The vision of our parent company Nature Nexus is to connect people with nature and their finance too. Nature Nexus supports projects like the Great Forest National Park initiative which has transformed the logging of old growth forests into a 1.8 million ha national park, protecting carbon and biodiversity. We address nature deficit disorder through our Wellbeing Walks division where people get to spend time in nature, observing and experiencing nature. When it comes to sustainability of products on the supply chain side our Blockchainifier service allows us to map entire supply chains and make visible all aspects of nature based compliance. On the finance side we are working on projects that help people to make environmentally friendly purchases and compensate for any activities or purchases that may be adversely affecting biodiversity or the climate.

Despite the Stellar Networks comparable low energy blockchain usage (due to the Stellar consensus protocol), as passionate Stellar Network advocates believing that Stellar will eventually take over the worlds financial network, we are concerned about the climate impacts that the future global network energy usage will have.

We teamed up with Public Node which is a not-for-profit organisation that provides validator nodes for the Stellar network and whilst some of the servers were already running on green energy there were some that were not, so we decided to come up with a Stellar based solution that would allow this polluting energy to be compensated for. We contend that if we build an API for others building on Stellar to easily be able to offer this to their customers that the Stellar Network could indeed become a carbon neutral or carbon negative global financial platform.

We applied for a Stellar grant in round 9 and were honoured to be chosen as a finalist however, due to some high budget projects we did not receive any funding. We continued to make some progress towards our goal to develop a way to compensate for carbon emissions on the Stellar Network and re applied for a Stellar grant in round 12. Stellar Community Fund introduced the boot camp which opened our eyes to how to better communicate what we were trying to do at a high level rather than using technical detail. Once again we were honoured to be a finalist and that the Stellar community voted us in at number 3 position, so this time we had our modest funding ask of $35,000 fulfilled to allow us to build a pilot. Incredibly via Public Node we may have been the first to retire a verified carbon credit on the blockchain! Another great outcome from the SDF process was that we attracted Mojoflower who are also developing on Stellar to become our second partner organisation to test out our API and provide valuable market feedback.

For the pilot we have chosen the most difficult and contentious area in the nature repair market being Carbon offsets. Despite having a verified carbon standard and accreditation through VERRA for projects that produce carbon offsets, these nature based offsets are now considered contentious because, it has proven difficult to show that some projects even exist little own make the contribution to drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere, which is the basis for the carbon credits that people purchase. This challenge provided Stellar Carbon the perfect opportunity to introduce the blockchain to be able to provide better transparency and visibility of offsets, and give people more confidence in the offsets that they purchase.

Over our journey another shortfall of the offset philosophy that came to light is that rather than addressing the root cause of pollution and reducing carbon emissions from polluting processes, offsets allow polluters to keep polluting as normal and just buy offsets. With the advent of Soroban for smart contracts on the Stellar Network, Stellar Carbon saw an opportunity to use the blockchain to be able to address the loopholes in the current offset philosophy for polluters by using Soroban smart contracts to require polluters to take appropriate steps to first reduce pollution as much as possible before buying offsets. As the nature repair markets evolve we are evolving with them to make the outcomes more rigorous, transparent and immutable on the blockchain. We are now planning to submit for another round of funding to take our pilot to the next level. Once our pilot project has solved these inherent loop holes and issues, we will be able to roll out the high integrity and high visibility blockchain model to other nature based markets.

Stellar Carbons vision is to provide a way for people to confidently invest and support projects that are legitimately and transparently helping to repair nature, specifically the climate. We are looking for more volunteers to join the team either as pilot partners, social media gurus, smart contract experts or website developers so please get in touch and get involved in making the future of the worlds financial network environmentally responsible.