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Hi AndrewSaul, thank you for your comments and questions.
Re. conferences and events, you raise a great point, and we've had several conversations internally about how much we should be allocating toward events and conferences, and how we can track their success. Where we have landed is that in order to generate activity across both sides of the marketplace on our infrastructure, we need to build trust and develop relationships. The VCM is an industry entirely built on trust and relationships. When thinking about our relationships with registries, developers, traders and retailers, the ROI of attending a conference is very hard to assess - though it is essential to our success.
On the other hand, as we think about commercialization activities, the focus over the past six months has been on three main areas:
- Speaking with customers to de-risk product and marketing decisions (e.g. our Web2 API)
- Building real-world integration use cases (e.g. SushiSwap) to showcase the solution and its benefits
- Educate the market on these use cases and how companies can leverage it to their advantage
Attending conferences with the goal of finding potential users of our technology does have ROI, and we are now hitting a point where we are going beyond POCs to real B2B sales deals. The sales cycle in our industry is typically long, at least with respect to an integration. This means that meeting decision-makers in-person at these events can often be a really important part of building the relationship and closing the deal.
Re. crypto versus VCM conferences, the team had a conversation last night about this topic in fact, and we are going to be prioritizing attendance at the largest commercial crypto conferences going forward, including Consensus (which we were at earlier in the year) and TOKEN2049, amongst others. This will be in addition to some of the larger carbon market / environmental conferences and events, e.g. the S&P Global Carbon Markets Conference. It is important to remember that the market opportunity in the broader VCM is ~ 1,000x larger than the current size of the Digital Carbon Market. However, we also recognize that being a DeFi project and our relationships with other builders in the space is a key capability that we'll continue to leverage going forward. Staying close to the latest developments in DeFi, as well as exploring opportunities to partner with others in the ecosystem (e.g. Polygon and others) will certainly continue going forward.
Of course, we would always welcome any warm introductions you could provide with contacts in your network from other projects in Web3/DeFi.
Re. our plans for tapping into Web3/DeFi and plans for broader adoption of sKLIMA, I will defer to @Cujo or @MarcusAurelius on the protocol / tokenomics side to explain their thinking.