As the number of blockchain-enabled climate solutions multiplies, founders need funding to get their projects off the ground.
Ben West is Head of Causes at Gitcoin, a company that helps early-stage crypto projects get funding. In his role, Ben supports Gitcoin’s climate solutions, DE&I, decentralized science, and advocacy rounds.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Ben joins Ross and cohosts Alexsandra Guerra, Head of Demand, and Daren McKelvey, Head of Crypto Partnerships at Nori, to discuss the process grantees go through to win funding from Gitcoin.
Ben explains how his background in climate activism informs his work at Gitcoin and shares what he learned from researching blockchain-enabled climate solutions for the Ethereum Foundation.
Listen in for Ben’s insight on the growth of the overlap between climate and crypto and learn how your project can apply for Gitcoin’s next climate round.
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Resources
Albert Bates on Reversing Climate Change EP079
Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis by Albert Bates
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Alexsandra Guerra said like such a gringo. I didn’t even try to roll the R’s. I got two in my own head there. Is that okay?
Alexsandra Guerra: You act like you’ve been having to say my name for like five years.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Something about not wanting to do the intro a second time if I had goofed on it. Despite being a mediocre Spanish speaker, I psyched myself out, head of demand, co-founder of mine. Five years. I’ve been doing this for more than five years I’ve known you. Can you believe it?
Alexsandra Guerra: No.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I was trying to explain to a new hire that we’ve gone from being basically familial or siblings to now a proper company at this point. It’s been sort of surreal. But yeah, anyways, you’re my company sibling. I view you as such. I don’t know if you think of me that way too.
Alexsandra Guerra: I actually just used that analogy with Rochelle, former CEO of Mammoth. They got required, but we were talking about co-workers, siblings, and I was like, yeah, I get that.
Ross Kenyon: Daren’s never been on the show yet. Daren, you’re newer, so maybe you’re more of like a cousin, and maybe we’ll get there. I don’t know. It’s kind of a long road. What a weird introduction. I bet you didn’t expect that. But Daren McElvey, Head of Crypto Partnerships here at Nori. Hey, Daren.
Daren McKelvey: Hey, cousin.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, cousin. Do I want this show to start this way? I need to think about that. I’m not convinced that I do, but... Thanks for being here, Daren. You do really interesting work so much in the world of crypto and trying to connect us with people.
Daren McKelvey: Yeah, there are a lot of people that want to have a real impact in climate. And I think that’s Nori is at the nexus of that. So this gives me opportunity to talk to everybody.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a busy, busy man. One of the schmooziest I’ve ever met. You made it sound actually worse than I think because there’s some connotations like inauthentic. Glad handing.
Daren McKelvey: Hey, chief.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve just been to most conferences I end by being spiritually, emotionally, physically exhausted and hating everything and wanting to sleep. And you’re like, we can’t go home yet. We have to stay for three more days.
Alexsandra Guerra: You should see the dynamic between me and Daren when I come to the conference.
Ross Kenyon: A special skill, a special person. It’s very important to have this person on your team.
Daren McKelvey: You know, like some people have extra room in their stomach for ice cream, like always. I have, I don’t know if the metaphor will translate to extra energy to meet interesting people. It’s always an adventure. And I like to improv with people.
Alexsandra Guerra: One more thing on this is like, you know, the zone of genius term, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Sure.
Alexsandra Guerra: Right. And so part of this, and we’re going to introduce our guest soon, Ben, who’s here and we’re looking on the screen together, is to work within your zone of genius. And so when we’re out at events, it’s Daren’s zone of genius. I mean, like genius excellence. And it’s my life. It sucks energy out of me. So we’ve had to learn how to use me as a fine resource throughout those weeks. But they’re always pretty useful because apparently someone’s walking around this WeWork in Miami with a tote they found at the mainnet conference in New York City, who I’ve not met yet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s impressive. Okay, Ben, we can’t just leave you here on ice for 10 minutes while we gab about ourselves. Shirley, say hello. Ben West, head of causes at Gitcoin. Hi, Ben.
Ben West: Hey, how’s it going? Happy to be here for this family reunion event. I’m enjoying it.
Ross Kenyon: What a weird intro, but okay. Where are you on the spectrum of being energized or exhausted by a conference?
Ben West: I would define myself as an introverted extrovert or an extroverted introvert, I think actually would be the way to put it. Like I can show up in a very extroverted way, but it drains the heck out of me. You know, I’ve like done a lot of emceeing conferences and standing on stage at rallies and things like that. And sort of a earlier version of my life. And I do a lot of Twitter spaces and stuff. But I think in my true state, I’m like most comfortable on the couch with my dogs, my partner.
But I can like sort of force myself to, you know, kind of be the extroverted version of myself as needed.
Unknown speaker: Well, very nice.
Ross Kenyon: I always love these types of shows, too, where someone has been a longtime listener and they get to now come on to the show, break the fourth wall. You’re now in the show. Is this surreal for you at all or is this just another day at the office?
Ben West: It is surreal for me. It’ll probably be even more surreal when I actually see it show up in my Spotify feed or whatever. That’ll probably be the particularly sort of fourth wall breaking experience. But yeah, before we started recording, I was telling Ross that I just went back through the catalog and found some of the earliest episodes that I listened to. And one that really jumped out at me was with Albert Bates, who was talking about biochar in his book Burn, which I think was like back in 2019. I had to click that show more episodes button a bunch of times to get to it.
