Reversing Climate Change
Reversing Climate Change
The Norigin Story with Ross, Christophe, and Paul
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The Norigin Story with Ross, Christophe, and Paul

How Paul Gambill and Christophe Jospe got from an idea about blockchains and carbon dioxide removal to a company called Nori.

Episode 13 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.

In the beginning… Paul and Christophe realized that the blockchain provides an ideal platform for a carbon marketplace where people can get paid to remove CO2 from the atmosphere—and ultimately succeed in reversing climate change. It took more than six days, but they eventually put together a team, developed a business plan, and Nori was born.


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Full Transcript

Announcer: listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world's first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.

Ross Kenyon: We're going to catch you up on what we've been doing lately with Nori, but also take you back to the beginning. Do a quasi rerun of that first episode and explain in the briefest way possible what Nori is, what we're doing, who we are, and why we're doing it. And we'll take you through all the way to where we are now. And we're going to try to do this in a relatively brief fashion. So if you've never heard anything from us, this is a very good place to start. So why are we doing this? Is that the first one I have written down?

Christophe Jospe: I mean, you have to start with the why, and the why is to reverse climate change. There's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The only way to stop climate change is to make sure that there aren't too many greenhouse gases staying up there. And in order for that to happen, it needs to be as easy as possible to pay to remove it. So we're building a market mechanism to make that as easy as possible.

Ross Kenyon: That was beautiful, succinct, and I think I feel comfortable moving to the next one. Paul, give us about five minutes.

Paul Gambill: Are we going to do a lightning round?

Ross Kenyon: I almost said the word lightning round. I want to say that phrase. I almost did that.

Paul Gambill: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Give us, how does Nori work? Walk us through the entire process.

Paul Gambill: The idea is that there are a lot of different ways of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You can sequester it in soil by changing farming practices. You could plant trees, could grow kelp, you could do direct air capture using industrial machinery. You could take that carbon dioxide, you could store it in the form of plastics or shoes or carpets or other products. You could also store it in geologic formations and have the carbon dioxide turned into rocks. So there are lots of different ways that we know how to do this already, but it's not really happening on any sort of large scale yet. And that's a problem of financing and incentives. And so we see our role as to help facilitate that process.

We also know that there are plenty of potential buyers out there who are interested in offsetting their carbon emissions, whether they are a large, say, Fortune 500 company or an organization, a utility, a nonprofit, even individuals. So there are lots of potential people who would be interested in paying for removing this carbon dioxide, and there are lots of potential ways to remove the carbon dioxide. So what's the problem? Why isn't this happening right now?

One of the problems is that it's a really difficult issue to make really plain and clear to all the parties participating. Kind of the main issue with carbon dioxide is that you can't see it. It's not something that we as humans are really aware of. Nori sees dealing with carbon dioxide as a garbage problem. If you were to just start throwing your garbage out on the street, people would get really mad at you. And right now, that's what we're doing with our carbon dioxide. So we want to make that whole process more visible, more clear for people to do. So our role is to help bring these different parties together and facilitate these transactions.

A remover, a supplier removes carbon dioxide, we need to be able to measure that and verify that and be able to prove to a potential buyer that the carbon dioxide that they're paying for removing actually was removed and is staying out of the atmosphere. That's our role as Nori, to provide this marketplace. So we have buyers who would be buying what we're calling carbon removal credits, CRCs. Credits are equivalent to, each credit is one tonne of CO2 removed, and the buyers are using a cryptocurrency that we'll create called the Nori token. So one token purchases one CRC and that price is always the same.

Ross Kenyon: And the CRC is on the blockchain and it's verifiable. People can't be changed sometime in the future.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, exactly. That's the provability part of this. So we'll be working with not only the buyers and suppliers, but also another group called verifiers, who are the people who actually go on site when necessary or verify data that's coming in from these potential suppliers, audit them essentially so that we can know that what happened is in that data and that data gets entered into the blockchain. Once this is in the blockchain, it's immutable. We know that it's true. We can trust it.

Ross Kenyon: The verifiers are making sure that the carbon was actually removed.

Paul Gambill: That's right. The carbon [unclear] out of the atmosphere.

Ross Kenyon: Okay.

Paul Gambill: So we're bringing these things together so that the buyers can pay the suppliers and the suppliers can get paid and we're getting rid of relative to the existing carbon markets, we're getting rid of all sorts of inefficiencies and unnecessary middlemen, and removing a lot of the existing startup costs that prevent new carbon offset projects from getting underway.

