Ethereum Climate Platform

Transcript

all right thank you so much for being here welcome uh to the crypto Valley Conference uh 2024 it's uh another year uh another Sunny year at that uh so it was a really great uh first panel that we had thank you so much Dennis for doing that I think the next one here we have a keynote from uh Steven from the ethereum climate uh platform so yeah really looking forward to hearing more about that I'll let you take it away thanks very much uh my name is Stephen ha for the past six years I've had the privilege of being being able to work at UH consensus consensus is a company founded by Joe Luben Joe luin as some of you may know is the co-founder one of the co-founders of ethereum we are 900 largely technical U execs and uh

builders in 30 countries I come from a background of being a green advocate for many years uh Joe has allowed those of us in the company to pursue not only a corporate agenda but uh our personal passions and mine for a very long time has been the threat of climate change around the globe and what we can do in the technology space to begin to face up to it now I've had the opportunity in the six years I've been at consensus to represent us and by implication to some degree the ethereum community at the United Nations over the course of the

six years I have to say for the first four or five years um that was a fairly quiet undertaking because um prior to September of 2022 we were a brown technology we were a very energy intensive proof of work technology the UN didn't even use the term blockchain it used the term distributed Ledger technology and while there was a pilot or two basically and for good reason as the UN is the steward of the global climate to a considerable degree they felt they really weren't willing to undertake much uh on an ambitious level with brown blockchains I saw the opportunity in early

2022 as uh I think everyone in the room knows that in the fall of 2022 ethereum transitioned through the so-called merge from proof of work to proof of stake and in the course of that transition dropped a considerable portion percentage of its um energy intensive uh consensus process and uh in doing that uh actually in un terms the UN is 195 countries they are measured by the UN in terms of uh well many of its ESG and SG measurements but one of them is carbon and U the fact is that uh the U the blockchain ethereum

was emitting the equivalent of a large National profile in fact um what we did is the first undertaking of the ethereum climate initiative was to go to Cambridge University who do the Bitcoin energy index and have them measure what was the historic carbon footprint the 7 years from 2015 to 2022 carbon footprint of ethereum and what we came up with was 30 million metric tons uh as a reference point 30 million metric tons is the equivalent of the U annual economy of azerbajan where the next un cop

conference will take place which is a country of 9 million people so ethereum was putting out emissions of the equivalent of a a gross national economy of 9 million citizens to run our blockchain um what we decided to do was to talk to the devs who were doing the actual work on the transition from proof of work to proof of stake the so-called merge team at the ethereum foundation and at consensus we were one of the largest Builders working on the merge and I started talking to the devs and said okay well now you are leading an

effort to transition ethereum from a brown Tech to a Green Tech what should we do what should we do now that we're a Green Tech what can we do in the post merge ethereum that we couldn't do in the Prem merge ethereum and what almost to an individual these developers these Builders around the world said to me was we want to look back at our seven-year carbon deck to the planet we want to look back and not only having cleaned up our carbon footprint on a go forward basis to look back over the past seven years and clean up the entire historic carbon footprint of ethereum uh we're

not the first to do that in fact as some of you I'm sure have read over the years Bill Gates famously has undertaken on behalf of Microsoft to clean up the entire carbon footprint of Microsoft going back to 1975 uh in point of fact ethereum which was launched in 2015 has seven years of carbon debt to clean up that seven-year carbon debt as I said is 30 million metric tons so we set about to figure out okay if that's the goal if that's the intention to clean up our historic carbon footprint how do we do it the first decision we made was to do it as a

community being a company uh launch lached by one of the co-founders of ethereum we have terrific opes in the ethereum community reaching out on behalf of Joe Luben and as this was Joe's undertaken I had the opportunity to call CEOs of many of the largest companies in the world built on ethereum and said here's what we're thinking of doing we're thinking of cleaning up the seven-year carbon footprint of ethereum will you join us and I have to say we met with a great deal of success and on this page you will see some of the many companies who committed themselves both as partners in the undertaking and

investors in the undertaking we knew we needed some funds to operate this um initiative so we raised a million dollars at a $10 million valuation the investors include all the company well all of the for-profit companies and ethereum based companies on this list ranging from Microsoft to okx to filecoin to consensus to cell to near to polygon um digital x uh tucon uh and across the near across the ethereum and ethereum related ecosystem we raised a million dollars with the intention of building a collective effort a

community effort to address our 30 million metric ton carbon debt to the planet now as we set about to do that we didn't we made a several decisions as a group one of them was not to reinvent the wheel there is a huge much of which uh centers around the United Nations climate agency and certain uh voluntary carbon organizations like the international emissions trading organization um Vera gold standard the major carbon exchanges in the world we said let let's not build everything from scratch but let's integrate the key players that already exist in the space

so once we had our core Consortium of ethereum companies the next thing that we did was we reached out to International organizations and said will you join the effort one of my favorite conversations was with the sort of most prestigious of the outside of the un uh the most prestigious of the carbon exchanges known as gold standard it was created by World Wildlife Fund I think we're all familiar with the World Wildlife Fund it's been ongoing for some several decades now and the CEO of gold standard uh laughed when I called her up um she she uh she made a knocking sound something like this and I said her name

is Maggie Kim and I said Maggie what's that she said that's every 3 hours When someone knocks at my door and said we're the blockchain solution to climate I said so okay I know we have run into these organizations why are you talking to me she said because you're the first one that came and said you weren't the solution but in fact you were creating a Consortium of companies that instead of competing to be the solution had decided to approach the task as a Consortium as as collaborators rather than competitors so Maggie joined on with our effort so as you all know running businesses the um first thing that you need to do is uh

