB certified offsets, and by individually vetting projects.

Centralized registries are still essential, and we need to rely on them for the safeguards they provide. Unfortunately, they offer no way to intervene when an offset is used to make inaccurate claims about a company’s sustainability, or is even used to cover up environmental or social damage caused elsewhere. Stellarcarbon will develop terms of purchase that, together with a clawback mechanism, will allow us to invalidate malicious offsets on-chain.

Stellar provides us with the payment rails to fund offsets, and with transparent accounts onto which we can lock a carbon offset. An offsetter can pay with any liquid asset in their account to receive CARBON, select a vetted offset project to fund, and receive CarbonSINK as on-chain proof of retirement. Their offset is recorded in the Verra Registry, and the offsetter receives an off-chain certificate directly from Verra.

Requested Budget

$37.0K

Team

Adam Menary (xpollinate)

Co-Founder & Director

Adam has a Bachelor of Agricultural Science with Hons. Adam has 30 years of experience in supply chain management and has developed an assortment of related technology solutions. Adam undertook the first ISO 31000 supply chain studies for Beef and Dairy from Australia to the USA, which was tabled as the basis for a bilateral trade agreement under the Bioterrorism Act. Adam has overseen the integration of blockchain technologies into existing commercial products. He is passionate about real action on climate change and a co-founder of Beyond Zero Emissions, which has become one of Australia's leading think tanks on climate action.

LinkedIn: adammenary
X: @AdamMenary
Keybase: @Xpollinate

Alex Olieman (convergence)

Co-Founder & Lead Engineer

Since 2020, Alex has become more active in the Stellar community because he got absolutely hooked on Stellar Quest. After a decade of commercial software development and academic research, he wants to introduce regenerative projects to the Stellar ecosystem. Alex is a generalist with a background in Industrial Design Engineering, a Bachelor of Science in Future Planet Studies, and a Master of Science in Information Studies. Several of Alex’ long-term interests have come together in Stellarcarbon, and he is very much looking forward to launching it.

LinkedIn: alexolieman
Google Scholar: Alex Olieman
GitHub: aolieman
Keybase: @alioli

Hendrik Grondijs (henkieee2606)

Lead Developer

Hendrik has extensive experience in full stack web development, data science, and mobile app development. He has a Bachelor of Science in Econometrics and a Master of Science in Statistics. In his spare time he produces his own music, and has fun tinkering with new applications of AI, or "superpowered statistics", as he would call it.