Ross Kenyon: And there's a cryptocurrency involved too. There's a new token.

Paul Gambill: Yeah. So I mentioned the token.

Ross Kenyon: I'm playing so dumb right now. Just setting you up.

Paul Gambill: So there's a token that I mentioned, the Nori token, where each token purchases one CRC, one tonne, and that token gets immediately transferred to the supplier of that particular carbon removal credit. And when those carbon removal credits come in to the market for sale, they go into a first in first out queue. So whoever provides the first carbon removal credit, that's the first one that gets sold to the buyers.

The buyers are using these tokens and the tokens, since they're always one to one in terms of price of token for CRC, what matters then is the price of the token in the cryptocurrency exchange markets. That means that the token is now representing for the first time a universal price on carbon removal. In the current carbon markets, this is a totally different thing because you could be buying offset credits from a project developer who's selling them for $40 a tonne, for $20 a tonne, for $2 a tonne. We've seen all sorts of prices like this.

And in our case, because we're separating out the token and the CRC, we're saying that these different methods of removing carbon dioxide have to compete with each other on costs. So over time in aggregate, we'll start to see potentially new ways of removing carbon dioxide that don't even exist right now that have found with a profit motive, have found ways to reduce their overall costs and increase their profit margins and incentivize them just like all other commercial markets work.

Ross Kenyon: There is now a universal price on carbon removal, which has never existed before.

Paul Gambill: That's right. That's the goal.

Ross Kenyon: That's the goal. It's very important information to have. You have to have a price on that sort of thing. Christophe, what other problems do you see with the conventional approach to solving climate change? How are we addressing it, you could say?

Christophe Jospe: Well, not to sound redundant, but as Paul mentioned, carbon offsets are selling for different prices and by having a universal price, we get around that issue. But also what happens when our token gets used, the CRC is immediately retired. So the actual attribute that tracks an environmental action can only happen once. Another advantage—

Paul Gambill: And actually that's a really big deal because that gets rid of all of the double counting issues that currently exist and overcomes one of the main barriers to this market which is people don't actually trust that things are happening. We're able to develop CRCs in such a way that you can see it.

Christophe Jospe: Accessible through something called the internet.

Ross Kenyon: I've heard of that. Is that the one with the email?

Christophe Jospe: It is.

they have to go through a very cumbersome process to create a methodology and those costs sometimes when you add it all up can range all the way up from [unclear] to $300,000. These don't need to be so complicated. Another difference, as a software company, we're pointing out that those sort of costs wouldn't exist with Nori.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, we think that's ridiculous. We want to reverse climate change. So people who can remove carbon, we want to make their lives easier and make the way that they measure that carbon being removed make it so that it improves over time. How are we going to do that? One fundamental difference is we're not going to treat methodologies like intellectual property. We're going to create everything out in the open where it's open sourced and it's built in the way.

Ross Kenyon: Are they all proprietary now?

Christophe Jospe: Yeah. If you see the steam coming out of my eyes, like, yeah, it bothers me. It's like. You can treat something and I don't want to denigrate that people put a lot of hard work and want to get compensated for their work. Really what matters is the execution of a thing and the ability of that thing to get better over time.

Ross Kenyon: I guess you could say that feeds pretty well into the philosophy of Nori.

Paul Gambill: As a software company, we tend to value the open source ethos that the entire blockchain community basically revolves around.

Ross Kenyon: What would you say are some key philosophical beliefs of Nori or how do we approach environmentalism and solving climate change? To think that possible for us to build a world where we can have our cake and eat it too?

Paul Gambill: Traditionally, the narrative is framed that in order to solve climate change, we're going to have to drastically cut back the amount of energy we use worldwide, which means cutting back quality of living in both first world and third world countries. That means preventing third world countries from advancing to the sorts of luxuries that we're used to in the first world. That this seems really unfair and wrong to do, and no one's willing to do that. And if they were willing to do that, we wouldn't be in this position because governments would have taken action decades ago to curtail this, and they haven't. But we believe that it's possible that if you start treating this like a garbage problem where you pay for removing your carbon dioxide, we have a lot of excess CO2 to remove as well as whatever future emissions come out.