Alexsandra Guerra: I remember that episode. That was a while back. That was like we were somewhere. I don’t know, but I remember that episode. That was crazy.
Ross Kenyon: I always love hearing stories like that or just doing it and someone thought about something differently or it gave them a new idea is always like the supreme satisfaction of the podcast. There are other things that come of it, but that’s always the one that makes me most excited. Ben, I think we should just start at what Gitcoin is. Let’s assume that someone listening is maybe somewhat familiar with crypto, but mostly not. And walk us through what Gitcoin is. What are you trying to solve with it? How’s it work?
Ben West: So Gitcoin gets its name from GitHub. For anybody who’s familiar with open source web development, GitHub being like the platform that a lot of people use to build in public, to share code, to sort of iterate on code. And Gitcoin was actually started as basically a platform for bounties for people to do open source web development projects. And that was when I first heard of Gitcoin. I’m a longtime supporter of open source software and use Linux as much as I can make it make sense in my life and use a lot of open source web software.
So I was interested in Gitcoin for a long time. It actually was born out of ConsenSys at the group in New York that’s behind MetaMask, amongst many other things. And Kevin Iwaki, one of the co-founders, had worked at ConsenSys doing a very variety of different projects there. And basically, that was where the Gitcoin project began. It’s evolved a lot since then. There was this idea that came from Naomi and Glenn from Radical Exchange, as well as Vitalik Buterin, who I’m sure folks have heard of from Ethereum, which was this idea of quadratic funding, which without getting too into the weeds of how this math works, really the idea of it is it’s a way to democratize decision making so that people do not have extra influence because they have extra money.
And the way that plays itself out for Gitcoin is that Gitcoin created a grants platform, basically a peer-to-peer crowdfunding platform, similar to GoFundMe or that kind of thing. And with the help of this quadratic funding mechanism, we allocate funds from partners. So we raise money for matching fund partners. And that’s like everybody from Polygon to ENS to Coinbase and OpenSea and like lots of basically projects that come out of the crypto world. Who provide funding to distribute on their behalf. And we use this quadratic funding mechanism to democratically make decisions about how that funding should be allocated.
So really the way that I generally sort of break down quadratic funding in its most basic sense is if you had $100 in matching funds, And two different grantees who are trying to get that funding. And they both raised $100 from individual donors. But one of them got it from one donor and one of them got it from 10 donors. So one person received $100 donation. The other person received 10 $10 donations. The matching funds would be distributed for $20 to the person with one donor and $80 to the person with 10 donors.
Basically, the quadratic algorithm, the way that it plays out, is when an individual goes and makes decisions about who to give a little donation to on our peer-to-peer fundraising platform, their funding can be matched by dramatically more money than what they’re actually donating. So I could be donating a dollar to a project and it could be matched with $10, $20, $30, even sometimes hundreds of dollars or more, depending on how that quadratic algorithm is kind of playing itself out. And for a lot of people, that’s kind of the magical experience that they have using the Gitcoin platform as seeing those matching funds allocated.
But really at its core, the problem we’re trying to solve is helping early stage projects get funding in the crypto space. So we run a number of different rounds. We have one big main round, which is largely open source web development projects that are building something in the crypto world. And then we have ecosystem rounds, which are run by folks like ENS or Polygon, who are basically encouraging people to build things on their protocol or their platform. And then we have cause rounds. And I’m lucky enough to have the job of Helping to support these cause rounds.
So we have a climate solutions round, a diversity equity inclusion round, a decentralized science round, an advocacy round. We’ve also run rounds for support for Ukraine and many other things. And yeah, we get to allocate to on a quarterly basis, something like $3 million overall to a whole bunch of different projects, but a million dollars in the cause round specifically. By people voting with their wallets, we can make decisions about how that funding gets allocated that are, you know, fair and put money directly in the hands of lots of people who may not have had access to funding otherwise.
Alexsandra Guerra: So can you tell us a little bit about what happens in a round? Like, who are the people that participate, like an example of a project, for example, and then what are the things that they are required to do throughout a round and when it closes up?
Ben West: Sure. So our grants funding rounds are really kind of a three-sided market in a sense. We’ve got our grantees, our donors, and our partners. So between rounds, we’re raising money from matching fund partners to have that matching fund that’s available. And the grantees, the experience that they have is generally... You basically have to set up a proposal. It’s a much easier process than many other grant proposal processes that people would be familiar with. As somebody who spent much of my life in the nonprofit sector, super familiar with how cumbersome some of those processes can be, how time consuming they can be, really to apply for a Gitcoin grant, all you need is a description of your project, a Twitter account, a website, and a wallet address.
Those descriptions can be anything from a few paragraphs to some people copy and paste their white paper over. But ultimately, really, the ones that are successful are the ones that articulate their project in the simplest, clearest, most transparent way possible. For example, in the last climate round, we had about 200 projects who applied. There were a wide range of projects. Everything from folks working on refi and carbon offsetting infrastructure of one kind or another. Some folks working on things like oracles, some folks doing arts and culture projects, podcasts, people writing books, all kinds of different things.
