Stellar Community Fund

By Stellarcarbon

Stellarcarbon Launch

SCF #33

$62.0K

Build

Awarded

Stellarcarbon enables Stellar users to contribute to biodiversity projects with confidence and ease, and in 2025 we’ll ship!

Products & Services

We're asking for support to launch Stellarcarbon this coming summer. There are two big work packages we're going to build in parallel:

The first is to develop a carbon sinking smart contract to enable other Soroban developers to automate compensating for CO₂ emissions through their own contracts, by sending financial support to verified ecosystem restoration projects. We also need to add support for Soroban in our backend so that there is no functional difference between sinking carbon through classic Stellar and through smart contracts. This will introduce the flexibility we need to appeal to builders who are increasingly using Soroban in their products.

The second package is to finalize the development of our dApp where individuals and small businesses can sink carbon. We have a list of UX issues to improve, and want to do a second round of usability testing to end up with a product that people love to use. This includes communicating clearly how we have a positive impact on climate and biodiversity, because most of our customers have no prior experience with the voluntary carbon market.

Soroban

Yes

Requested Budget

$62.0K

Success Criteria

We define our success in terms of integrity and the volume of carbon sunk. The impact projects that are supported through Stellarcarbon need to have a science-based, quantifiable positive impact on biodiversity, climate, and vulnerable communities. Without that integrity, other metrics don’t matter.

The volume of carbon sunk through Stellarcarbon determines the magnitude of the collective impact made by our customers. This volume is most meaningful when it wouldn’t have happened through other means, or when it replaces the use of eco-credits of lesser integrity than ours. When volume moves from another high-integrity service to Stellarcarbon, it’s still positive for the Stellar ecosystem, but it represents less of an environmental benefit. Finally, there’s the risk of compensation being used for emissions that could have been avoided or reduced at a similar cost, which is detrimental to our success.

We have calculated the minimum volume that is required for the longevity of our project. It is determined by the break even point where our gross profit equals our operational expenses minus payroll (which can be zero if needed). With our current pricing model, we need to sell 750 tonnes of carbon per year to cover our costs. Our target is to reach this amount 6 months after the launch date.

Go-To-Market Plan

Stellarcarbon targets two fundamentally distinct customer segments: retail users and integration partners. While each segment is multifaceted, we can offer a personalized approach to integration partners, and have to think about retail users in terms of profiling and personas.

Retail segment

We define our retail segment as: the customers that want to access eco-credits to claim the environmental benefit for themselves, and who want to interact with Stellarcarbon through our dApp.

Retail users on Stellar

People who already have a non-custodial Stellar wallet or are interested in installing one, experience the least onboarding friction. They don’t have to create any accounts, and the journey from landing on our dApp the first time to sinking their first carbon has taken our pilot users less than two minutes on average. Their second time usually goes even faster.

Our main task in marketing to this audience is to answer questions that are not about Stellar: What is the voluntary carbon market? What does it mean for a carbon credit to have “community and biodiversity benefits”? Why would I spend money on this? How can I see that my contribution actually has a positive impact?

To reach this audience, we would like to:

create better informative content about ReFi and Stellarcarbon
publish testimonials by our pilot customers
host and participate in X spaces and Discord events, working together with Lumen Loop and Stellar Global
leverage our early adopters as ambassadors

ReFi enthusiasts

There is a dedicated and growing community of crypto-savvy people who are passionate about regenerative finance (ReFi). They have an affinity for other blockchains, most notably Celo, Polygon, and Solana. We want to introduce them into the Stellar ecosystem, and pave the way for other ReFi pioneers building on Stellar, such as Geld Network and netzero.kiwi.

We have been active in the ReFi community for several years (as individuals), on X and Discord. Tribalism has been a barrier to promoting Stellar and Stellarcarbon on some of the most active Discord servers. Through our network, we have gained access to some more chain-agnostic venues (thanks Evan!), which will help Stellarcarbon be part of the conversation.