We believe that it's possible to develop a robust ecosystem of carbon removal that enables the sort of energy usage that we're used to and the quality of life that we're used to. Innovation trumps any of the potential problems there. And what that really means, and to go back to philosophy, we're treating the root cause of the problem. There's too much CO2 in the atmosphere. There are ways to not emit that CO2, not put your garbage out into the street. And by creating that mechanism where you need to pay to remove that garbage, well, maybe you'd rather not put that garbage out in the street. Functionally, that means putting renewable sources or carbon free sources of energy out there onto the grid, or if you want to put less garbage into the street, reduce your emissions. We're not playing any favorites. We're saying we need to remove already 750 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to get back to safe levels.

And on top of that, we need to slow down and stop and then negate the approximately 40 billion tonnes of CO2 we're adding each year. And that's why this all comes back to putting a price on this. Like economists have been talking about this for decades, that we need a price on carbon dioxide. Because if you can put a price on it, then all these things that we're talking about in the ways like I can't stand here and say that I, as some sort of central planner, know exactly how this market is going to play out and how the different removers of carbon dioxide will function and which ones will be successful and which ones won't. That's ridiculous. We have no idea. But if we can set the stage to allow that sort of activity to occur in a trustful way so that all parties can trust what's going on and ensure that what they're doing with their money is what they intended to do, then we believe that all sorts of wonderful and amazing things can happen.

Ross Kenyon: But yeah, if you can use prices and get markets to have people act in a way that is socially beneficial, that's the dream ticket. I feel like the right would like that. It doesn't involve the government necessarily essentially planning everything. The left should like it because it gets to their ends and it seems like everyone's better off and it's less controversial or everyone hates it. What is one of the two?

Paul Gambill: It's one of the two.

Ross Kenyon: Okay guys, where does Nori come from? How did we all get here now?

Paul Gambill: For me, this started about three years ago. I was running a small business that wasn't going anywhere and it wasn't really contributing a whole lot to the world.

Ross Kenyon: These are like the smallest violin.

Paul Gambill: I wanted to work on something more important. And I had also been turned on to the idea of starting with why, Christophe mentioned that at the beginning, that comes from Simon Sinek, my all time favorite TED Talk, Simon Sinek talking about the importance of starting whatever you're doing with the why behind it, the purpose behind it. And I started looking into climate change as an area of focus.

And I'm an engineer by training, and so I think about problems in terms of how do we solve them and fix things rather than just make them less bad, which is how I kind of perceived a lot of the noble and important efforts that people are doing. Started thinking, okay, well, we've put all this CO2 up in the air. Can we just pull that back out? Would that make a difference?

I didn't even know the term carbon removal at the time, but I was really interested in this and I wanted to learn more and I needed to do that with other people. So I started a meetup group in Seattle called Carbon Removal Seattle and it was a way of planting a flag and saying, "I want to work on this and if you do too, come join me and let's learn how to do this together and maybe hopefully we'll find a way to inspire or spin out businesses that are doing carbon removal or something." So it was the early germ of how to build up activity that's doing this sort of thing that can really scale.

While I was doing that, I found out that there was a research center at Arizona State University, which is my alma mater,

Ross Kenyon: and mine too,

Christophe Jospe: and yours too, and one of our other co-founders, Jaycen.

Paul Gambill: is called the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. And I was like, OK, well, that's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. And it's great that it's at a place I'm so familiar with. So I reached out to them on Twitter. And to be honest, this is the only time that Twitter has been useful for me professionally. And I tweeted at them and said I was an alum, and I was interested in doing this. And was there anyone there I could talk to? And Christophe replied to my direct message like right away and said, "Yes, are you available to get on a Skype call right now?" And so we did.

Christophe Jospe: Sure played a little harder to get. I gave him all other options, but I was free and then I had to be somewhere in like two hours.

Paul Gambill: And it was clear there was going to be a fun conversation. I told Christophe about what I've been up to. And then he started telling me about what the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions was and what they did. And we discussed these ideas. Christophe was in New York at the time. And I think everything— I don't want to take words out of your mouth. But I think everything you were saying was like kind of through a financial lens.

Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I just finished the book, The Big Short, and I was thinking about, well, it's clear that there is a major bubble going on as it relates to solving climate change. What if we could build an instrument that could effectively short the way that we go about solving it?

Ross Kenyon: I feel like that would be controversial among the listeners of the podcast. Or maybe not. I don't know. Shorting the carbon markets?