The neat thing about our cause rounds is that we actually have opened them up. Whether you’re an open source web development project or not, we’re basically using this quadratic mechanism to And the crypto community as sort of a new funding source for all kinds of traditional, you know, climate solutions projects, as well as DEI projects and DESAI projects. So we’re seeing really a wide range of projects getting funded. Really, the thing that’s consistent is that generally speaking, we try to help very early stage projects. A lot of the projects that come to us actually are referred to us by VCs or angel investors who see something that’s very early stage, but aren’t quite ready to invest in that particular project.
And they encourage them to go out and seek funding to sort of get a proof of concept to test their idea in the court of public opinion, so to speak. You know, sometimes it’s projects that don’t want to have a VC funder or they’re looking to be independent and really bootstrap their way to success. So we definitely see a lot of projects like that. And increasingly, we’re seeing a lot of projects from the global south who a small amount of money can really go a long way. And, you know, there’s over 35,000 people who donated in our last round.
About a million dollars raised directly from individual donors on top of the three million dollars that we get from matching fund partners. You know, so there’s there really is a lot of different roles that people play and some even play all three. I’ve seen some projects donate some funds to one round, participate in another round and also be individual donors to people on various other rounds. You know, so in the beauty of sort of the decentralized space that we live in, there’s a lot of different ways people can get involved in and either, you know, support projects or be a project.
Daren McKelvey: So you talked about the climate round. Climate’s near and dear to you. You’ve been an activist for a number of years, and I think I’d love to learn a little bit more about that. How it informs the lens at which you see this open source crowdfunding platform. Have you ever thrown soup on a Van Gogh painting or glued yourself to a wall? What kind of activist? I’m not poo-pooing that at all because I think that there are some strong messages around that. But what makes your experience unique in coming into a very respected platform in crypto?
Ben West: Thanks for that question, Daren. I have not thrown tomato soup at anything, although I have organized training sessions for lots of different civil disobedience actions and participated in them. I’ve often been the person talking to the media next to the civil disobedience action. In my past life, I have been a campaign staffer for a few different relatively large environmental NGOs. I think to answer your question of what lens do I bring to the work at Gitcoin, I’m a climate campaigner and activist, first and foremost, like my goal has always been to try to do whatever I could to sort of help move the climate movement forward, help sort of expand the size and scope of who’s involved in that movement, you know, and to me, like Gitcoin.
With something that was interesting to me just as a person who is interested in technology, but as there’s increasingly been more and more efforts to use blockchain technology to solve some of the bigger problems in the climate space, particularly around accountability and transparency when it comes to carbon offsets, but also just looking at any number of different things that can be done with blockchain technology around logistics or carbon accounting. Or just directly funding projects and putting more money directly in the hands of people with various different DeFi protocols. I’ve just increasingly been interested in sort of what was possible using blockchain technology.
And when the opportunity came up to sort of help Gitcoin with this process, I guess the lens that I bring to it is like, You know, really just trying to identify projects that genuinely are going to have a positive impact on the climate that are are more reality than hype and trying to just try to make sure that there’s a level playing field for everybody who’s getting involved. One of the big advantages that anybody with a DAO or a podcast or something like that has when they show up on the Gitcoin platform is that they’ve got a pre-existing Web3 community.
So one of the big things that I’ve been trying to do is ensure that there’s as level of a playing field as possible with access to a microphone and opportunities to get your project out in front of people, even if you might not come with a pre-existing community. So that’s the lens I bring to this work is that background.
Alexsandra Guerra: So what happens after the round closes? What are you typically seeing? Do you reach back out to some of these projects? Have you had any success stories that move beyond the grant round?
Ben West: Yeah. I mean, the really interesting thing for me now, having been at Gitcoin for a little over a year, which is like 10 years in crypto land, which I guess means y’all have been doing Nori for like 50 plus years now or something.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, I appreciate it.
Ben West: Has been just like seeing the ebb and flow of, you know, the sort of composability and interoperability of these various different projects. Like, you know, people finding new co-founders, people pivoting their projects from one to another. You know, definitely some kind of early success stories. You know, for example, Toucan was one of the projects that got started as a project on On Gitcoin, you know, which every project’s got its upsides and downsides, but interesting to see, you know, what their road has looked like over the past year or so. You know, of course, Uniswap was started as a Gitcoin grant, Bankless DAO, you know, EtherJS, a number of different sort of core pieces of Ethereum code, you know, were actually built, you know, starting as Gitcoin grants.
You know, so a lot of them outside of the climate realm, but as the sort of purveyor or coordinator of the Of the cause rounds, it’s been particularly interesting to sort of see all these projects that are revolving out of Gitcoin, like Senkin and Return Protocol and so many others that- Yeah, tonnes. There’s a lot of really interesting projects that are kind of graduating, I guess you could say. And one of the things that we’re trying to do now is really create these feedback loops where as people kind of graduate out of our grants program and sort of reach this relatively arbitrary level of funding that we’ve considered sort of the cutoff for being part of the round, which is a half a million dollars in funding.
