• Proposals
  • KIP-45: Separate Carbonmark from KlimaDAO and fund expansion strategy

Arthurian There were milestones for previous requests. Check out this one: https://forum.klimadao.finance/d/230-kip-38-dao-funding-request-for-h2-2023

This proposal, it looks good, you know, if we want more people to use Klima's products. I understand that making a whole market switch to a new technology can be tough. It's like taking a big chance, but with a big potential reward. When you compare it to other DAOs that are out there, the way they've been showing what's been happening behind the scenes here is quite good. Check out the office hour recordings for example.

If you think that using markets are an important part of how we deal with climate change, I still think KlimaDAO and Carbonmark are the best options around. The whole industry is only set to grow.

keep building. I support.

jengajojo

Appreciate the comments and ongoing input you give to the project!

To elaborate on the challenges with milestone & tranche based funding:

  • Accountability: Carbonmark primarily represents a product and engineering effort for the time being - this group are in reality already the most efficient and accountable group within the DAO, and are building out against a clear vision to operationalize KlimaDAO's carbon - is it even proportional to milestone them given the track record and professionalism demonstrated?
  • Decision making: who would be the adjudicator of performance in a tranched funding model? There are already differences in opinion in terms of what and who should be funded. Would it not make most sense to have a CTO (or other leadership structure) with a defined funding package & mandate to call the shots and drive growth. I say this as CM essentially looks like an internal tech company already, and I don't think anyone is querying whether going further down that route (for CM only) is a good idea. Alternatives are essentially an internal DAO team who (may) have different stated priorities? Or the Community which is demonstrably a mix of stakeholders with different perspectives and timelines for their priorities? There will at best be inefficiencies here, or unintended consequences at worst.
  • Tranched funding creates consistent problems internally: already discussed elsewhere in the RFC period. One of the objectives is to protect Carbonmark from the volatility of building software in this manner in the short-term, whilst also forcing it to seek viability without subsidy in the med-term.

On a personal level, I am not against clear milestones -- although P&E have already defined their roadmap and give extensive updates on a weekly basis internally, and monthly externally. This roadmap is given ample opportunity to be reviewed and challenged publicly. Commercial milestones will likely be challenging to define until the appropriate business infrastructure can be wrapped around the product itself.

Regarding long-term strategic alignment: KlimaDAO's interest is in Carbonmark utilising DCM liquidity. I think other "nice to haves" from the DAO perspective could dilute CM's ability to pursue this mission and are not particularly pertinent to either organization's success (e.g. IP is currently open-source). P.S. one would of course expect Carbonmark to be an important "governor" of KlimaDAO over the long-term to solidify that strategic alignment!

The last 6 months have been difficult as we’ve navigated several internal challenges and worked to respond to an increasingly competitive market. Carbonmark’s core function has always been to serve as a gateway to the DCM landscape – making it easier for players both new and old to the Web3 world to access the liquidity that KlimaDAO has incentivized and facilitated on-chain.

A number of community members have highlighted the need to ensure alignment between Carbonmark and KlimaDAO. I certainly understand this sentiment, and believe the following factors will de facto ensure that these entities are aligned long into the future:

1) There is no other widely available interface for players to access KlimaDAO’s carbon liquidity. Period. While there are some players in the past that have promised such access and alignment, they’ve since turned to playing the same old games that the traditional industry has been by gating off their marketplaces and trying to own their own DCM tech stack. Long term, I don’t see these actions as viable strategies, and believe openness leveraging the network effect of countless builders together will be vastly superior. What’s the point of building a blockchain-based system if you’re not utilizing the advantages that come from the composable and interoperable nature of DeFi tooling?

2) Carbonmark’s entire raison d'être is to open demand channels to KlimaDAO’s liquidity while making it easier for supply-side participants to add their own liquidity to the Klima ecosystem. The projects have been symbiotic from the start and will continue to be because it makes clear sense. We expect KlimaDAO to continue servicing the base layer infrastructure necessary for a fully interoperable DCM, and Carbonmark will build atop those foundations and ensure the overall throughput of the system is increased.

