“We are extremely excited to be a part of TravelX’s mission to evolve the travel industry, making it more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective. This partnership signifies a giant step in the right direction towards decarbonization in the travel industry,” said Francisco Benedito, ClimateTrade CEO.

Through the integration of ClimateTrade’s API, customers buying NFTickets via TravelX’s platform can easily calculate and choose to offset the emissions of their corresponding flights. Those customers will contribute to mitigation projects, such as reforestation and renewable energy, as selected by TravelX from the more than 60 verified global projects currently available on ClimateTrade’s marketplace. Upon concluding a transaction, customers will automatically receive a personalized certificate with information about the amount of CO2 they offset, as well as a blockchain key for traceability, guaranteeing a direct impact in different Sustainable Developments Goal determined by the UN. 

“We really believe that a better, more sustainable travel industry is possible. We are creating the blockchain-based infrastructure and the right ecosystem to make that happen. We are happy to partner with ClimateTrade to help offset the carbon footprint of the travel industry together,” said Facundo Diaz, Co-founder TravelX.

The companies will celebrate the alliance by hosting a networking event on Wednesday, June 8 at Mila in Miami after the closing of World Aviation Festival Americas. 

About TravelX

Led by a team of tech and travel industry veterans with a track record of pioneering change, TravelX is building a blockchain-based distribution protocol developed to create a more secure, decentralized, frictionless, transparent, and efficient travel industry. Learn more at www.travelx.io.

About ClimateTrade

ClimateTrade is a blockchain-based climate pioneer, aiming to empower large-scale decarbonization through constant innovation. The ClimateTrade marketplace allows companies to offset their climate impact by purchasing carbon, plastic and biodiversity offsets, as well as renewable energy certificates directly from project developers. Learn more at www.climatetrade.com.

La entrada ClimateTrade and TravelX Partner to Decarbonize Travel with NFTickets se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.

ClimateTrade launches https://developers.climatetrade.com/, a developers’ portal allowing companies to integrate carbon offsetting services into their own channels autonomously. By making all API documentation available at the click of a button, this new platform streamlines and expands access to the ClimateTrade API and Widget for companies that want to give their customers the option to offset their carbon footprint.

ClimateTrade’s developer solutions include:

• The ClimateTrade API, which helps companies calculate the carbon footprint of their products and services, and allows customers to visualize and offset it in one click by supporting climate action projects.
• The ClimateTrade Widget, an easy-to-integrate tool to allow the customers of small organizations to offset the carbon footprint of their purchases in just a few clicks.

These solutions have already been successfully implemented by clients in sectors such as mobility, airlines, construction, e-commerce and financial services. Check out our use cases. 

On top of the API and Widget readily available from the Developers’ Portal, ClimateTrade regularly works with clients to develop custom integrations for their needs. Most recently, Santander Bank integrated ClimateTrade’s carbon offsetting solution into its website and app, allowing clients to visualize and offset the carbon footprint of their card purchases and utility bills directly from their account. 

ClimateTrade is a blockchain-based climate pioneer, aiming to empower large-scale decarbonization through constant innovation. The ClimateTrade marketplace allows companies to offset their climate impact by purchasing carbon, plastic and biodiversity offsets directly from certified projects. With the ClimateTrade API and Widget, clients can integrate these offsetting functionalities into their own platform, making their products climate-positive. ClimateTrade is also spearheading disruptive innovation around the digital certification of carbon mitigation projects and supporting the digitization of national carbon registries.All of ClimateTrade’s products, including the marketplace, API and Widget, are based on blockchain technology, making carbon offsetting transactions traceable and improving transparency in the famously opaque voluntary carbon market.

La entrada ClimateTrade Developer’s Portal: Carbon neutrality at your fingertips se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.

The crypto industry has been getting out of the realm of nerds and gaining traction amongst the masses for a while. Everyday, thousands of users are getting their first contact with the technology that is already shaping the future of our world, as many other technologies did before it. 

A virtuous cycle is emerging as new and promising projects compete for unicorn status, getting more users and accordingly more investment, both in terms of funding projects in exchange of tokens or equity, and in the form of retail and institutional investment in so-called blue-chip crypto assets. 

However Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) criteria for investment firms are ever more stringent, and they also apply to the crypto industry. It is time to leverage ESG for blockchain investment.