You know, that those folks then come back and become the supporters or partners on future rounds. And we actually had our sort of first alumni round, you know, this past round where we had a number of our previous, you know, grantees become funders and partners in the round moving forward. So, yeah, it’s been really interesting to see the sort of ebb and flow of different projects. Like, for example, Astral Protocol was an interesting Oracle-based project, which was, you know, folks from a number of different projects coming together. Demeter or Demeter is another similar project that we’re seeing evolve right now.
And a bunch of projects that are starting to take on more work in the diversity equity inclusion space as they’ve met folks from that end of the grants protocol world. And it’s interesting to see how that’s kind of changing the face of some projects as they’re thinking more about diversity and thinking more about sort of who their team is and sort of how they’re approaching the space and who they’re inviting in. Yeah, so lots of different ebbs and flows, still pretty early, really just been a year since we’ve been running climate rounds, but already, you know, just interesting to see the projects that are evolving and growing.
And I’m very curious to see who becomes the next sort of uniswap of the refi space.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine to many people listening that the career arc of climate activists to someone within the crypto ecosystem is not that common or that likely of a mix. What about blockchain animates you and makes you feel like this is the best use of your time as someone who sees themselves as primarily a climate activist?
Ben West: Good question. And I love telling my crypto origin story because it’s pretty weird and different than most people’s, I would say. I was working for an environmental nonprofit looking for a space to host a event about a proposed pipeline in British Columbia. And I went and checked out a yoga studio that was run by a friend of mine who was a techie guy, one of the people who I often talk to about Linux. He was running a Bitcoin mining rig in the back of his studio. This was like in 2014, maybe 13.
So going back a ways. And he... You know, introduced me to this mining rig, not because of the Bitcoin that he was mining, but because he was dehydrating fruit with this interesting contraption he built on the back of his mining rig.
Ross Kenyon: You’re in Canada because of your Oots. And then this was like a hot yoga studio. And this was a waste heat kind of thing. It sounds like I was kind of on track.
Ben West: You’re correct. This was in Vancouver. And I do use boots. But yeah, I mean, this friend of mine was, you know, a real counterculture kind of a person who was kind of in the sort of libertarian space somewhere between left and right, which is kind of where I would put myself as well on many issues, you know, sort of preferring decentralization and like sort of local approaches. I saw Bitcoin at the time as a counterculture activity. Anything that was highlighting the problems with the big banks really resonated with me. This was long before people were talking about energy consumption as it related to crypto, but I actually spoke at my first crypto conference, which was a group of people in a coffee shop in 2015.
And talked about how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could play a role in basically creating new micro economies that could help fund the renewable energy revolution that I was hoping to see happen. And I just didn’t have a ton of hope for the government and the big banks leading us in that direction after years already at that point of working on trying to get there using more traditional methods. And my involvement and interest has ebbed and flowed a little bit over the years. But around 2017, I actually worked for Holochain for a while.
I don’t know if people are familiar with Holochain. Interesting project. Still have lots of friends there. But, you know, I was kind of at a place where I’d moved back to Toronto to be closer to family after about two decades on the West Coast of Canada and was just kind of looking for new ways to have an impact, kind of burnt out after, you know, many years of being on the front lines of activism and Getting about as involved as he possibly could be, I was just looking for new ways to have a positive impact.
That was a project that really espoused its environmental focus. That same friend of mine who’s now an angel investor, no big surprise after he was mining Bitcoin in 2012, 2013, 2014. He actually introduced me to that project. And we’ve just continued to talk along with a lot of other people on, you know, some threads and Signal and elsewhere, just about interesting things that were happening in the space. It was actually really DAOs recently that really brought me back into the space, kind of. Just seeing this way that people were coming together and organizing in decentralized ways and having an interest in what that could lead to and how that could be expanded just got me more and more day-to-day involved in crypto again.
Then this opportunity at Gitcoin came up after helping with the first climate round in GR12. I got asked to come on full-time as a cause round lead. And it’s been an exciting and really neat opportunity to sort of play a role in helping to shepherd this process through and hold the hands of a bunch of grantees who are doing really interesting, exciting work.
Ross Kenyon: I really like that cultural split between Bitcoin and Ethereum, where Bitcoin is so classically libertarian, but then you’ll have within Ethereum, I think it’s like a wider range of influence beyond just the Austrian School of Economics and sort of like a narco-capitalist vision of the future, where there’s so many of those influences that are part of Ethereum. But like Glenn Weil’s book is a good example of one too, where it’s how to use markets to drive egalitarian outcomes. You’re like, cool, this is weird. This is something for everyone to love slash hate.
And I always like it when things break a little more unevenly rather than you know exactly what everyone’s going to say. It can predict it from a mile away. Ben, it seems that your vision of refi, regenerative finance, is becoming... Dominant though, I hear maybe it’s the space that Nori operates within, but I hear more about the growth of the overlap between crypto and climate than seemingly anything else. Surely this is the space that I work in more than anything else, but also out there in the general world, it’s kind of taking over.
What’s it been like seeing this come to fruition with such a long pedigree in crypto?
Ben West: I mean, really exciting, honestly. I definitely have that same, you know, probably somewhat skewed perspective just given the circles that I’m in. But, you know, there definitely is a lot of interest and growth in this space. You know, and... I think just looking at the number of grantees that we’ve onboarded into the climate round in the last year speaks to that experience. A bunch of the projects that have actually received the most funding in the last few grants rounds have actually been projects that came through our climate round, which to me is just an interesting signal and really interesting just to see people in crypto Really embracing these approaches.