3) Core contributors to Carbonmark’s infrastructure have heavy skin in the game to KlimaDAO’s success (including the majority of Klima’s actual founders). Our upside from the continued growth of the KlimaDAO protocol is what drives us forward to bring in new carbon supply, improve Carbonmark tooling, and build partnerships with demand-side players.

I'd also like to clarify a key point that was made by @Archimedes

The biggest retirements and offsets that occurred in the history of the DAO came from personal connections to larger orgs, none of which came during the time of Carbonmark or from the team that currently works on it. These were all largely done in 2021 and early 2022.

Number one, I was intimately involved with all of those deals and am still on the Carbonmark team. Number two, without any reasonable Web2 interface for corporates to connect to, of course the only large retirements that could have been made would be made by Web3 protocols at the tail end of the bull market. All of the low hanging fruit from that segment of the market were taken by mid 2022, and therefore the sales strategy was altered as per the feedback we began to receive re. integration partners (and from countless carbon market participants that we’ve spoken to over the last two years).

On the integration side, we can leverage the programmatic nature of tokenized carbon while abstracting away the Web3 pieces through a fiat-enabled partners (e.g. Provide Services). This is precisely where we’re seeing exciting partnerships develop now and where we believe the advantages of tokenized carbon shine. As I spoke about at Token2049, the next wave of adoption is only going to occur when fiat onramping/offramping and wallet abstraction are further developed (across the entire blockchain space) and this is a core objective within Carbonmark’s development over the next few months.

We have an opportunity to chart a promising path forward for the DAO by focusing our efforts on the commercialization of Carbonmark, increasing access to the DCM and KlimaDAO’s infrastructure stack, and having the organizational structure necessary to succeed in the market. Stagnation and straw man arguments are the exact opposite of what we need right now.

In summation, I trust that the community will recognize who is working tirelessly to drive innovation forward in this organization and vote in the best interests of that endeavor.

    Can somebody comment on the core team external funding? Has that ended now and the whole core team is funded by DAO?

    Ooh, it's getting a bit hectic in here
    if this is all true @Dionysus, I don't know what to think, I guess I'm more disappointed in the team member

    I'm in favor of the proposal.

    btw, thanks for trying to explain all this to us.

    Dionysus thank you for addressing these points.

    On the merits of the separation: KlimaDAO is aiming to disrupt a high margin, low volume incumbent industry with a high volume, low margin business model.

    That model relies on demand for carbon credit retirement, and the biggest consumers of carbon credits are outside of the web3 bubble. Furthermore, most web3 projects are not prioritizing sustainability initiatives given the difficult conditions and need to preserve runway.

    So we must seek out end-users who are not yet onboarded on-chain, which requires providing a clean, clear and user-friendly experience, more akin to Goldfinch's new UX or friend.tech rather than assuming users have a wallet with funds onboarded already. Automated integrations via Provide's SAP integration and the Carbonmark API also represent key levers for attracting new demand.

    On the specifics of the proposal, my concern with tranched funding is that it perpetuates the tenuous short term funding asks that have created uncertainty for existing KlimaDAO contributors and limited our ability to attract and retain top talent (especially engineers).

    That said, I am in favor of some formal mechanism to ensure that Carbonmark's product development accrues value to KlimaDAO.

    This has been one of the biggest disappointments in the development of the ReFi/Digital Carbon ecosystem: very few players are proudly standing alongside and building products that support KlimaDAO's pioneering infrastructure, instead extracting value from the pools we provide liquidity for or building around it by avoiding the retirement aggregator.

    As Dionysus said, all of the initial contributors to the new Carbonmark organization will be KLIMA holders, and therefore values-aligned, but some formal mechanism in the new Carbonmark organization would ensure that even if those contributors move on, the new organization would still be aligned with KlimaDAO's long term success.

    I think a revised version of this proposal, KIP-45a, could incorporate the feedback provided so far and chart a clearer path forward for the new Carbonmark organization. In particular:

    1. Lay out the planned roadmap for Carbonmark (though it will be much the same as that outlined in the previous funding ask for Product & Engineering)
    2. Clarify the source of funds, estimated budget breakdown, etc. that 0xy as shared in his responses to comments since the original proposal
    3. Specify that a mechanism must be included in the founding docs/bylaws of the new Carbonmark organization to align with and accrue value to KlimaDAO based on the success of Carbonmark's products.