Paul Gambill: Turns out that's what we're doing, if you really think about it. Christophe used that term. We were in peak carbon on that call initially, and that always stuck with me. Like, yeah, we're in this— by peak carbon meaning we all freely emit carbon dioxide, and no one's getting charged for it. We're all dumping our trash on the street. And so that's the peak carbon. And there's going to be a reckoning coming, whether that's in the form of government taxes or cap and trade schemes or something. There's going to be something that changes about this. And so how can we figure out how to [unclear] that along and make a business out of it.

Christophe Jospe: And it was clear from when we spoke, I like this guy, let's do something together. We decided to start something called the Carbon Removal Society. It was an online group. It grew, it sort of was a learning group and a virtual group because I wasn't in Seattle, Paul wasn't in New York. And I knew that there was a community out there of people who wanted to talk about this and wanted a hand in building it. I think we got about like 50, 75 people or so to join that. These were people who were researchers, academics, some people like us who were just kind of interested in it from around the world.

Paul Gambill: But it was pretty much just you and me posting things in there.

Christophe Jospe: Right, and so we had to meet in person. Fast forward to September 2015. I was organizing a conference called Closing the Carbon Cycle in Phoenix for the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. At that point, I had already started my first company as a consultancy. And actually, my former employer was my first client.

Ross Kenyon: Carbon A List, is that what this is?

Christophe Jospe: Yeah, Carbon A List.

Ross Kenyon: Carbonalist.

Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we also say, we call it a carbonalist.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Yeah, it runs together in the URL.

Christophe Jospe: Indeed. It runs so well. And you are becoming a carbonalist.

Ross Kenyon: I'm a junior carbonalist, apprentice.

Christophe Jospe: Indeed. And we hung out. That's when I first met Paul in person. He showed me an app that he was working on. Anyone can actually find this app if they search in the app store at Phish Tour. It's a sticker app. It's really cool. We both like the band Phish. I'd like to let it be publicly known. That was after the conference ended. We had went out for beers afterwards and we were talking about that. And I was like, I'm always sort of nervous to bring up Phish to other people.

Ross Kenyon: As you should be.

Christophe Jospe: It's a mild obsession and you never know how people are going to react to it. But Paul Tu does not like it. I'm trying to teach him.

Paul Gambill: It's not gonna work.

Ross Kenyon: Paul Tu is one of our other co-founders. There are two Pauls.

Paul Gambill: And that was the first, like, "All right, I can definitely get along with Christophe." It's just a good signal. If we both like Phish, I think we can both get along really well, and that's a good sign for a future business partnership.

Ross Kenyon: So we're talking about Norigin, so let's move it along. In February, Paul and Jaycen competed in a hackathon called Carbon Harvest. Jaycen's our chief blockchain dev. Yes?

Paul Gambill: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Lead blockchain dev?

Paul Gambill: His title is Principal Blockchain Architect.

Ross Kenyon: That's way better.

Paul Gambill: In February last year, it was actually on Super Bowl Sunday. So I totally missed that amazing comeback by the Patriots because I left at halftime. Like, this game is boring. And I went to this meetup, which I was really excited about. And it was hosted by IPFS, the Interplanetary File System, and MetaMask, which is a web 3.0 [unclear] for the Ethereum blockchain. I was super excited to meet some of the developers who've been working on Ethereum. I was really obsessed with Ethereum at the time.

Ross Kenyon: On February 2, you're still one of the cool kids who I think March was the time when it was no longer. Yeah, this is before crypto really. It's like the last month of quasi underground.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, exactly. We're hosting this week-long hackathon about using IPFS and MetaMask together. I was trying to get Jaycen interested in Ethereum at the time and so he was in Phoenix and watching the live stream of the talks that were going on at this meetup and then eventually, after a couple of days, we decided that we wanted to compete in this hackathon. It was a week-long competition. I had been thinking about, well, what if we could potentially make a cryptocurrency, a token that would just pay farmers to sequester CO2 in their soil? Jaycen started building a very, very early prototype of this, and we called it Carbon Harvest, as I mentioned.

We didn't actually finish because we started late in the competition, so we didn't win and there weren't that many entries. But it was a really good early start. We got a good reception from a lot of the hosts of the meetup. They were really interested in the idea. And so we just kind of kept that on the back burner. A few months later in the summer, Christophe was nice enough to call me to wish me a happy birthday in June last year. This guy's a networker, so that's what he does.