It’s definitely not universal. There’s lots of opinion and lots of perspectives out there. But anybody out there who’s got a perspective that people in crypto don’t care about climate or aren’t interested in Putting dollars behind these kinds of solutions. I mean, I’ve definitely seen firsthand that’s not the case and that there’s a wide spectrum of people that are not the so-called usual suspects in the climate space. Definitely not the people who are showing up at the rallies that I organized years ago, who are quite interested in like, Helping to move innovative projects forward where there’s upside for the earth and potentially upside for themselves as well, or even just like giving to things that really matter and doing it with crypto, even in the midst of a bear market, which I have.
I found particularly fascinating to watch as the market changed pretty dramatically from when we were running our 12th Grants Round in December of 2011 to really the last six months or so now, where we’ve actually continued to have some of our biggest Grants Rounds, even as their market was in full force.
Unknown speaker: Wow.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the interaction with DAOs and innovations that are happening with governance? In our daily lives, we probably have very little ability to experiment with rules at scale or really any meaningful scale at all beyond just whatever you and a couple of friends or neighbors want to do. What is becoming possible now with DAOs? What are they? Let’s catch a vision for people who are maybe newer to it. Oh, Alexsandra, did you want to?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I just have a question on, because we hear lots of DAOs. So I want to part B of this question that Ross has is, what DAOs have you seen that are successful? Because I love the idea of DAOs, then I actually don’t know. And like, mind you, I’m not like a highly involved crypto person. So it’s not like I wouldn’t know, like this is exactly it. Like being a person who loves the idea of DAOs, Are they actually successful? Do they do things? And what do they need to do in order to be successful?
Ben West: All really good questions. I mean, probably the easiest one for me to point to is the one that’s paying me right now. So, I mean, Gitcoin is a DAO. It actually started as a company, Gitcoin Holdings, and then transferred its assets over to a treasury and launched its own token, which is now what pays my salary. And, you know, I mean, it’s interesting to be involved in that. I, you know, get to be a steward in the DAO. So Kevin Iwaki delegated some of his voting power away to a bunch of staff and community members to sort of try to actively decentralize the voting power within the DAO.
You know, so we ratify all the budgets quarterly, which is challenging, but, you know, important. You know, we vote on the structure and the plans for future grants rounds. Honestly, having worked much of my life in somewhat decentralized spaces, I sometimes joke, although it’s actually true, that one of my first memories as a child was taking minutes at a cooperative housing meeting with Crayons. I’ve kind of grown up around different models of organizing. As somebody whose parents was quite involved in activism when I was young, And having spent much of my life, you know, either in political parties like the Green Party, which is, you know, definitely more decentralized than most political parties in Canada, as well as, you know, working for a lot of nonprofits, you tend to be at least somewhat decentralized.
There’s definitely a scope of decentralization or like a spectrum, I guess you could say. And I think the interesting thing that all of us are struggling with is, first of all, how decentralized is really decentralized. And I just made air quotes there for anybody who’s listening, which I guess is everybody. And I think the challenge is, one, the actually operating fully decentralized, or at least partially decentralized. And two, really creating a viable micro economy of some kind. Really, what is it that gives your token value? What utility does it genuinely have?
How does that continue to have value over time? You know, I got pretty involved in Bankless DAO and FWB when I was first kind of experimenting in the DAO space because they were just two of the bigger DAOs that were quite active. And, you know, it was interesting to see up close, like FWB’s token is like, Basically completely tanked, although still has some value in the market. Although there was a time when a membership to Friends with Benefits was about $10,000. It’s now like, I think less than $1,000. Last time I looked at the market, Bankless Dow had similar problems.
And one of the things I’m actually seeing people do is just like, Shifting a bunch of their treasury into stable coins when it’s got some value so that they can continue to pay people regardless of the market fluctuations, which I think is a smart thing. We’re seeing a lot of treasury diversification stuff and DAOs that are doing token swaps with each other or mutual grants, things like that to find common ground. But I think it’s still very much a big open experiment. And some projects are Doing a lot better than others.
You know, one of the things that I personally find super interesting in this space is like some of these kind of smaller DAO applications, like community energy grids. There’s a project called Seven Energy in Norway, who is one of our Gitcoin grantees, who I actually had the pleasure of interviewing. I just did a research project on kind of climate projects. Blockchain-enabled climate solutions projects, trying to dive deeper into seeing all these different projects. If you’re running a local community-level grid, you need some sort of a decision-making mechanism to deal with the intricacies of how you’re actually going to run that little microgrid.
I think that’s a very novel and very clearly defined DAO use case, is making those kinds of decisions about your community energy grid. So I think that’s one kind of example that I think is interesting to sort of see how that plays itself out. I’m also interested in some of the kind of collaboration and interoperability stuff. Like I think some DAOs are starting to see themselves as service providers to other DAOs, like LexDAO, for example, which is like a legal services DAO, or YAP, which does work on... Basically supporting public relations efforts for DAOs reaching out to the crypto media or even Bankless with their Bankless Academy or some of the services they provide for helping people get a newsletter or a podcast off the ground or things like that.