    As for the size of the ask, personally I don't find it excessive at the reduced burn rate, and 18 months is already on the edge of a viable runway for a new organization just starting out (especially in the current funding environment).

    There is a lot of work to be done integrating new credit supply into Carbonmark from ICR, Coorest and others in the pipeline pending governance approval.

    This important work will both benefit KlimaDAO by providing more throughput in the retirement aggregator and any liquidity pools launched to support these new credits, as well as Carbonmark by providing users with a broader range of high integrity credits. There is also potentially an opportunity to integrate forward credits from the Solid World pools into Carbonmark, which will entail additional engineering work.

    The provided reasons for making Carbonmark a separate entity are sound and I support it. The amount of funding is significant, but may be reasonable, given whatever the team size is. Carbonmark, as a separate entity, could pivot away from KlimaDAO and actually I would support it, if it helps to grow short- or long-term. But it would be fair towards the Klima token investors to create a formal guarantee for value accrual based on the provided investment. Perhaps a model with KlimaDAO being an actual shareholder of Carbonmark with a defined range of decision-making power (limited to value-accrual-related issues, but nothing operational (or whatever might interfere with the reasons for separation)) could be a solution.

      rrrmmmmm But it would be fair towards the Klima token investors to create a formal guarantee for value accrual based on the provided investment.

      There it this quote from optima in the Office Hours chat: "The revenue generation is largely figured out - there've been ideas to use $KLIMA as payment token on CM for reduced fee levels (which I like, and want to be an option)".

      That's an idea, not a "formal guarantee", but ideas like this would probably come close to something like value accrual (increase token value by giving it benefits/utility on other platforms).

      I can’t vote for the proposal in its current form because there is no part of the proposal that sets out in a concrete way how the long-term alignment of Carbonmark with KlimaDAO would be ensured. I have noted @MarcusAurelius suggestion for a revised proposal that would take this into account.

      If the intention is for the new entity to be a not-for-profit, I would also like to see this stated explicitly in the proposal. Otherwise we have very little idea about what we would be granting funding to.

      And lastly, how much USDC would be left in the Klima treasury after providing this funding (also considering the expenditure that has been approved for the Aither/Limenet and Solid World KIPs)?

      Hey! Ryan from Provide here again voicing my support once more and with some added context of the benefits I see in this proposal plus a few ideas that should address concern and encourage others to join in support of this KIP.

      First: I'm glad to see Carbonmark's role as a web2/enterprise sales channel for KlimaDAO being pretty well understood throughout this thread (plus a big thank you to those of you recognizing Provide's contributions too!).

      As its own legal entity, Carbonmark will be equipped with even more tools and capabilities to drive value to the DAO and to customers. Banking and invoicing is a key one. As glad as we are at Provide to invoice users of Carbonmark - we think it would be a better customer experience for the invoicing party/legal entity in such cases to strictly be Carbonmark (but still operating from the API and SAP solutions by Provide as a technology partner). Also to mention - our customers understanding, confidence, and willingness to engage with digital carbon is greatly furthered with Carbonmark as a designated legal entity. And when Carbonmark API and SAP users graduate to other enterprise blockchain offerings by Provide - this also enables us to offer a share of those revenues back to Carbonmark. Our end-to-end business process re: API simply works better with Carbonmark as a legal entity of its own.

      I like to think as well - there will be a boom in the years to come in sustainability driven funding and grants driven by a number of businesses, non-profits, governments, NGOs, etc. KlimaDAO/Carbonmark would actually miss out on taking full advantage of such funding opportunities without the organizational structures to effectively interface with such institutions. I think this would be a good funding channel to pursue regardless of how much Carbonmark is authorized to receive from the treasure in this KIP

      With the direct revenues of the API and this additional institutional reach, I believe you would see Carbonmark ultimately become self-sustaining and while also driving a lot of value into KlimaDAO. And KlimaDAO itself could sharpen its focus that much more purely into operating the digital carbon market protocol.