Christophe Jospe: I had ulterior motives.

Paul Gambill: And it turned out that I was leaving my job at a creative agency where I'd been a project manager for a number of years. And I didn't have great plans. And I told him that. And he told me about how he was really focusing on Carbon A List and trying to grow that and really go the entrepreneurial route. And [unclear] thought, well, why don't we try to actually do something about this? We've been talking about this for a long time. And Christophe suggested that he should come out to Seattle in August for a couple weeks and we could trial it, see how well we work together, see what sort of concepts we come up with, and if it'd be possible to actually do this sort of thing.

Christophe Jospe: And it's not like this idea is all that novel. I mean, many people have thought, well...

Paul Gambill: the carbon market is perfect for cryptocurrency. So it was abundantly clear that, okay, we have something. And then when we got into it, yeah, it really clicked. We spent two weeks together and things happened really quickly. Like insanely quickly, everything kind of just fell together. And then at the end of it, something came across our plate, which was a hackathon, essentially a month long business planning competition put together by ConsenSys.

Christophe Jospe: ConsenSys are basically the granddaddies of the Ethereum network. They're like the premier for-profit company.

Paul Gambill: They're like a venture studio for all sorts of different Ethereum blockchain application companies. They also are the main drivers behind the founding of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. They do a lot of enterprise consulting. If you're involved at all in the Ethereum blockchain space, you're probably in some way affected by what ConsenSys is doing.

Christophe Jospe: I read the other day they're the largest blockchain company in the world.

Paul Gambill: Oh yeah, they're huge now. Yeah. Anyway, so there is the blockchain for social impact hackathon and we decided to pull a team together. That was happening in September last year and it seemed like it was just really fortuitous timing. These were sorts of activities like doing research and writing up initial drafts of a paper and doing some early designs with the concept. These are all things we had to do anyway. And we knew people who wanted to work on this with us. And this just seemed like a really good low commitment sort of thing. It was a month long. Like if at the end of it, we decided that we didn't like the idea or there are certain people we didn't like working with. We weren't committed to anything. And so we just dove headfirst into that.

Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we ended up winning in the energy and environment category. And I think that kind of lit another match. And I had already decided I was moving to Seattle and doing this irrespective of winning. And so I was there for the fourth week. It was really cool.

Paul Gambill: You came up Ross. Jaycen was there as well.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah.

Paul Gambill: And we ended up having, as we had a seven person team for the hackathon and we ended up having two members of that team decide that they didn't want to go on. And then we added two additional people who were amazing fits for our founding team and we kept going and founded a company and have been working ever since.

So we've been working on getting this going from the ground floor. So that's on the technical side, starting to architect out how is this application going to work? What is the blockchain design? How are we thinking about the token design? On the other side, it's how do we do business development for this? We're going to have to get a lot of potential buyers and we're going to have to get a lot of suppliers into this. How do we bring all these people together and help them understand what makes us different from the existing carbon markets? Why should they participate with us? Why should they use cryptocurrencies and blockchains and all these crazy new thing called technologies. What does that provide for them? And what's our strategy for communicating that? So we've been working on all these fronts because we have a really diverse and talented team of people.

The big events that's coming up for us is at the end of April, April 26th and 27th, we're hosting a summit in Seattle where we've invited a number of people to come meet with us. These are suppliers and buyers and verifiers, researchers, academics, people we throw into what we call the carbon removal illuminati who are just kind of in the space and helping to propel this along. And we want to demonstrate the prototype that we've been working on from a software perspective. We want to get their feedback on the methodology design. So we've been doing, we want to be able to adapt what it is that we're building to really meet their needs as much as possible. So we're all really, really looking forward to that opportunity to interact with so many different people in that way.

Ross Kenyon: And then there's plans to launch. I know that we want to launch the platform simultaneously with the token and that should happen sometime this year.

Paul Gambill: Yeah. We want to do this in 2018. We want to get this going as soon as possible because we need to start removing carbon dioxide as soon as possible.

Ross Kenyon: Tick tock.

Paul Gambill: Tick tock. Exactly. So we're working on doing that. We're starting to expand our team to hire a UX designer and some engineers to add to our team potentially soon. So we're pretty serious about getting things going so that we can launch an MVP where people will be able to buy real carbon removal credits with the token sometime in 2018. We'll hopefully be able to get more concrete about our estimates as we get closer to it.