ESG for blockchain investment

While a lot of money is being poured into the industry and investment flows are growing at astonishing rates, firms that are subject to strict ESG criteria remain out of reach for crypto projects. That is why it is important that the industry moves fast towards fulfilling those requirements in order to reach the next level of financing and investment capacity.

When carbon budgets started to be drawn, no one could foresee the evolution of the energy-intensive blockchain industry. Today, the crypto world is unintentionally distorting those budgets, while facing closed doors from firms that can’t invest in industries that are not “clean”. 

We are now in a very delicate situation, in which the blockchain industry has the resources to bring in thousands of users even though ESG matters are not entirely solved. This is affecting the momentum of the virtuous cycle mentioned above. 

SuperBowl ads about crypto and climate

Let’s take the example of this year’s SuperBowl, where three prominent players of the crypto exchange industry jumped into the olympus of advertisers. Considering that a single bitcoin transaction emits one ton of CO2 to the atmosphere (according to Digiconomist), encouraging the SuperBowl’s millions of viewers to join the crypto revolution goes against global climate goals, particularly since both of the top coins in terms of market capitalization lack in environmental consciousness. 

Ethereum’s footprint is not as harmful as Bitcoin’s, but a single transaction still emits 124.4 kg of Co2. Additionally, that figure grows in correlation with the energy consumption of the equipment needed to validate transactions and mine new units of the coin, as it happens with Bitcoin. Ethereum plans to change its working mechanism so that energy intensive equipment won’t be needed anymore; this would reduce its energy consumption by 99.95%, but it’s unclear when such a change would happen, since the process is highly complex and has already been delayed a few times. 

In effect, the SuperBowl ads have encouraged millions of people to contribute to increasing the world’s carbon footprint – something we simply cannot afford. It’s time for blockchain to help solve the problem, not to make it bigger.

First good practices in the crypto industry

The first innovative initiatives to solve this problem in the blockchain industry are beginning to sprout. For instance, the alliance between ClimateTrade and Algorand has been described as the first green governance initiative in the blockchain space.

Any blockchain network can become carbon-neutral thanks to ESG-driven policies, such as the ClimateTrade and Algorand’s Green Treasury initiative.

By calculating carbon impact across the Algorand ecosystem and enabling immediate offsets through ClimateTrade’s blockchain-based marketplace, the Green Treasury allows Algorand to offset its own carbon impact, while seamlessly integrating the same offsetting capabilities across its ecosystem, including NFT marketplaces, payment solutions, regulated digital assets, and new economic models. 

The custodian opportunity

Institutional investors did not enter the crypto world until it offered well developed and secure custody services to relieve them from the high responsibility of custodying digital assets and managing the security threats that are inextricably linked to crypto asset possession. 

Bunkers have been built with military grade physical security and the strictest cyber security banking industry standards to prevent the theft of crypto assets from servers. Inside those bunkers, which are blocked from all internet connectivity, hardware security modules generate, store and protect private keys, with a very limited number of people carrying out manual management of transactions. But this is only the most basic (and necessary) layer of service to secure the funds – it is definitely not enough. 

Any entity subjected to ESG reporting that is willing to hold digital assets needs to go the extra mile and turn their holdings into an asset that is not only secured but also complies with ESG standards. Here lies the opportunity for custodians to provide a value-added service, not only to ensure that crypto holdings are safe but also that they have offset their CO2 emissions to fulfill ESG criteria. This would ensure the traceable application of ESG for blockchain, opening the door for more clients to be able to jump onto the crypto-investment train. 

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La entrada The importance of ESG for blockchain adoption se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.

We live in an era in which emerging technologies never stop introducing new terms to our vocabulary as they reshape our society.

While some of them are too specialized to be discussed in the mainstream, there is one technology whose vocabulary is as likely to be heard in a business meeting as in a bar conversation. We are talking, of course, about blockchain. 

Today we will be analyzing the latest blockchain craze: fungible and non-fungible tokens (also known as NFTs). But first, let’s start with a very simple but effective explanation of blockchain. 

What makes blockchain so popular is that it allows people to hold digital assets that are impossible to counterfeit or duplicate, without a single entity controlling the system. On the internet, a photo or any other file can be duplicated any number of times and sent to different recipients who would never know how many duplicates of that photo existed and who had them. This is why it has been impossible so far to transfer value through Internet networks; and why it has continued to use legacy financial railways. 

But once you have a technology that allows digital assets to bear the same characteristics as money (durability, transportability, fungibility, scarceness, convenience, counterfeit resistance, etc….), it opens the way for value (not just money) to be transferred directly over the Internet, without any need for legacy infrastructure. 