      There's a lot of good conversation on how to protect and enhance the interests of token holders on a $3 million commitment or other significant amount. Here's a few ideas of mine:

      • Form a board of directors at Carbonmark elected from and representing the interests of KlimaDAO to overlook operations and expenditures
      • Find an appropriate way to reward $KLIMA holders in some way during operation of the USDC liquidity pools we use for API
      • Carbonmark to produce an auditable financial statement and annual report to the public
      • Carbonmark to set a goal to use its profits to accumulate $KLIMA and/or contribute directly back to treasury

      Accountability is key when you're handling millions! All this might even make ops expenditures even more transparent than they already are.

        ryfleisch Thanks for your post! Really good ideas how to enhance and protect Klima token holders interest still providing continuity for Carbonmarkt employees and no rigid periodic DAO funding rounds. Also good information and justification why separate legal entity for Carbonmarkt is needed. I hope there is demand upcoming for Carbonmarkt services. One viewpoint I would like to raise that have not been discussed very much: how to incentivice and engage future Carbonmarkt employees so that they have aligned interests with Klima token holders? Assuming that Carbonmarkt is a non-profit entity with Klima aligned governance. We do not want to loose good talent.

        optima @Archimedes

        For transparency and those who do not know me, I'm jabby the KlimaDAO and Carbonmark product manager and DAO contributor since Jan, 2022.

        100% for accountability but your comments infer that this has not been happening which is simply not true.

        The product & engineering (R&D) team at KlimaDAO embraces transparency and accountability, and leads the way on working in the open. This is not just a qualitative statement, we have the quantitative data to back it up. Our GitHub is available for all to see, and as you know we maintain rigorous and verbose documentation internally so all internal stakeholders have visibility on the work of the product team.

        What we work on day-to-day is not random, it is always linked to our strategy and based on what we are learning from markets, competitors, customers, and our users. We are a problem solving, outcome focused team with well established, best-in-class, light-weight discovery and delivery processes as guard rails. This allows us to strike a balance of being structured, focused, and efficient while nimble enough to pivot based on what we are learning.

        KIP-30 and KIP-38 (still in progress) funding proposals were already milestone based. We put forward our strategic goals and high-level tactics to achieve those goals in the proposals and the community debated and voted on the funding. I will proudly stand behind the outcomes that were delivered for that funding. The product features we shipped 100% delivered value to users and the business. Those key outcomes were shared in the office hours slide presentation but worth repeating here:

        H1 2023 (based on KIP-30)

        Q1

        • Carbonmark (beta)

        Q2

        • Retire & Buy in CM
        • Retirement receipt in CM
        • Carbonmark API PoC
        • Carbon Dashboard infrastructure migration
        • Subgraph v2
        • Retirement bonds

        H2 2023 (based on KIP-38)

        Q3

        • Retire page in CM
        • Retire with credit card
        • Carbonmark REST API v1
        • Carbonmark docs
        • Project list & map view

        Q4 (in progress, planned delivery)

        • Carbonmark contract v2 & Seller listings (Oct)
        • Carbon Dashboard (Klima Data) frontend redesign (Oct)
        • KYC beta (Q4)
        • New credit supply(Q4)
        • Start of Carbonmark v2 features (Q4)

        It is worth emphasizing that Carbonmark is just getting started. We only had a MVP at the end of March and the maturing product is barely 6 months old. We are very much still in the realm of finding product-market fit in a rapidly changing and nascent market full of competitors. Our conviction of what we are building in engineering in the next quarter is high, but future "bets" are still being shaped, researched, and de-risked (and yes we have a defined process for idea/bet management as well). At this stage we need to have flexibility and stable, longer term funding. We are not at a product maturity stage where we can predict feature development. In fact, handcuffing the product & engineering team to milestone-based funding tranches promotes premature convergence on high-risk bets and increases the likelihood of building the wrong thing which is the fastest path to wasting funding.

          @jabby09 Thanks for the detailed breakdown Jabby. I think we have consistently been the most transparent, cost-effective, cohesive and organized team within the DAO (thanks to you). Very good point about the potential for milestones to handcuff us.

