Head of Engineering at KlimaDAO here 👋
Creating & funding this entity is an absolutely critical step for both Carbonmark & the DAO.
I only wish we'd done it sooner. Since day one, our approach to building products has been blockchain-first, and permissionless. These technical decisions have tradeoffs touching everything from user onboarding, to transaction speed and website performance. Some of these Web3 tradeoffs are simply insurmountable for the segment of the market who would adopt Digital Carbon at scale. Managing wallets, gas, and permissionless assets is simply too much to ask from carbon brokers and project developers who have long-established KYC and accounting practices. Many quality of life features that I want to ship-- Stripe integrations, wallet abstractions, KYC and AML, and more, are simply not possible in the current DAO structure, so me and the product team have deprioritized them. This has been deeply frustrating for me.
Our legal designation has also made my job as a manager and team-builder more difficult, as I can't compete on the same level as software companies who can offer more familiar employment contracts. Thankfully KlimaDAO and Carbonmark are exciting, high-impact projects: plenty of top-tier builders have showed up to contribute. The team I work with right now is incredibly efficient and talented. The next phase of growth, however, is going to require a more traditional talent acquisition process.
As I've come to understand (I am not a lawyer) the only way to bridge these gaps and solve these problems are to establish a legal entity.
Right now, most dev time is already spent on Carbonmark. KlimaDAO invented ReFi and the Digital Carbon Market, but it absolutely can not succeed without a product like Carbonmark. I want Carbonmark to be the most comprehensive UI and API for interacting with the Carbon Market end-to-end. The DAO liquidity engine has already made the impossible possible-- the largest and most diverse supply of carbon credits with open access, instant settlement & instant retirement, and a set of APIs that allow anyone to integrate carbon into any application.
Now, we believe we have enough feedback to address fundamental issues and really unlock the scale we've all been envisioning.
For those who are worried about my commitment to the DAO going forward: Me and my colleagues will continue to maintain app.klimadao.finance for the foreseeable future. The DAO marketing team has already made huge strides towards taking full control of the website & blog, so they are no longer dependent on us developers for their new content and campaigns. In addition, the DAO will benefit from the fact that projects like Klima Infinity, KlimaDAO Pledges, and the carbon-oriented sections of the app can be deprecated and no longer be a burden on the DAO to maintain-- these have already been re-implemented (and much better!) in Carbonmark with the same value-sharing mechanisms for the DAO.
Finally; we work in the open and plan to continue doing that as well. Concerns or complaints about our pace, code quality, roadmap or spending have always been welcomed. So far the product and engineering teams have received nothing but praise, our team outperforms any team I've ever been on dollar-for-dollar, and is improving every day.