This brings us back to the topic of this article, tokens. Tokens have been everywhere in different forms for a long time (think casino chips or tickets to attractions), and digital tokens are not that different. Specifically, they can be seen as accounting systems that serve a specific use within a certain context. Multiple features can be built upon tokens’ accounting capability to serve different use cases, from holding reputation to voting rights, or access to a concrete service or platform. 

Now, let’s focus on the difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens by understanding the word “fungible”. According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, fungibility means: 

1. Being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account

Oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities.

fungible goods

2. Capable of mutual substitution: Interchangable

… the court’s postulate that male and female jurors must be regarded as fungible

— George Will

3. Readily changeable to adapt to new situations: Flexible

Managers typically use more than a hundred different lineups over the course of the season. Batting orders are so fungible that few players last long in one spot.

— Tom Verducci

Let’s use a simple example to illustrate the difference: if I have a cinema ticket and I can’t go, another person can use the ticket in the same way I would have used it – cinema tickets are interchangeable. But if we are talking about a plane ticket, only the original passenger can use it – a plane ticket is unique and not interchangeable. I can exchange my cinema ticket to see a different movie: cinema tickets are fungible tokens. But I can’t exchange my plane ticket to fly somewhere different: plane tickets are non-fungible tokens.

Money is fungible: I can easily exchange a US$100 bill for another, but if I try to exchange a piece or art for another, things get tricky: art is non-fungible.

Let’s take the analogy to the digital field. If I have 1 bitcoin, I can easily exchange it for another bitcoin without any loss of value, but if I own a piece of digital art, it is not necessarily meant to be exchangeable for another piece of digital art. This takes us to one of the most common use cases for non-fungible tokens: the representation of ownership for digital artwork. 

What makes tokens non-fungible is that they have unique attributes (or meta-data) linked to them, and those make them different and irreplaceable (in the case of the plane ticket, the key attribute would be the name of the passenger). For digital artwork, the link/location where the piece of art is stored, and the author who uploaded it (created the NFT) can be traced back to prove authorship. 

Art and collectibles are two of the more simple and expanded use cases for NFTs, but the ability to have digital assets which can contain metadata opens up the field for a plethora of other applications, among which: 

• Gaming: This is another hot area for NFTs: you can represent avatars, weapons, or capabilities in the form of NFTs that can be traded within a game. 
• Finance: You can have bonds in the form of an NFT whose holder receives the yields of the bond in the same address that holds the NFT. 
• Tickets and certificates: They can be represented as NFTs to authenticate and preserve their ownership and exercise the rights derived from it. 
• Luxury fashion: NFTs are increasingly being used to fight counterfeiting in the luxury fashion industry by attaching a Non Fungible Token issued by the luxury brand to any item (such as a pair of shoes). 
• Content creation: Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis recently launched an animation series, Stoner Cats, which only the holders of an NFT representing one of the characters were able to watch. 

Climate change and NFTs 

There are two angles here exercising opposite forces: 

On the one hand, NFTs have an enormous CO2 emissions impact because of the energy-intensive process of creating them in the blockchain where most of them are created and traded, Ethereum. 

As of April 2021, the creation and trading of NFTs on Ethereum has caused an estimated footprint of nearly 150,000 tons of CO2, the equivalent of 70,000 roundtrip flights from New York to London. Some NFT platforms, such as Aorist, are built on blockchain networks that do not rely on massive energy consumption, like Algorand. But the reality nowadays is that most of the NFTs created and traded come with a very high environmental cost. 

We are proud to be contributing to making the blockchain and NFT space more sustainable by partnering up with Algorand, Aorist, and Cudos Network, to name a few, to achieve negative-emissions NFTs, and to mitigate the environmental cost of blockchain’s promise through our API and footprint calculators. 

On the other hand, NFTs can also be used to fight climate change in different ways, for example, an NFT could have attached a certain amount of carbon offsets with an artwork which makes the offsetting of emissions more appealing: an example of this use case is this NFT minted with the offset of 1,000 tons of CO2. 

Going back to our previous use case around tickets and certificates, we can also envisage carbon credit certificates represented as non-fungible tokens that contain a serial number registration and all the relevant information as metadata. Because of that, we at ClimateTrade are convinced that in the near future, NFTs will have a prominent space in climate action and carbon markets. 

La entrada What are NFTs and fungible tokens? se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.

