Proposal
Introduce the Goddess Nature Token, GNT, into the treasury: specifically via, naked GNT, GNT/KLIMA, and GNT/USDC bonds.
Motivation
A collaboration between Flow Carbon/Goddess DAO and Klima will accelerate market adoption of tokenized carbon offsets, creating a liquid and transparent market. This market gives project proponents who create offsets access to instant liquidity, from the same pool that corporates can buy from at scale. Additionally, owning diversified, high-quality carbon assets and bridges will strengthen KLIMA’s treasury.
What is Flow Carbon?
Flow Carbon is a company based in New York that helps leading corporations, cultural institutions, tech companies, and individual buyers offset their carbon emissions by providing them with high-quality carbon offsets. As part of their operations, Flow is active at every level of carbon removal and protection projects, from helping finance projects – often nature protection projects – that are just getting started, to sourcing and selling offsets in the opaque and broker-dominated spot market. Having extensive experience transacting in the traditional market, Flow is now focused on leveraging Web3 to rebuild the carbon offset market as an open, accessible, transparent market with clear pricing and market-tracking quality benchmarks coded into different classes of tokens. Most importantly, it enables those doing essential projects that remove and store carbon to instantly bridge on-chain for access to direct liquidity.
Flow Carbon will be launching a Goddess DAO to govern the protocol in close proximity to the initial GNT launch, decentralizing governance of the project and enabling community decision-making. More details on the DAO will be posted in Flow Carbon’s Discord in the coming days.
What is GNT?
GNT is a bundle token composed of individual ERC-20 tokens called GCO2. Each GCO2 is backed 1:1 with one metric ton of un-retired carbon credits. Different GCO2 tokens are specifically linked to a specific batch of credits issued for a specific project. Each individual GNT token represents one metric tonne of carbon certified as an offset, and meets the following criteria, which directly track what corporate buyers are seeking in the market:
- Certified by one of the market-recognized certification bodies, which currently are: Verra, American Carbon Registry, Climate Action Reserve, or Gold Standard
- Certified pursuant to a nature-based methodology from the above registries (i.e. REDD/REDD+, ARR, IFM)
- Vintage (issuance) year not more than five years old
The projects initially seeded into the Goddess Nature Token pool at launch include, among many others:
- Katingan Mentaya, a very large forest conservation project in Indonesia that protects 943,676 hectares of rainforest and the habitats of 39 endangered species.
- Luangwa Community Forests Project, a large-scale REDD+ project implemented in Eastern and Lusaka Province, Zambia with a project area of 943,676 hectares.
- Russas Project, a large-scale forest conservation project in the State of Acre, Brazil with a project area of 41,976 hectares.
- Madre de Dios Project, a REDD+ / CCB project in Peru focused on the protection of sensitive forest areas and endangered species in the Madre de Dios area with a project area of 7,749 hectares.
- Valparaiso Project, a large-scale forest conservation project in Brazil with a project area of 28,096 hectares.
A litepaper on GNT can be found here.
Minting - The Two Way Bridge
Each GC02 token represents exactly one un-retired offset credit, held by Goddess DAO in a bankruptcy-remote, professionally managed, third party SPV account at one of the accepted registries, e.g. Verra, and attributed with a universally unique identifier (UUID). These UUIDs are published on Flow Carbon’s website and are used to create a checksum that links the individual carbon credits with unique tokens.
GC02 tokens can be minted and deposited into GNT pool tokens (more below) by anyone holding qualifying underlying carbon credits, by transferring those carbon credits to the SPV. Currently, no limits on minting are built-in; however, they could be added later, by DAO governance.
Bundle Contracts
While a VCU and the resulting GCO2 token originate from a specific project, its abstract properties may be the same as other credits. Hence, some VCUs have full fungibility across projects and can be bundled to represent a standardized underlying commodity. Multiple projects are thus bundled into one ERC-20 token contract – the GNT pool token – which represents the underlying commodity. GCO2 tokens can be added and withdrawn from the bundle.
Any token holder can unwrap the GNT for an individual GC02 from a bundle contract, for a fee. Additionally, any token holder can redeem a GNT for a live offset credit, for a fee. In this case, the live credit will be transferred to the token holder’s registry account off-chain.
GNT is the first bundle contract to be created by Goddess DAOand represents a pool of all nature-based credits. Future pools will have additional filters to create a variety of pools that serve different goals.
Retiring
The underlying carbon credit is retired when the token holder decides to do so. Retirement happens on-chain first and is later finalized in the SPV. Users will be able to retire GNT tokens held in their wallets using the Dapp on the Flow Carbon site.
To retire the underlying VCU of a GC02 token, the token needs to be burnt. For GNT, the contract burns the underlying GC02 project token and increases the retirement balance on the bundle. When a minimum number of tokens have been burnt on-chain and are awaiting retirement, the retirements take place in the SPV’s registry account as a batch, which receives a UUID. Checksums are used to link between off-chain and on-chain processes explicitly and in a tamper-proof manner. This allows for retirements of partial tons. Users who wish to have large batches of retirements made at the registries in a specific fashion can have those instructions executed by the SPV.
Purchasing & Trading
GNT will trade on AMMs on Polygon for anyone to purchase. Retail and corporate buyers will also be able to buy GNT off-chain via Flow Carbon’s website, using fiat.
Flow Carbon will be seeding the initial liquidity of the AMMs with a minimum of $5,000,000.
Third-Party Audit and Attestation
Flow Carbon has completed a security audit from Quantstamp. Details can be found here.
Flow Carbon has engaged a well-respected US accounting firm to conduct specified procedures that support the following assertions:
At any given point in time, the number of live credits held by the SPV matches the total supply on-chain for any given project
At any given point in time, the number of retired credits held by the SPV matches the total of retired tokens for any given project
Values can be independently verified on a blockchain scanner, and on Verra. To verify the individual tokens, the event log is checked to confirm that the UUIDs match the checksums and the amount. If a token is added to a bundle, it is examined together with the bundle.
What is in it for KLIMA?
KLIMA DAO gains exposure and diversification from adding to the treasury high-quality carbon credits that maintain their off-chain value and can be created by anyone.
Flow Carbon is pledging a minimum of $100k in joint marketing spend to increase the public exposure of KLIMA and the Flow Carbon/Goddess DAO/KLIMA DAO partnership.
Flow Carbon’s corporate sales team will be selling offsets with on-chain pool tokens to buyers and will be educating offset buyers about the benefits of holding and staking KLIMA, via Klima’s ‘Klima Infinity’ program, as a way to meet their sustainability ambitions.
A minimum of 2.5% of the fully diluted DAO is being set aside for GNT/KLIMA and GNT/USDC liquidity mining.
Vote
For: Introduce GNT as a treasury asset with naked bonds
For: GNT/KLIMA bonds
For: GNT/USDC bonds
Against: Do not Introduce GNT, GNT/KLIMA, and GNT/USDC bonds