Open Grant Proposal: `GainForest Transparency Hub`

Name of Project: GainForest Transparency Hub Proposal Category: green

Proposer: @daviddao

(Optional) Technical Sponsor: @redransil

Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT and APACHE2 licenses?: Yes

Overview

Read long version

The natural world is deteriorating in scales unparalleled in human history. Carbon offsets are a way of financing and trading on the capture of carbon for businesses and governments - and demand is rapidly increasing with many new players moving into the crypto space. Unfortunately, linking corresponding payments with carbon emissions and ecosystem restoration is a resource-intensive and complex task without clear consensus and standards. Current methods for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) are either based on on-ground inspection which is too expensive (USD 20-30k), delayed (up to two years), corruptible, noisy or not robust, resulting in systematic overestimation of forest credits and a lack of trust.

Project Description

GainForest Labs, together with Restor.eco and ETH Zurich DS3Lab Climate + AI, have collected and developed data layers, ML models and apps that allow everyone to query and store environmental data from satellites, drones and on-ground measurements (more details in the long version).

This grant proposal aims to build a decentralized Transparency Hub, that makes our environmental data and models accessible for everyone - by leveraging the power of Filecoin's decentralized storage. The hub will 1.) allow anyone in the world to explore the quality of any nature-backed asset (e.g. Toucan’s NCT, Flowcarbon, RainForest Token, etc …) and enable us to filter out low-quality sites and build trust around high-quality projects, and 2.) provide an economic opportunity for local communities to participate in the digital economy by empowering them to contribute field-based data.

Value

Our team believes that the Filecoin community can play a key role in green finance by storing important environmental data and models and making natural assets more trustworthy and accessible for decision makers, scientists and decentralized protocols.

Risks if we do not get this right:

Datasets are biased, unchecked, violate privacy rights, not transparent, leading to systematic noisy estimations and incentivize low-quality nature-based assets
Potential harmful effects on the environment (leakage, double counting of carbon).

Execution risk:

Environmental data is heterogeneous, distributed and very large (in peta-byte scales). It updates on an infrequent basis. Therefore we require scalable system designs and oracles that are fault tolerant.

Milestones

1. Store Open Data Pipelines for Earth Observation in Decentralized Storage (8 weeks)

First, we aim to extend and scale our current proof of concept into a production-ready deployment pipeline that automatically processes, uploads and maintains data bridges from all our satellite-based data sources into Estuary for each project area.

Required members: Project Manager, Backend Engineer, ML Engineer

Timeline:
July - Sept 2022

2. Store On-Ground Data Pipelines for Environmental Monitoring to Decentralized Storage (8 weeks)

Next, we aim to allow users to upload local field-based data through our multiple sources. We aim to integrate our TreeApp that collects tree species and diameter, drone-based ortho-mosaics and wildlife cam footage into our Estuary bridge.

Required members: Project Manager, Backend Engineer, ML Engineer

Timeline:
Sept - Nov 2022

3. Transparency Dashboard (24 weeks)

Simultaneously, we will be working on an interactive web-based transparency dashboard that will allow everyone to efficiently query and interact with crucial environmental information, such as the rates of deforestation, land cover change and health of biodiversity in any nature-based asset project around the world (backed by decentralized data).

Required members: Project Manager, Full-Stack Engineer

Timeline:
July - Jan 2023

4. NFTrees: Dynamic Data Bridges and Non-Fungible Impact Certificates (8 weeks)

Besides being able to explore detailed data in the web-based dashboard, we aim to issue impact certificate NFTs that will airdrop near real-time data NFTs into a user's wallet (satellite and field-based) - thus allowing the user to have a glance at updated forest data without the need to leave the wallet.

Required members: Project Manager, Backend-Engineer, Artist

Timeline:
Nov - Jan 2023.

5. Onboarding New Project Sites (24 weeks)

Our core design principle is to work closely with local communities and various stakeholders with regular feedback loops. Thus, we urgently seek a full-time community manager that interfaces with blockchain, climate finance and local communities - and help us explore novel finance methodologies and on-board new project sites.

Required members: Community Manager

Timeline:
July - Jan 2023

Development Roadmap

Our development aims to build the Transparency hub that consists of several milestones:

Data collection, processing, and uploading into Filecoin (Milestones 1 + 2)
Development of the wallet and web-facing UI (Milestones 3 + 4)
Exploration of novel green financial instruments & On-boarding new projects (Milestones 5)

The goal is to finish the entire MVP by the end of 2022 / early 2023.

Total Budget Requested

Salaries

Project Manager (24 weeks, part-time): 18K USD Engineer: Machine Learning (16 weeks): 24K USD Engineer: Backend (24 weeks): 36K USD Engineer: Full Stack (24 weeks): 36K USD Community Manager (24 weeks): 30K USD

Others

Deployment Costs: 2K (e.g. transaction fee) Hardware: 10K USD (e.g. cloud compute) Artist: 10K USD Legal: 10K USD Security Audit: 14K USD Travel, Conference & Others: 10K USD (e.g. COP27)

Total Budget

Total budget requested: 200K USD

Maintenance and Upgrade Plans

We will be continuously upgrading the platform as soon as new conservation sites, data layers, AI models and collaborations are on-boarded.

Team

Team Members

David Dao (Lead & ML Engineer)
Reuven Gonzales (Backend Engineer)
Sharfina Adamantine (Full-Stack Engineer, Product, South-East Asia Lead)
Simge Sandal (Product, Partnerships) Yumna Yusuf (Climate Policy, Investment, Partnerships)
Simeon Max (Forestry, Conservation, Partnerships) Facundo Cajén (Policy, Blockchain, South America Lead)

Team Member LinkedIn Profiles

David Dao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwddao
Reuven Gonzales: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reuvenvgonzales
Sharfina Adamantine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharfina-adamantine/
Simge Sandal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simgesandal/
Yumna Yusuf: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yumna-yusuf/
Simeon Max: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simeonmax/ Facundo Cajén: https://www.linkedin.com/in/facundo-cajen/

Team Website

GainForest Website

Relevant Experience

GainForest is the grand prize winner of [COP23 Hack4Climate]() in 2017, and an inaugural Microsoft AI for Earth grantee. Our team members have organized and negotiated climate policy at COPs, led panels at the World Economic Conference in Davos on community-centered technology, founded technology startups in Silicon Valley and South America, and led academic collaborations at prestigious institutions. GainForest works together with local and Indigenous communities around the world to ensure that our technology is inclusive, and we are the first government-backed green crypto project. GainForest's MRV technology is also one of 15 semi-finalists for the $10M XPRIZE Rainforest (initially 300+ teams).

Team code repositories

Additional material

See long version

filecoin-project / devgrants