          Still, concerns about accountability and incentives between the orgs are valid. For my own sake, I want to try re-framing things so I can better understand where there is tension, and where there isn't.

          1. Top-level DAO strategy: we need transaction & retirement volume, and our path to get there is by building out the UI, API, and marketplace and by eliminating web3 friction. The DAO and community has been extremely well aligned here ✅.
          2. This strategy requires heavy investments in software development, engineering, and sales. On this we have also been strongly aligned past budget KIPs have passed with little controversy ✅.
          3. The market is best served by a standalone brand. The product, partnerships, sales, and protocol teams were all aligned when we created Carbonmark to address challenges faced with the KlimaDAO brand ✅
          4. We critically need an organizational entity for this brand (see my post above). We have strong alignment here as well, even within this thread ✅
          5. This new org should manage itself to reduce DAO organizational overhead, reduce DAO software maintenance burdens, and for Carbonmarks own longevity, agility and resilience. ⚠️Tension: how much management control should the DAO have over the new org?
          6. This new org must continue to consume the DAO’s tech stack (specifically the Retirement Aggregator contracts, Retirement Bonds, and liquidity). This is a no-brainer as the products whole USP is oriented around Digital Carbon, most of which is owned by the DAO. ⚠️Tension: can we prevent Carbonmark from abandoning the stack in the future?
          7. This new org must continue to contribute to the DAO’s tech stack. This is status-quo, as the product team already develops on both fronts. ⚠️Tension: can we prevent Carbonmark from abandoning this responsibility, switching to forked & closed-sourced versions?

          From my perspective, Carbonmark and KlimaDAO’s fates are bound completely. Carbonmark is nothing without the DAO and nobody on the product team has any interest in rebuilding our foundations. I struggle to think of a practical arrangement that can can fully alleviate these tensions without creating more headache. I would much rather we secure a single tranche of funding so we have a guaranteed runway and peace-of-mind for contributors. Other arrangements are too far outside my domain of expertise (I’m not a lawyer) and I haven’t heard any real actionable suggestions yet.

            jabby09 Atmosfearful KIP 45 and 45a have a large difference in the allocated funding, which seems to mostly impact the ability to develop features for Carbonmark. How much development would you see as really necessary at the current point? Isn't the current main challenge in engaging with customers the legal problem, which is unrelated to product features? In other words, if Carbonmark becomes a private company with its existing product, would this already attract customers and start generating revenue? Do you think it would be possible to build features in a much leaner fashion and directly derived from the customer experiences? To what extent would you see customers to be able to put funding into the development of their individual features wishes, which would still be part of the open source code? P.s. KlimaDAO could in still add funding, too, e.g. in the proposed way in KIP 45a.

              rrrmmmmm

              Thanks so much for your questions; appreciate your interest in our work.

              I'll be happy to answer these but just wanted to let you know it will be late Monday before I'll have time in my schedule to do this.

              rrrmmmmm

              thanks for your questions! I'll do my best to answer them below and then atmos may also have perspectives to share.

              How much development would you see as really necessary at the current point?

              Consider that we only launched a very MVP version of the product at the end of March. Since launch, we have been using the MVP to engage and learn from customers and users while in parallel building a more feature complete beta application (major feature areas I highlighted in my comment above). The next quarter and first half of 2024 will be focused on delivering on the solutions we have validated with customers and users. These include broad themes such as overall redesigned user experience in Carbonmark (beyond an MVP), improved onboarding (KYC/KYB/AML), asset management (custodial wallet, fiat on-ramp and off-ramp), registry aggregation, and additional platform integrations (includes API enhancements). The other significant and critical activities over the next 3-6 months is the substantial technical work to integrate new credit supply into Carbonmark (related to KIP-37, KIP-39, KIP-41 and more to follow).

              Beyond that, important to recognize we are very much still in the realm of finding product-market fit in a rapidly changing and nascent market. We will need to continue to learn and pivot to build a product that solve customers problems better than our competitors. That is how we will dominate market share and win. How long that takes is unknown, nobody has that crystal ball.