Christophe Jospe: Just to give a sense under the hood, some of the really important things to get right. One are, what are the economics of how all this is going to work? We're extremely fortunate to work with someone who is building an agent-based simulator looking at the supply and demand side for carbon removal and also understanding how this will function in the cryptocurrency markets.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, Christophe brings up a really important point, which is one of our advisors, Dr. Klaus Lackner, has brought this up with us quite a bit. There's an issue that if the token is worth one tonne of CO2, then the monetary supply and the economics of that are really, really important because if we make many tokens and issue them, then the price will be too low. And if we don't make enough tokens, then the price will be too high. And then we could accidentally affect the market. Like it wouldn't be able to reach any sort of market equilibrium because all the other characteristics of it would be out of whack. So like Christophe mentioned, we've been working with an economist, Kyle Burchard, to help us simulate that and think about it so that we can come up with what is our best approach to this, what sort of levers do we build into the monetary supply to help that stabilize over time. Working on monetary economics is super important for pretty much any sort of like token economic situation.

And then we're also working pretty hard on making sure that the game theory and procedures regarding verifiers are secure because there's a huge incentive to cheat, right? If you can say you remove like a hundred thousand tonnes of carbon and get paid like.

Ross Kenyon: Someone's gonna try and do that. How do you prevent that?

Paul Gambill: Right, exactly. And so to sort of answer the question, you have to verify the verifiers. You have some amount of random auditing that happens of them. And there's a lot of academic research into this. And there's some sort of threshold value over which if you audit enough, then that disincentivizes people from cheating enough that it shouldn't happen.

Ross Kenyon: Right. So there's that. And then one thing I work on quite often with Christophe and Aldyen, Alexsandra is the business development side of the team, making sure that there's people who know about us. We do a lot of communications work. I'm working on an ebook. Christophe and I co-host the podcast.

Paul Gambill: You guys are working on the white paper right now too.

Ross Kenyon: The white paper too. So we're trying to have that done here around the time of Reversapalooza. So in April, we're hoping to have a white paper that's ready for, if not fully public consumption, then nearly public.

Paul Gambill: Initial review.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So it should be maybe in May around then we might see a white paper get released by us finally.

Paul Gambill: We have one that's already done from the hackathon, but it needs to be updated.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, significantly. What else do we have going on? I know a lot of the developers are working quite hard and actually making the platform.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, they've been doing a lot of work up to this point, the blockchain back end side of things and coming up with the designs for the tokens. At this point, they have a very basic prototype that allows you to spend Nori tokens for CRCs and have the coin transfer ownership. That's about as far as they've gotten. We haven't done a whole lot yet on the front-end side. That's where hiring a UX designer comes in to play so we can start to think about what is this experience like from a buyer's perspective, from a supplier's perspective, from a verifier's perspective, and how do we make this as simple as possible for them to do? Because we want to get out of the way of like transactions that are happening. The front end on most cryptocurrency and blockchain projects is pretty challenging.

Ross Kenyon: If you had explained to someone who had no experience, it would take you a while.

Paul Gambill: Yeah. Building decentralized applications is very different from building a client server application.

Ross Kenyon: That's very new too, right?

Paul Gambill: Yeah, it is. There aren't many best practices established yet. It's not like You can't just have someone send cryptocurrency to an address and then have them wait the 15 to 45 seconds or longer that it takes for that transaction to confirm. We need to be able to communicate that we can't just have like an activity spinner that's like waiting for that transaction to go.

Ross Kenyon: With money on the line too.

Paul Gambill: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Makes people mad.

Paul Gambill: Right. So these are all sorts of new and interesting problems that we have to think about. And the design of the user experience is super critical to that. So we're putting a big emphasis on it.

[Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] You can see all these podcast episodes in our blog. But right now we're working to redesign the website to make it much easier for people to land on it and understand what it is that we're doing. We want to include more useful infographics and describe exactly how this marketplace works. And so we're hoping to relaunch our website with this all new design in the coming weeks, like very, very soon. Really excited to be able to show that off. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]

Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks so much for coming on and catching everyone up. This will be the episode that we direct people to if they've never heard anything from Nori. This is a good introduction. Good to catch people up on what we're doing. If you'd like what we are doing here, please tell your friends, share us on social media, give us a good rating on your podcast app. That would be much appreciated. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]

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