Still a big experiment, definitely challenging. I’d say probably just dealing with the whims of the ups and downs of the market is kind of the biggest challenge, but it sure is exciting as somebody who’s always had an interest in sort of local currencies to see how people can just create a currency out of thin air and fund something useful in the world.
Daren McKelvey: Look at some of your research that you’re doing. You do some research at the Ethereum Foundation, right?
Ben West: Yeah, so I actually got this opportunity to help the Ethereum Foundation sort of wrap its head around, you know, kind of what’s going on in the blockchain enabled climate solution space. And just, just, just, just finished interviewing a little over 50 different projects, including Nori, which thank you again for the time, the two of you. It was a really, really interesting process to sort of talk to academics and critics and people who are leads of projects and sort of just kind of get a sense of like, you know, what’s out there?
What are people trying to build? What really seems to be viable? What has the biggest obstacles? You know, what relies on government or company adoption? You know, so yeah, I’ll be Releasing bits and pieces of that in the not too distant future and coming back to folks that we interviewed before doing that. So stay tuned. But yeah, it definitely gave me a really good sort of sense of the space that like really just started by talking to people who were Bitcoin grantees and then sort of expanded from there. I really tried to break it down by...
Sectors of the economy as opposed to sort of sectors of crypto projects like we looked at transportation and housing and waste and, you know, kind of tried to break it down in a way that sort of reflected the needs of the planet first and foremost. So, yeah. What else can I tell you about that? Lots of about 100 different rabbit holes I could go down on that.
Ross Kenyon: I think you’re just trying to bait us into us inviting you back. I think I’m being manipulated literally on the air right now. Can you give me like one nice juicy anecdote from that?
Ben West: I can do that too.
Ross Kenyon: You can come back when you’re ready as well.
Ben West: Sure. I didn’t realize I’m doing that, but I have been a campaigner for much of my life. So, you know, yeah. One juicy nugget. Let’s see. Nori is a great project. How about that?
Unknown speaker: Please go on.
Ben West: Honestly, I think it just is interesting to look at the different models and approaches that people are taking to getting more hands directly in the hands of whether it be farmers or people doing forestry protection and looking at the different sort of obstacles that may be in their way if relying on traditional carbon markets or on government regulation. So projects like Nori that are finding ways to basically not be beholden to legacy institutions in the same way that some other projects may be, I think is an interesting component of the landscape.
Because definitely one thing that I identified during this work was that there are many innovative approaches that are very much dependent on buy-in from legacy players who may have vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Like one of the areas that I’m personally the most excited about, like when I first started this, I thought it would actually be decentralized grid stuff that might be like the killer app that I would identify. And definitely the thing that I ran into looking at that was just how dependent on government policy and the utility companies all of this is.
I was hoping I would find evidence that we could just kind of leapfrog over legacy institutions. And definitely in some jurisdictions that’s happening, like there’s places in Africa and India and elsewhere. Where people are doing some pretty innovative stuff. But to kind of get to scale in the Western world, there’s some pretty big roadblocks. And probably the other big takeaway is that logistics is probably the least sexy and one of the more potentially important things that we could do with blockchain tech. And just for the sake of shilling other potential guests, if you haven’t talked to the guys from the Rocky Mountain Institute who are working in this space or some of the folks who came from RMI or who are now working with Filecoin Green, I think they’ve got some interesting stuff to contribute in terms of like kind of what’s possible in the logistics space.
Alexsandra Guerra: It’s interesting. So I have a background too from, I used to work at Southern California before I quit my job and started this thing with these crazy folks. But I worked in the advanced technology lab and I worked on renewable energy integration, data systems, like what are the things that are required to build a fully like kind of like microgrid. And I think you’re absolutely right. There’s so much for opportunity for technology. DAOs in general, these like decentralized decision making mechanisms that is common in this space to innovate in those spaces of utility and power.
And yet there’s already a foothold and legacy of obviously Utilities currently existing. And then they’re also regulated. A lot of them are regulated by their state governments and it moves so slowly. So maybe I think what we’re going to have to see is we innovate in the spaces that move More quickly, especially at the edge of what’s built and what’s not built. So creating a whole new carbon market, for example, or a whole new mechanism for funding projects within climate is the thing. And then maybe in 10 years, who knows what you’ll see in terms of blockchain applications within utilities.
So my hope is that it does not end here. It’s just like they’re not there yet. They’re not at that part of the adoption curve.
Ben West: Totally. One small aside about microgrids, a project that I was totally unaware of that I discovered doing this research was actually right here in Toronto, Canada, where I am, which is a company called Switch, who’s doing microgrids in condos. Basically, they’re letting people buy and sell electricity from their electric vehicles back into the microgrid that is that condo complex. And they’re using blockchain tech to facilitate it under the hood. And nobody even knows that it’s a blockchain project. They basically are just looking for ways to have transparent, verifiable ledgers of the amount of electricity that any individual automobile is either putting on or taking off of that little grid.