              Isn't the current main challenge in engaging with customers the legal problem, which is unrelated to product features? In other words, if Carbonmark becomes a private company with its existing product, would this already attract customers and start generating revenue?

              It is both. By working with customers with our MVP, we have learned that traditional web2 organizations are very challenged to commercially engage with our solution given our DAO status. So there are organizational changes that are required (the primary focus of this KIP) but also additional features we need to provide (outlined above), generally to eliminate web3 frictions. Our hypothesis is that with these changes we will be able to unlock the huge potential of the KlimaDAO / Carbonmark ecosystem and move towards a self-sustaining revenue model.

              Do you think it would be possible to build features in a much leaner fashion and directly derived from the customer experiences?

              As eluded to above, our engagement with customers and users is already being used to validate the bets and feature development we work on and that will continue.

              To be honest, we are already very lean. We have one PM, one designer, an engineering lead and a handful of developers (working at various levels of FTE). These are the core roles required for a product team to function. Most product teams would also have a dedicated QA role but we manage that using existing contributors (including myself).

              For some additional context, I've been leading product in various startups since 2019 and have been working with software development teams for over 20 years. While there is always room for productivity improvements, and we welcome feedback on pace of delivery, code quality, etc., based on my experience this is a very high performing and efficient team. Overall I'm very proud of culture of professionalism, transparency, and accountability that we have been able to foster with a global remote team within a very challenging DAO organization structure.

              To what extent would you see customers to be able to put funding into the development of their individual features wishes, which would still be part of the open source code?

              I'm not a lawyer so I won't comment on funding. However, we 100% welcome ideas from the community and would be happy to include them in our portfolio of bets ideation and prioritization process. Another approach to this could be regularly scheduled and funded hackathons to encourage new ideas from outside of our internal team.

              I hope this helps, let me know if any follow up questions and thanks again for your participation in this process and support of the project.

                jabby09 Thanks for the message! I’m in favour of this proposal in general but thinking about the viability of Carbonmarkt non-profit entity after the funding. I have not understood from this discussion the assumptions or calculations how Carbonmarkt is going to generate money to pay its costs after the funding is ended at month 18. How many tons of carbon is assumed to be sold and what is the business logic (how the revenue is generated)? What are the revenue streams and assumptions behind them?

                jabby09 @rrrmmmmm Hey there, I wanted to offer some more detailed insight on just how lean our team is, to help add some perspective from inside the team. We

                Hi, I'm Professor A. I'm the designer Jabby mentioned in his post. In my experience, a product of this size normally has a design team of 4. Currently we have only 1. Just me. I'm doing the work of UX Researcher, UX Architect, UI Designer, and Prototyping Engineer.

                In my experience, a product of this size and feature set normally has a front-end dev team of 6-10. We have like 2 full timers and maybe 4-5 part time contributors.

                In my experience, a product of this size and complexity has a back-end dev team of 5-10. I have no idea what our back end staffing looks like (that's a question for @MarcusAurelius), but I can assure you it's far below industry standard.

                We're already running leaner and more efficiently than most other projects I've worked on. And nonetheless shipping features on an unfathomably fast timeline. I've worked on projects with 1/3d of the complexity that took twice as long to ship from inception to MVP. Understand we shipped the Carbonmark MVP in 5 months from blank page to deployment, while being understaffed by industry standards. AND, this same team was shipping improvements to the Protocol simultaneously. I hope I've been able to provide some insight (edited to remove superfluity)

                  In regards to questions directed toward viability, I wanted to provide some additional context

                  Carbonmark's business model

                  Carbonmark’s core revenue stems from brokerage fees tied to trading volumes. In order to build market share and maximize transaction volume, we are currently pricing our services competitively. These brokerage fees would be distinct from the existing fee system that exists in the KlimaDAO Protocol (e.g. those that come from the Retirement Bonds). In addition to this, as we continue to build value-added features and services on the core product, we anticipate new revenue streams to open up, which may include subscription and advertising fees.

                  We believe that by having a commercially-incentivized ecosystem built on top of KlimaDAO's infrastructure, we can maximize the chance of success for all stakeholders involved.

