Sirob Dear @Sirob
Please do not put words in my mouth ;-).
Nowhere did I say anything about monopolizing supply. To try that would be silly, as the voluntary market is 250mn ton currently, growing potentially to 1bn in a few years. We do however want to digitalize the process to drastically reduce current costs for asset generation - which are absurdly and unnecessarily high because of an outdated, manual, analogue fact checking and due diligence process.
We believe in the DIGITAL generation of assets. That's how we are gonna remove the "middlemen" and empower the micro or small property owners to conserve and pay them for protecting the forest. Our experience in Brazil, with a team of multi decade experience in the carbon and environmental space, is key to understand the sharing of economics with the small players. For example, the current system of paying 500k USD to incumbent authorized auditors and developers for a 3-4 year certification process is obviously taking money away from the land owners and concentrating the benefits of carbon asset generation to large holders.
Once we are able to digitalize and generate assets via a decentralized system - instead of having to audit and certify them via abusive centralized registries - supply should boom, and a large share of development economics will stay with the land owners.
Moss intends to create a network and digitalize the assets for NO COST. The company will make money by creating NFTs and other tokenization services, as one player in a multiplayer decentralized service system, with transparent fees as you suggest.
Our fee is currently ZERO. We have bought credits cheap in the beginning of 2020, took (significant) balance sheet risk and are selling them dear(er) now. Simple as that.
It's certainly not a recurring model, and we aim to build this decentralized certification system with DAOs such as Klima. That's our end goal, that's our core value. Have we made money? Of course we have. This doesn't mean we support the current incumbent system that forces prohibitively expensive certification processes on land owners, and our engagement with Klima and similar DEX/DAO efforts are in the way of reducing these costs in a permanent way.
We want the guy who owns 2 hectares (2 football fields) of Amazon forest to upload their land data and get back the money from any conservation performed in the past year automatically, without having to pay hefty fees.
Now, in Brazil, the developer figure is the same as the land owner, it's not as separate as you suggest or as people living in developed markets would think. And developers, especially in the Amazon forest, take A LOT OF risk. Brazil is a wild wild west in terms of rule of law, especially the northern region. Brazil, by holding the highest reserve of carbon in the world, is by default the low cost generator. High risk, high return. Developing NBS in Brazil will ALWAYS generate high profits (as implicit costs are 2-3 USD per ton), and making a profit is OK (right?).
We want to create as high incentives for property owners to avoid deforestation as possible. We WANT PEOPLE TO PROFIT FROM SAVING THE AMAZON OR ANY FORESTS, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
Currently, a person can buy forested land in the Amazon for 100 usd per he, slash and burn, and resell for 500 usd. If we create a "green gold rush" and decrease the yield for carbon generation by increasing land value, we'll save the Amazon. That is to say, once land is at USD 600 because everyone in the world is buying land in the Amazon to generate carbon offsets, the Amazon will be saved. It's as simple as that, people (from time immemorial) follow financial incentives. Fixing margins for players sounds to me like a centralized, socialist, romantic view of how the world works. We need to be pragmatic. Has Klima worked because of the significant high APRs and arb between legacy credits and BCT, OR because people want to combat climate change? Probably both, but the first incentive has probably been stronger than the second.