🟪 PolyPulse #30 Polygon is Going Carbon Negative.
Also, read about the Green Blockchain Summit and blockchain technology enabling greener cities.
Howdy family!
Welcome to Poly Pulse - your guide to staying up-to-date on the latest trends in the Polygon DeFi ecosystem.
This newsletter breaks down top stories, developments, updates, and trends from the second week of July 2022.
This week the growth in Weekly Active Users (WAU) slowed down seen by a 12% decrease compared to the previous week i.e., the number of WAU dwindled from 990K to 795K. The Average Transaction Cost on Polygon was10% cheaper this week versus the previous week with the Average Price per Transaction at $0.009.
Quickswap remains the most engaging DeFi dApp on Polygon, with approximately 188k Weekly Transactions and 37K Unique Users.
👉 Also Read: How the decentralized Twitter is progressing on the Polygon Network:
🍇 DeFi Pulse Happenings
DeFi Pulse is excited to kick off a new video series, Traversing the Merge. Join Scalara’s Nathan Howard and Index Coop’s Allen Gulley, for a discussion on how the largest change in the Ethereum ecosystem will impact DeFi.
🗓 July 21st ⏰ 6:00 pm UTC/2:00 pm EST
🌲 BUIDL on Green Blockchain: Moving towards sustainable development on blockchain
Carbon credits are government permits to emit carbon dioxide (CO2 ) measured in tonnes or its equivalent. Regulators often refer to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which introduced emission caps on specific sectors, such as oil, transportation, and energy. Companies that emit less than their allowance can sell the excess credits to those that over-pollute compliance markets.
These carbon markets have boomed in recent years as the growing urgency around climate prompted companies to adopt net zero emissions policies. But even as demand grew, the carbon offsetting process remained complicated, lacking transparency and quality assurance, with most of the trading happening in over-the-counter deals that enriched intermediaries.
As part of its sustainability efforts, Polygon partnered with KlimaDAO and Offsetra to assess emissions from node hardware, the energy consumption of staking operations, checkpointing, and bridging contracts on Ethereum. The carbon bill for Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) from the genesis block till today reached 90,000 tons of CO2.
The Polygon team has purchased $400,000 of high-quality and trackable carbon credits on KlimaDAO's on-chain marketplace. Once retired, the offsets will be permanently taken off the market, and no one can claim these credits later. Polygon is also creating a climate offset vertical within its ecosystem. In addition, it has pledged $20 million to a series of community initiatives, including funding projects that utilize technology to combat climate change.
Polygon's sustainability pledge comes ahead of Ethereum's transition to a PoS consensus mechanism, reducing the network's energy consumption by almost 99%. After Ethereum transitions to PoS and the completion of the Crypto Carbon Rating Institute (CCRI) analysis, Polygon will move beyond carbon neutrality to attain the carbon negative status.
Several projects on Polygon offer solutions that leverage blockchain technology's power to help reduce carbon footprints. Below are some notable examples:
Carbon Offsetting On-Chain: KlimaDAO and its partners Moss, the Toucan Protocol, and C3 have developed the infrastructure to tokenize carbon credits and make them available on Polygon, where they can be integrated with decentralized finance. The on-chain carbon markets are fully transparent, allowing for dramatically lower fees and making instant purchases possible. All of which makes carbon offsetting equally accessible to a large corporation with a footprint of thousands of tonnes and an individual canceling out the impact of a flight.
Carbon Credit JPEGs: Another approach to bringing carbon credits into the chain is to use the existing market infrastructure to buy and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs). DeepMarkit is building a platform for minting credits into NFTs, which generate royalties every time they are re-sold or traded. Earlier this month, the company carried out a successful test on Polygon, minting carbon credit NFTs originating from a landfill in the United States, a wind power farm in India, and a renewable energy project in Brazil.
Additionally, a part of the $20 million fund will be utilized to fund some of the green initiatives which I’ve highlighted in the closing thoughts section.