figure out what is the problem we're here to solve so we went to Cambridge University which published the Bitcoin energy index and we said okay you all are the reigning Global experts there are there are actually pretty much two companies in the world that do this uh in a First Rate manner one is Cambridge University Center for alternative Finance the other is called CC out of uh out of Munich and we said um okay let's measure the scale of our problem so it was Cambridge University who went about studying the seven years of ethereum's carbon footprint where it comes from in the globe where the mining is done um

where the transactions tend to uh be weighed around the planet in which regions what is the power grid in those regions to come up with uh a North star for us and that North Star for us as I mentioned they came up with the figure of 30 million metric tons is what we owe the planet we took 30 million metric tons of healthy atmosphere turned it into a 30 million metric ton crappier atmosphere and now we're looking to give back Health to the planet um as a Consortium the next task we had to do is you know uh many of us in the room are individual entrepreneurs you run your old company you get up in the morning

you decide what am I going to do today we decided to approach this as a Consortium so the next thing we had to do is talk to all of our stakeholders they had invested a million dollars in the undertaking they committed their technology they committed their uh actually uh hearts and Minds in in in in a very uh in in a very collaborative manner to try to address this problem in a way that it's never been done before as a best of web three Collective and so we started going down the list Company by company what tech do you have what resources do you have to commit to this initiative and what do you want out of

it how do we create a win-win a win for the platform and a win for each of our partners so in the course of conducting those conversations the companies on this list that I'm running through here um provided responses to us here's the Tech they have that they're interested in committing here's their goals for the initiative and we set about at that point um building a um uh a model of how we were going to go about addressing the 30 million metric tons and in 2023 which was our first year of operations we were announced in December of 22 at the cop at charm L

Shake cop being the UN conference on climate that happens every year uh at charmal Shake we announced it we had this I I think those of you who feel it as I do a tremendous kinship to uh all of us around the globe who are involved in web 3 and blockchain it was a beautiful array of mainly the CEOs of all of these companies uh on stage and virtually on screen appearing together to say we are committed to working with the United Nations and work working with gold standard to undertake this U this uh promise to the planet to not only be green going forward to but to clean up

our entire history going back and so in 2023 uh we consulted with our partners then we set about and brought on um a a design team to design what does this initiative look like on a go forward basis what do it actually we're going to do to clean the planet uh as a collective this had never been done before certainly not as uh a collective organization and we decided the following we decided we're going to build two modules to accomplish this goal one module is a Services module the services module is going to work with

projects around the world who are undertaking decarbonization we're going to invest in those projects we're going to collaborate with those projects we're going to give those projects a window into the blockchain community where you can see important things going on around the world in decarbonization and have the opportunity to second half of the undertaking invest we're building a fund to clean up 30 million metric tons will be an undertaking of several hundred million dollar worth of uh effort and we know that we need to assemble quite likely through tokenized means um a large fund to undertake this effort now I have to

say that um apart from the tech building of uh a sort of portal front door for both investors and projects which will be a considerable part of this undertaking we need to we needed to come up with with an investment strategy how are we going to do this what we decided right up front is even though we ran up this carbon debt from 2015 to 2022 2022 we went green um I mean I I I gave you a comparison of the old carbon footprint of ethereum here's the new carbon footprint the I had the opportunity to speak about this in Paris not long ago

during Paris blockchain week and the comparable we came up with ethereum today uses the equivalent amount of energy as it takes to light the Eiffel Tower for one year compared to an entire country the gross national product of azerbajan 9 million citizens for an entire year so it's been a dramatic drop we are probably the single most successful climate mitigation technology or business in the history of are of of of of environmental activities on the around the globe so we decided to use the the strength of that Marquee to go

about raising a fund to do two things the fund will invest in projects around the world that are looking to decarbonize how will we choose those projects we have identified our criteria for choosing projects uh our criteria range from Project Specific to um who who who the to the ownership of the projects and the opes and the government uh environment in which that project lives is this a government that's going to allow this project to thrive is this a project from a builder that's done

this before is this a project from a builder that's done it before successfully does the project have a history of achieving its Milestones does has the project um shown any interest in integrating it any aspect of its technological development web 3 Tech and that criteria that you see above is are our guiding principles for making um investments in the space now in order to um go about raising a the next round of the funding that we needed to undertake this tokenized effort we realized that what we need to

show you all what we need to show our colleagues in the community is what would an investment look like so with that in mind we identified uh uh a first round of seed assets we're going to make three investments in 2024 that show you how this um web3 based climate investment vehicle is going to work we have already made our first of those three Investments our first of those three Investments and I don't identify the project that's currently under NDA but it will be uh released later this year I can tell you it's a it's a terrific Marquee level

team Bill Gates is one of the investors it's a regenerative agriculture in the project in the global South and our invest over the next four years will be $8 million against 500,000 metric tons we have a 30 million metric ton goal and we're taking looking to take big swings so the first investment will actually be over the lifetime of it 800,000 metric tons of the 30 million in that first investment and investments in this space are profitable so we're going to be not only doing good cleaning up the Planet but we're going to be doing well we will generate $1 million in profit on this

first investment alone over the next several years and we'll do two more investments before we launch the fund we're currently engaged in a $2 million seed round to launch the full funding um the description of everything you've heard from me today is contained in a light paper which we're sharing with investors and partners and with that I would simply please say join us do well do good and be part of the effort [Applause]