But it’s interesting to think of what’s possible at scale if like an entire parking garage went from just kind of being dead space to when all those vehicles are spending like 90% of their time just sitting there could actually be this backup battery to help with energy peaking at different times of the day and putting more affordable electricity directly back into that building and potentially stopping a natural gas plant from having to fire up at peak times or off season. Yeah. So I had no idea that company even existed. It was one of those kind of one thing leads to another, leads to another.
And we ended up having a conversation and hadn’t even really thought of that as a form of a microgrid. But when they described it that way, I all of a sudden realized, yeah, of course, that’s what that is.
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re giving me lots of ideas about what we could do with the condos here in Miami because there’s so many combos going on.
Ross Kenyon: Side business. She starts another one. Just kidding. I know how busy you are. Come on. One day. Sorry. Not now. Sit down and focus on your work. It is cool. I’m like giggling over here too because it also animates me. I’m like, oh, this is a great idea. This is really fascinating. But anyways, please continue.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. So anyways, I wanted to introduce this topic that we talked about on a Twitter space a few weeks ago at the beginning of your, it was 15, round 15 for the climate. Yeah. So Nori and Gitcoin, we had this little collaboration where Nori sponsored 100 tonnes of carbon and it removed for that round. Do you want to tell us or share with the audience a little bit about what that was like and the general program?
Ben West: For sure. Well, I’ll start by giving a big shout out to Daren for helping to shepherd this along and to you too, of course, Sally. The interesting thing about the last grants round, well, one of them, was that the Ethereum merge was happening right in the middle of the round. And because we use Ethereum mainnet infrastructure, as well as Polygon and ZK Sync for people actually making their donations, the carbon footprint of every donation on the Gitcoin platform was going to go down by 99. 95%, about halfway through the round.
And it kind of Gave us this moment of pause to think, okay, well, maybe we should be offsetting our historic emissions or in some other way, replacing or removing emissions that we’ve had historically. And there has been a bit of a conversation about sort of how to go about doing that, which of the various different protocols to use. So instead of just kind of picking one winner, so to speak, I thought it would be a great opportunity just to give a bunch of different projects or broadly in this space, the opportunity to First of all, contribute and help offset historic emissions.
First of all, thank you to Nori for doing that. You know, in particular to ask for the opportunity, you know, for these projects to explain their point of view, their approach to this kind of work, and also to tell the stories of the projects that were actually getting funding as the result of this particular effort. You know, so along with Nori, a number of different projects also contributed. You know, there was Toucan, Klimadao, Zero Labs, and Helios, and I think I’m, oh, Regen Network. Of course, how could I forget Regen Network?
You guys are OG friends from way back. So yeah, I mean, I just thought it was a great opportunity to kind of get everybody in the same space and to help sort of educate the broader crypto community who might have an interest in this sort of thing about the various different approaches. You know, and I thought Nori did a great job of sort of explaining the difference between what you were doing and what others were doing. And I also thought just given how contentious some of this could be, that everybody involved did a great job of just kind of like, Expressing their perspective in a friendly way.
So thanks to everybody for that.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, because in the end, it really is like one climate change problem we’re all trying to solve. And at Nori, we... We don’t aim to be right and hold fast to that, but we aim to get it right. And so that is just a creative process because no one’s ever had to solve climate change before. And so we as a species need to adopt that learner’s mentality and also creative mentality of, okay, you iterate. You might have an idea and then it iterates and you’re constantly... Within that spirit, improving the thing that you have, whether, and, you know, we have our own vision, but hopefully amongst a bunch of folks, we’re able to actually make reasonable action because I think we’ve all kind of, well, not all, but for me, at least I have like climate anxiety.
And sometimes I’m like, I can’t think about it. And people, you know, my parents, my grandparents, oh, did you see this on CNN? I’m like, I don’t know. Nope. Oh, did you read the new climate change book? Nope. Because what does that do for me, just myself as an individual, like very uniquely, I dedicate my whole life to this. So there’s nothing more I can do, providing more panic does not help the situation. So what I need more is like time in the hot yoga studio.
Daren McKelvey: We’re going to make an older reference. It’s like the Michael Jordan, Larry Bird matchups. These famous matchups where they would push each other to be better. These were the best in the game a long time ago. And I think it’s really important to take that mindset, the competitive sportsman-like mindset where we may disagree, but there are certain things that will make everybody improve and step up their game.
Ross Kenyon: 100%. I’m not sure that we’ve always been that successful at that ethos either. We haven’t been, many of the refi players named have not appeared on the show. And I think part of it is that we, the theses are so different for what we think are the problems in carbon markets. And I don’t want to put someone in a position where I’m just gonna be like, well, I don’t think this is worth saving or able to be saved in the particular way that you’re trying to, and then But I would still like to be collaborative.
I do think we’re all on the same team. I haven’t really cracked the code on how to be an ethical collaborator, given that there are some fundamental disagreements. Any ideas for how to unlock that, Ben? Am I just ruined by admitting this in public?
Alexsandra Guerra: No, I think it’s honestly with candor a question that we do discuss a lot internally at Nori and we do believe that we want to address this together. But someone like Ben is perfectly apt to answer that since he’s been assessing all these people and us and others.