Polygon also recently hosted the Green Blockchain Summit, a virtual forum for Web3 leaders to develop solutions to address the most urgent environmental problems faced by the blockchain industry.
Befitting the scale of the blockchain industry's problem, the Green Blockchain Summit crossed network boundaries to bring together the representatives from Polygon, Solana, and Celo. Another component that differentiates the Summit from the pageantry of the green events circuit is the focus on a concrete goal: an agreement to collaborate on a framework for blockchain sustainability standards.
You can listen to the event recording here.
👻 Aave proposes to launch a USD-pegged stablecoin called GHO
A new proposal was posted on the Aave governance forums for GHO, a native decentralized stablecoin pegged to the US dollar & backed by collateral deposited on Aave (aTokens). Aave is trying to enter into the massive $150 billion stablecoin market by leveraging its existing money market protocol, which is currently deployed on almost all major chains. Additionally, over $6 billion in available deposited liquidity on Aave can be used as collateral to issue GHO.
A new protocol module has been deployed on Polygon, allowing anyone to borrow agEUR on Polygon PoS and Ethereum mainnet.
48 Projects are landing on Polygon from Terra.
This Polygon-based platform will let users make a down payment and take a loan to buy “blue chip” Ethereum NFTs.
Polygon became the only blockchain chosen to be a part of the Disney Accelerator program.
The permissionless, under-collateralized credit protocol RociFi is now live on Polygon.
What use cases of blockchain technology have enabled greener cities, helped better natural resource management, and reduced the impact of food production on the environment?
Environmental Monitoring: As the saying goes, you can’t improve it if you don’t measure it. Keeping track of environmental indicators is integral to meeting sustainability pledges. For example, PlanetWatch, based in France, is building a global network of low-cost air-quality sensors and leveraging blockchain technology to incentivize people to join their network while creating a permanent, tamper-proof air quality ledger.
Agriculture and Animal Husbandry: Knowing where your food ingredients come from is key to building consumer faith. Transparency is a built-in feature for blockchains and can help establish trust between merchants, sellers, and buyers. AgriDigital, started by Australian farmer founders, uses blockchain technology to keep track of buying, storing, and selling grains between farmers, merchants, corporations, and even stock traders. Another example is a CO2 Offset Market that incentivizes planting hemp, a carbon-negative crop, allowing farmers to tokenize their produce and sell carbon credits quickly.
Marine Life: Transparency can also be an effective tool to end overfishing. The World Wildlife Fund, SeaQuest Fiji, and ConsenSys are building a blockchain system to stamp out illegal tuna fishing by verifying where, when, and how the fish were caught. Consumers can get the info by simply scanning a QR code. Similar tools can also help handle human rights abuse on the critical seas.
Supply Chain Management: Bringing the power of blockchains to supply chain management can help reduce carbon footprint and uncover unsustainable practices. A creative project team at Heineken used the technology to track five varieties of hops, capturing information about raw material origins, environmental footprints, and fuel and water consumption. The result was an information-loaded QR code consumers could use to see the product’s entire journey, from farm to bottle.
Recycling: Reducing waste by recycling materials is a significant sustainability pillar. Blockchains for waste collection and management can help with tracking collection locations and destinations and could be used to incentivize people to participate. PlasticBank, powered by the Alchemy blockchain platform, is looking to stop plastic before it reaches the ocean by rewarding people for recycling. The project has already recovered over 2 billion plastic bottles or more than 41 million tons of material.
Peer-To-Peer Energy Trading: The shift to renewables like solar and wind will shift a lot of power generation from the primary grid and into the hands of individuals. Peer-to-peer markets can help smoothen such transitions and solve the last mile problem for some difficult-to-access areas. Australia-based Power Ledger connects communities to create microgrids and helps track, trace, and trade renewable energy.
What do you think about the above? 💭 Feel free to connect with us on our Discord channel to discuss more!
-Aishwary Gupta (Community Lead at DeFi Pulse & Strategy and Marketing Lead at Polygon DeFi).
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