Myth #1 Blockchain = Cryptocurrencies

The first myth is that Blockchain = Cryptocurrencies. This statement is incorrect, since Blockchain has many more applications apart from cryptocurrencies, such as tokenization or the registration of documentary evidence. Besides, there are some cryptocurrencies that use DLT technologies other than Blockchain. At ClimateTrade, each carbon credit of the projects published on the platform are tokenize and register, and the modifications that occur on them are registered.

Myth #2 Blockchain for everything

The second myth is that Blockchain can be applied to absolutely everything. This is something that is often read in the media and among many communities. However, to take full advantage of Blockchain technology and to provide a differential value regarding traditional database technologies, transparency and immutability needs are key points to consider, as not all applications have those needs. At ClimateTrade, Blockchain technology is used to guarantee the traceability and transparency of all operations on the platform.

Myth #3 fast and anonymous

The third myth is that Blockchain is fast and anonymous. The speed of a Blockchain network depends on the implementation. The capacity of newer networks like Algorand is notably superior compared to older networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. On the other hand, all the operations carried out in the majority of Blockchains are traceable and identifiable to the different “wallets” that although they are totally anonymous at the start, as operations are carried out, a profile can be created regarding that account; therefore, to achieve anonymity, it is essential to be very careful with how these tools are used.

Want to offset your carbon footprint? ClimateTrade is an expert in blockchain and has a team capable of working with the latest technologies. To learn more about blockchain technolgy, click here.

La entrada Top 3 myths about blockchain se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.

It is easy for newcomers to mix up cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Although the first blockchain (Bitcoin) is a cryptocurrency, it does not necessarily mean all blockchains are (or will be) necessarily used as payment networks. Blockchain technology has unique properties without which we would not be able to guarantee such a high level of transparency, decentralization and immutability.

If you do not understand yet some of the concepts do not worry, we will explain them to you step by step. The following concepts, constitute the foundation of blockchain technology and we will go over them without getting too technical on the implementation details:

• Distributed ledgers
• Consensus mechanisms
• Mining
• Public and private blockchains
• Blockchain platforms

Distributed ledgers

What is a ledger?

Today, vast amounts of information are controlled and managed by institutions that we trust to act honestly. Blockchain technology enables a shift from today’s centralized repositories of information to more decentralized robust fault tolerant networks. Using blockchain technology, it is possible to imagine a future where we do not rely on centralized organizations to manage our data but we, the users, have greater control of our digital lives. So how do blockchains enable this? It starts with simple accounting.

Ledgers are data sources that track accounts and balances of assets, they are fundamental to accounting and tracking value. Today most ledgers are maintained in databases run by central authorities such as banks, credit card companies or governments. Record-keeping by central authority is beneficial for several reasons:

• A central authority can maintain data integrity by restricting access to the ledger to authorised users.
• The data location is known and accessible to the data curators this allows for fast retrieval and regulating access to the data.

Updates to a database are known as “transactions”. The following are key properties for a database transaction  :

• Transactions need to be atomic (where all updates are applied to the ledger or none of them are).
• Transactions need to be durable, meaning they persist in the system and there is no chance of the change being reverted.
• Transactions need to be consistent. Ledger data must be modified in a reliable permitted way.
• They also need to be isolated. Transactions must be isolated one from another.

Recently, distributed ledger technology has gained popularity. Distributed ledgers do not rely on a central authority to maintain data. Maintaining agreements among the shareholders of the ledger is a difficult problem. Data integrity can be maintained using public/private key cryptography which can verify who initiates transactions and that they are authorized to do so.

Transactions in a distributed ledger must have the same properties as a centralized ledger, they must be atomic, durable and consistent. Accessing the latest data often takes longer in a distributed ledger system than a centralized one, because it takes time for the participants to agree on the ledger’s state. Therefore the latest transactions are not immediately available to every node (participant in the network).

A ledger is distributed when it has been securely replicated across geographic locations. Some features of DLT include:

• Consensus formation
• Peer-to-peer protocols
• Cryptographic infrastructure

Blockchain technology is a version of distributed ledger technology. It implements these features through a specific  data structure called a “blockchain” and consensus mechanisms such as proof of work, proof of stake, delegated proof of stake, proof of authority, etc.

To know about ‘Why does ClimateTrade use blockchain technology to offset carbon emissions?’ click here.

La entrada How does Blockchain actually work? se publicó primero en ClimateTrade.