For Earth Week 2021, Zenobia Godschalk interviews Irfon Watkins, CEO and Founder of DOVU, and Matt Smithies, CTO of DOVU, on inexpensively and sustainably issuing tokenized carbon credits to any person, business, or government to fund projects that remove, capture, or sequester carbon from the environment:

DOVU is passionate and hugely optimistic about the positive societal and technological impact blockchain and tokenization can have on our planet. We’re also very aware of the environmental impact our industry is responsible for and the damage it can cause.

We’re striving to be a positive force in the right direction through the development of DOVU — a next-generation protocol to help manage the supply (carbon stored) and demand (carbon offset certificates). DOVU uses the proof-of-stake public Hedera network to inexpensively and sustainably issue tokenized carbon credits to any person, business, or government, in order to fund projects which remove, capture, or sequester carbon from the environment.

We move fast and never get hung up on perfectionism. After all, the environmental challenges our planet faces need fixing now. Of course, our industry has a carbon footprint. But we should all be making efforts to minimize that impact. And we’re focusing on the largest land-based carbon store: soil — did you know up to 75% of all land-based carbon is sequestered in the earth’s soil?

We want to measure it and make its quantity and location trusted and publicly verifiable on Hedera Hashgraph. We’ll then mint NFTs representing it; they’ll contain the necessary proof of carbon and enable it to be offered for sale within the DOVU marketplace. Farmers can use DOVU to farm carbon alongside other crops or livestock. Communities will be able to support the carbon farming practices of neighboring or global farms.

So, how do you know that your contribution and purchase of carbon credits are making a difference?

DOVU bridges the divide

At DOVU we believe that you should have the choice to support the projects that make a positive impact. You should know all the information before you commit. Informed decisions need information that is trustworthy and that is why we’re using public distributed ledger technology — to measure positive impact towards our planet through the cumulative effort of every farmer and every contributor.

DOVU has chosen to combine using the Hedera Consensus Service with Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) to ensure decentralized and trusted document storage for land owner and project manager updates, including lab reports, photographs, permits, or any other type of documentation that contributors may require.

One DOV at a time: together!

How does a company like DOVU, building on the very thing that we are potentially trying to offset, minimize our own carbon footprint?

We’re advocates of a multichain world — we believe it leads to more efficiency, innovation, and cost management. When we started planning out the technology stack to create our trust layer and the cDOV marketplace, we investigated a variety of options before deciding on Hedera Hashgraph.

The core reasons were speed and efficiency, resulting in a significantly reduced carbon footprint compared to the current setup within Ethereum. Additionally, there’s a significant cost benefit in using Hedera Hashgraph over Ethereum when it comes to fees. The cost of tokenizing land, for example, as a non-fungible token (NFT) is $1 USD paid in $HBAR on the public Hedera network and less than $0.01 USD to transfer. In comparison, gas fees on Ethereum cost ~$80 - $100 USD today paid in $ETH for minting a non-fungible token, with pricing that fluctuates depending on network usage.

Furthermore, we’ve designed our carbon marketplace to deliver a frictionless user experience with no gas cost to consumers, while retaining a public level of trust and transparency for every transaction.

As we said earlier, there are statistics and there are statistics. A few carefully selected stats can tell any story. However, we have to start somewhere and we know that current PoW Blockchains are energy-intensive. We’ve decided to use these published statistics as a starting point.

Using this data we can calculate that at a $20 per tonne cost of carbon, to offset each individual Ethereum transaction, the fee would be $0.16c. The DOV token will facilitate this in a seamless way, building with Offset by Design principles.

As a result of using Hedera for our marketplace and cDOV, we’re able to run on a very light footprint and therefore significantly reduce our impact on the environment.

Visit the DOVU website and join the conversation on Twitter and Telegram. If you’re more of a visual activist follow us on Instagram. Love Crypto. Love Earth. Love DOVU.