KlimaDAO Forum

Hi @jabby09 The-Professor-A Hugh , thank you all for your additional insights. I will try to address the key points below.

In summary, the funding of $3M is a large number for KlimaDAO. To my knowledge, it's the majority of KlimaDAO's USDC treasury funds? Yes, Klima has funded the development of Carbonmark already until now, but the separation and asked funding would mean that KlimaDAO gives away control over these funds.

Even though Carbonmark is a direct spin-off of Klima and even though it's largely the same people working on both projects, I believe we need to treat them as being separate and understand the consequences for both sides.

Carbonmark is an ambitious project and it can lead to KlimaDAO's success, but it can also fail. If it fails, then KlimaDAO will be left behind with even less funding and operational ability. We're putting a lot of eggs into one basket here.

The requested funding with no formalized value recapture is a big risk for KlimaDAO. I'm not sure how many investors would do such a bet of this size, relative to their total budgets.

KlimaDAO needs to grow. The token value needs to grow. Only when this growth is achieved, KlimaDAO will have the ability to do more. The treasury will grow and there will be more ability for operational activities. This definitely requires the right signalling to attract individual investors. Right now, however, we are only thinning out the treasury with no visible promise of growth. This will only work for a finite time. Then it will be over.

Let's assume that Carbonmark can be a success, but needs this amount of funding. Are there no other sources of funding available? Investors, VCs, must be lining up if they believe in CM's vision. Perhaps CM should have a profit-oriented business model?

On the other hand, I'd like to challenge some of the points given regarding the feature implementations.

For example, what is the required effort to integrate new carbon asset classes to CM? It sounds as if this is a big deal, but is it really? We're talking tokenized carbon here. Toucan protocol built their complete bridge, the NFT model and the first 2 pool token types within 3 months and I believe with an even smaller team. KlimaDAO was built in the same time. What is the effort, for example, to integrate ICR's credits? Isn't this basically just publishing new smart contracts with the code being mostly copy-paste from other ones? And if CM wants to build more UI/UX around this, shouldn't ICR then be willing to contribute to the development with additional funding?

Does CM really need a KYC solution right now? Individual customers surely don't. And if a company, who wants to offset their footprint, brings their own custodial wallet, isn't the KYC story already solved for them?

Doesn't Carbonmark basically only need one customer that has a lot of carbon throughput? This customer could serve as a precedence for others to follow. With a large throughput and a related large cost reduction, this customer could be willing to contribute to the funding of some features, if needed. If there are customers waiting to partner with Carbonmark, then surely some of them should have a reduced entry barrier, right?

If we see Carbonmark as an independent organization, then it is one of various possible approaches for generating supply and demand for tokenized carbon. Other approaches might exist as well. CM follows a traditional corporate carbon offsetting strategy. This can work. Other approaches could let the advantages of tokenized carbon shine more. They might be more web3-centric and would only take off after the next general adoption wave of web3. For KlimaDAO, the question really is about risk and operational ability.

I strongly believe that the DAO should not put too many eggs in one basket.

For KIP 45 I personally would either ask for a more formalized value recapture mechanism or for a different funding strategy. How difficult would you see it, to find $2M from other sources and get $1M from KlimaDAO?