Ben West: What we did in that last climate round was a good step in the right direction anyway. You know, because I think for a lot of people like who are not like, I think the Venn diagram of people who understand climate and understand crypto is a very small, thin slice. So to really help people understand that and what those differences are, huge differences between Nori and Klima, let alone looking at Xero Labs and Helios, folks who are doing renewable energy credits. And I just thought it was useful to have the conversation and try to, in layman’s terms, really break it down.
Whether each individual conversation is the most productive, most useful, I think going through third parties is probably a good way to go because it gives you that space to have the conversation where it’s not like they’re on your podcast or you’re on their podcast, but where we’re all just coming together as people who care about this stuff. As Alexsandra pointed out, it really is one big climate movement at the end of the day. There’s only really one climate. We all live here. We all need to figure this out. And even if our projects have totally different visions of how to move forward, I think just having those conversations in a way that is productive is possible.
But it’s not always necessary to have every single conversation either. I have people in my life who I just avoid all kinds of topics with over Thanksgiving dinner, for example. Yeah. But there is common ground somewhere. So maybe we just focus on something else where there is common ground. So I guess that would be it. It’s like trying to figure out where the common ground is and figure out ways that we can genuinely be productive instead of just kind of having conversations that may not be super helpful.
Daren McKelvey: To add to that is the concept of not cutting corners. I think we could... And prevent against fraud and be as transparent as possible, then we’re starting from the right foot. There’s definitely nuances and disagreements around that. But I think we noticed during Climate Week, we missed you during Climate Week, by the way. But we bumped into a lot of folks that we consider be considered competitors. And when you have that face-to-face time, you really notice there’s not a lot of barriers between us. We’re cut from the same cloth. We’re hitting things from a different angle.
Ross Kenyon: I’m a broken record on this too, that I think Nori has made a number of design decisions that are controversial within the carbon removal community and within carbon market. We think these are the right decisions to make. We think these are the right risks to take for the company. And we think our breaking with orthodoxy is important in this way. But I can also respect that people don’t all agree. And I think they might have good reasons for not agreeing in many cases too. And they have valuable pieces to add.
And yet, maybe that’s prevented me from engaging in the refi community more deeply. I need to reevaluate that about myself. And hopefully I won’t regret being vulnerable on the air. But that is what I’m saying now. Then we got to wrap quickly, I guess, kind of quickly. Where can people who want to apply do so? What do you want to see in this next climate round? What are you looking for?
Ben West: Good question. Well, I mean, we’re actually at a inflection point for Gitcoin. We’re just about to switch to our new protocol. So the existing Gitcoin grants platform that Kevin Milwaukee built like four plus years ago is basically reaching its end of life. And we’re just about to switch to using this forkable version of the Gitcoin grants platform. There’s actually a pretty active discussion happening on our governance channels right now where people can weigh in on sort of what they’d like to see the future of the program look like. But long story short is like right now is a great moment to be sort of thinking about how you could use the quadratic funding tools and mechanisms to run your own grants around, to create new sort of versions of what Gitcoin’s doing, and also to sort of really double down on what we’re doing ourselves through the Gitcoin platform.
So, I mean, long story short is like, Stay tuned for some big changes in the months ahead with how we’re running Gitcoin grants rounds. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation and a lot of new partnerships and perhaps even a slight pause in when the next Gitcoin grants round is. That’s what’s being discussed in that governance channel. For me personally, people want to reach me. I’m easy to find on Twitter. I’m just at Ben West on Twitter. I’m always down for an interesting conversation about any or all of this stuff.
And, you know, anybody who wants to get more plugged in can just at me. And I’m happy to point you in the right directions in terms of, you know, various projects or, you know, governance threads or whatever else it might be to sort of dig in deeper.
Daren McKelvey: Yeah, I like your, I can always see that it’s you’ve commented on something or because you have the emojis, panda, butterfly, monkey and sunflower. Very pleasant.
Ben West: Maybe topic for another discussion, but I’m writing a book called The Monkey Flower Experiment, which is the reason why there’s a monkey and a flower in my emoji.
Unknown speaker: Well done.
Daren McKelvey: We found something.
Ross Kenyon: More manipulation for a second show. When’s the book?
Ben West: I’ve been working on it since I got that donation from my friend who I mentioned before. My first time I ever got some Bitcoin was he gave me 250 bucks worth of Bitcoin for For that book in like 2015. And I’ve gone through various different versions of the book. And it’s actually evolved into a work of fiction, largely during the COVID lockdown. I gave myself permission to explore this idea that I was playing with as a theater student many lifetimes ago. It’s basically about a group of people Kind of like Lord of the Flies on a university campus.
It’s a group of people on a off-grid experimental campus that gets cut off after a large storm from the rest of the world and has to sort of figure out how to make its way forward. So if I ever find the time to actually finish that book, stay tuned. But I did get a big chunk of it done during lockdown. So stay tuned.
Daren McKelvey: Just finish it before charge R. R. Martin, and I think you’re fine.
Ross Kenyon: All right, good. Thanks for being here, Ben. Super fun to have you. Happy to have you back when it is justified, which doesn’t even sound like it would be that long. But thank you.
Ben West: Thanks for having me. Yeah. Pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: Daren, thank you. If you like what we’re doing here, please give us a great rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for listening. Share it with a friend, all that good stuff and have a delightful day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media.
We will catch you next time.