To reach this audience, we would like to:

announce our launch in the CARBON copy newsletter
become a highlighted project on Giveth
engage with the ReFi DAO community
provide tutorials on our website on how to set up a Stellar wallet and bridge stablecoins
post regular updates on the impact projects we support

New-to-crypto users

One of our pilot customers was a first-time dApp user, who had also never used a non-custodial wallet before. We onboarded him from scratch, providing limited wallet installation and on-ramping instructions. Including setup, sinking carbon took around 15 minutes the first time, and 5 minutes the second time. Overall, this was a good experience for everyone involved and we expect him to be a repeat customer.

The most important characteristic of customers coming from outside the crypto space is that they don’t want to pay with digital assets. To serve this audience, we’ll need to enable debit card payments through a payments processor. The second is that they’re not that interested in the technology, and experience managing and securing their own keypair as friction.

We can smoothen this journey by building in support for smart wallets with passkeys and/or account recovery (SEP-30). Stellarcarbon can take care of account creation, reserves, and fees, without having to become a custodial wallet provider. Such a solution is out of scope for this submission, and we’re considering it as a post-launch addition. When we are ready to onboard new-to-crypto users, we will focus on simple, relatable campaigns that emphasize the positive environmental impact rather than blockchain technology.

Integration segment

The integration segment consists of builders that want to automate their interactions with Stellarcarbon. They can give their users access to eco-credits, claim the environmental benefit for themselves, or do both. These builders are already on Stellar/Soroban, or are willing to join the ecosystem.

Our strategy for engaging with integration partners is tailored. We have the capacity for 1-on-1 conversations with builders who are interested in integrating Stellarcarbon into their software. One of the uncertainties for potential integrators is how much demand for eco-credits there will be within their user base. Having our own retail customers really helps to prove the demand to them. We haven’t been actively reaching out to other builders for the past year or so, and are going to ramp up these efforts paired with our dApp launch.

To reach this audience, we would like to:

add an overview of software integration opportunities on our website
clarify that we can split our sales margin with integration partners
show builders of end-user applications how easy it is to integrate Stellarcarbon into their checkout flow
ask developers of wallets that don’t currently support dApps how we can help to give their users access
reach out to infrastructure providers with an offer to help track their emissions (using tools like CodeCarbon) and reach carbon neutrality
offer a bounty to use DeFi yield for automatic carbon retirements
participate in industry events and increase our visibility there

Traction Evidence

People are already using our earliest demo version app on mainnet right now. We have more than $240 revenue just from demos, 15 distinct pilot users doing 29 transactions in total. This does not include testnet stats, since we don’t preserve data across testnet resets. To verify these stats, see the transaction history in our API, or on stellar.expert.
GiveCredit will use our Soroban contract to further automate carbon credit retirements from the donations of their users.
We have been approached by the lead dev of DeFindex (PaltaLabs), indicating a clear demand for real world eco-assets on Soroban.

Tranche 1 (Deliverable Roadmap) - MVP

[Deliverable 1] Soroban Interface MVP

Develop the full sink carbon contract as specified in the technical architecture. Launch a CARBON/USDC liquidity pool on testnet Soroswap. Develop a replenish pool feature in the Stellarcarbon backend.
How to measure completion: contract repo is available on our GitHub featuring the sink carbon contract. The contract can be deployed and invoked in a local sandbox. Our liquidity pool is visible in Soroswap. Whenever the CARBON price there deviates significantly from the price returned by our API, the pool will be automatically rebalanced within minutes.
Estimated date of completion: 8 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 60 hours development + 60 hours testing x $100/hr = $12,000

[Deliverable 2] dApp frontend UX, content, and styling

Testing has revealed numerous improvements that we want to make to the UX. Most revolve around input validation and error handling. We have identified what we can do to guide users through a successful sink carbon flow. Several testers have asked for emissions estimates (e.g. calculators) to be further integrated into our dApp. We’ll rewrite some of our text content and improve on the accessibility of the page layouts.
How to measure completion: the dApp looks and feels complete. A tester can use test.stellarcarbon.io to sink carbon on testnet and manage their account. Some data connections may still be mocked at this stage.
Estimated date of completion: 8 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 50 hours development + 40 hours testing x $100/hr = $9,000

These two objectives can be completed independently and in parallel. We’ll have two developers working on them simultaneously, and there are no direct dependencies between the deliverables.