                  Carbonmark currently aims to serve three key users within the Voluntary Carbon Market:

                  1. Companies looking to offset their carbon footprint programmatically.
                  2. Developers of carbon projects seeking direct access to buyers.
                  3. Intermediary traders.

                  Critical to addressing the needs of (2) and (3) are the changes we propose making as part of KIP-45, including establishing a fit-for-purpose legal entity and delivering a set of key features to enable greater accessibility to the underlying technology.

                  Beyond these user groups however, we believe our addressable market extends far beyond the VCM. Extending into other environmental asset classes is high on our priority list.

                  Our organization

                  During the early stages of the DAO’s life, the flat management hierarchy and lack of structure resulted in an unwieldy organization. Since this time however, we have focused on driving efficiency, accountability and alignment within the team. We have sought to strike the right balance between speed and burn, and improvements in core operations have resulted in a much-reduced team size of dedicated and talented team members.

                  The Carbonmark core team and advisors consist of experienced world-class technologists and carbon market industry experts:

                  • Andrew Bonneau, Business Development & Partnerships. Co-founder of KlimaDAO, C3 and Offsetra. Previously at First Climate and BioCarbon Engineering. MSc in Environmental Governance from the University of Freiburg.
                  • Gabriel Kent, Product Owner - KlimaDAO core team contributor since October, 2021. Experienced startup CTO and former co-founder at Adext AI, Defilanthropy, Virket Holding, DASH, and others. Successfully involved in numerous capital raises and exits / acquisitions.
                  • Brice Walsh, Principal Product Manager - KlimaDAO contributor since January, 2022. Over 20 years experience as a builder in software studio consulting agencies and startup organizations. Leading product and scaling technology startups since 2019.
                  • Brendan McGill, Head of Engineering. Co-founder of KlimaDAO and Offsetra. Previously at Esri and Ioki. MSc in Environmental Governance from the University of Freiburg.
                  • Giorgio Alessandro Donà-Danioni, Head of Legal. Co-founder of KlimaDAO and C3. Previously at Studio Pirola Pennuto Zei and Borgonuovo & Partners. J.D. from LIUC - Università Cattaneo and Barcelona's universitad Abat Oliba
                  • Peter Noszek, Marketing. Co-Founder of TOKEN2049, previously Head of Growth at Montu – Australia's fastest growing tech company. MA from University of Cambridge and MSc from the London School of Economics.
                  • Liam Ellul, Head of Solutions - Senior technology strategist with 9+ years of experience in leading tech firms, as well as zero-to-one product and business growth environments.
                  • David Peyronnin, Consultant & Operations. 25 years of experience in IT OPS and in crypto since 2013. Co-founded various startups and worked on projects including TheDAO, VISA DLT pilot, Polkadot during its launch. Co-organised the Ethereum Meetups in London since 2014. Worked as head of delivery for Barclays and delivered front to back trading platforms for tier 1 investment banks worldwide at FIS Global. He is also the proud father of 2 teenagers.

                  With that core team and a group of incredible contributors and community members, we have significantly de-risked the market opportunity and delivered several key milestones (with H1 and H2 2023 milestones listed below)

                  With KIP-45, Carbonmark aims to become profitable and self-sufficient as a standalone entity. This means we are aiming to rely less on KlimaDAO's treasury for funding. Further, spinning off Carbonmark with a more traditional legal framework will allow us to more easily recruit top talent, work with major institutions, and generate profits, which in turn supports both our mission and KlimaDAO’s (specifically, increasing the throughput of tokenized environmental commodities across the foundational infrastructure that KlimaDAO has developed).

                  Finally, the team recognizes that the market is significantly more competitive than it was when KlimaDAO first launched back in 2021. We need to maintain some degree of commercial sensitivity around things like pricing, partnerships and roadmap to avoid risks from competitors. Having said this, the KlimaDAO protocol is actively working through the recommendations from the Decentralization Working Group, and a key pillar of this is around transparency. We believe KlimaDAO is one of the most transparent DAOs in the market, but we are working toward continual improvements in this area.