Tranche 2 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Testnet

[Deliverable 3] dApp usability improvements

We’ll launch the full dApp frontend on testnet at the beginning of this milestone. Our previous testers and newly recruited ones will be provided with a testing protocol, which we’ll use to gather feedback and sort out any remaining issues.
How to measure completion: a usability testing report will be provided.
Estimated date of completion: 12 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 40 hours usability testing + 40 hours iteration x $100/hr = $8,000

[Deliverable 4] Automate retirements for testing

After sinking carbon, the sinking transaction needs to trigger a “retirement” of carbon credits in the Verra Registry. In our testnet app, the corresponding amount of credits currently isn’t retired because the Verra Registry lacks a testing environment for us to develop against. We want to mock this part of the retirement process in our own backend to provide a testing experience that is comparable with the real Verra Registry connection.
How to measure completion: pending retirement balances are automatically retired (after some delay) in our dApp.
Estimated date of completion: 10 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 30 hours development + 20 hours testing x $100/hr = $5,000

[Deliverable 5] Complete Soroban Interface

After deploying our smart contract to testnet, we’ll start integration testing with at least one partner. This will deliver us the insights we need to improve the contract and its documentation. Support for the contract will be added to our backend, including event ingestion and their post-processing into data structures that are compatible with our classic Stellar data.
How to measure completion: sink carbon events (i.e. atomic swaps with metadata) that are generated in Soroban are visible in our testnet API and in the dApp.
Estimated date of completion: 12 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 45 hours development + 25 hours testing x $100/hr = $7,000

While working on this milestone, we will also increase our engagement with the Stellar community. There will be testing opportunities for end-users as well as for developers. As we have done in the past, we’ll want to on-ramp these testers as pilot customers and integration partners.

Tranche 3 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Mainnet

[Deliverable 6] Soroban Integration on mainnet

Before we can launch on mainnet, we want our contract to be audited and well documented. Since it ties into a larger system, we also need to document the integration between the Soroban events and our backend and the API it exposes. We’ll launch the Soroswap liquidity pool on mainnet. The automatic replenishment feature will be adapted for and deployed in our mainnet backend. We’ll also develop a backup mechanism that publishes ingested contract events in our public data repository.
How to measure completion: it’s possible to obtain and sink carbon through Soroban contract invocations. The resulting events will be visible in our dApp, API, and will show up in our data repo after some time. An audit report of the contract has been published by a reputable 3rd party (provided we have been granted audit credits from the SDF Audit Bank).
Estimated date of completion: 20 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 40 hours development + 20 hours testing + 40 hours audit process x $100/hr = $10,000

[Deliverable 7] Fully automate retirements for mainnet

There are some tricky parts in automating retirements for mainnet. We currently still have a human-in-the-loop process, because errors made in the Verra Registry are immutable. The logic for processing retirements has been specified, but we have yet to identify all edge cases. We’ll develop the solution incrementally, starting with the simple cases for which we haven’t needed manual intervention, and proceeding towards the most challenging case of batching fractional retirements from multiple users into a community certificate.
How to measure completion: sinking transactions will show as retired in our dApp as soon as possible, within a couple of minutes when we can generate an individual certificate. Check the Verra Registry to verify that the retirement has actually happened. Individual certificates will also be emailed to eligible accounts directly by Verra.
Estimated date of completion: 24 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 50 hours development + 20 hours testing x $100/hr = $9,000

[Deliverable 8] Launch our dApp (retail shop)

This is a festive moment: we’ll go live with our dApp on www.stellarcarbon.io, replacing our old website. There should not be much left to do; all the features and content have been completed in other deliverables. We’ll configure our CI/CD pipeline to deploy the production version of the dApp, do some manual testing, and update our DNS records. After we have fully launched, we’ll continue to focus our efforts on marketing and business development. Onward!
How to measure completion: our dApp is live and fully functional on www.stellarcarbon.io.
Estimated date of completion: 24 weeks after award announcement.
Budget: 12 hours development + 8 hours testing x $100/hr = $2,000

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.