Hi, we’re flowcarbon. We’re preparing to launch our token on Celo in the next few weeks, and want to introduce ourselves and our vision to the Celo community. We hope that you’ll be as excited as we are about GNT being available on Celo!
What is flowcarbon?
We are a company based in New York that helps leading corporations, cultural institutions, tech companies, and individual buyers offset their carbon emissions by providing them with carbon offsets. As part of our operations, we are active at every level of carbon removal and protection projects, from helping finance projects – often nature protection projects – that are just getting started, to sourcing and selling offsets in the currently opaque and broker-dominated spot market. Having extensive experience transacting in the traditional market, we are now focused on leveraging Web3 to rebuild the carbon offset market as an open, accessible, transparent market with clear pricing and market-tracking quality benchmarks coded into different classes of tokens. Most importantly, it enables those doing essential projects that remove and store carbon to instantly bridge on-chain for access to direct liquidity and allows anyone who wants to purchase carbon credits, instant access to do so.
What is GNT?
GNT is a bundle token composed of individual ERC-20 tokens called GCO2. Each GCO2 is backed 1:1 with one metric ton of un-retired carbon credits. Different GCO2 tokens are linked to a specific batch of credits, each of which is issued for a specific project. Individual GNT tokens each represent one metric tonne of carbon that can be used as an offset, and meet the following criteria, which directly track what corporate buyers are seeking in the market:
- Certified by one of the market-recognized certification bodies, which currently are: Verra, American Carbon Registry, Climate Action Reserve, or Gold Standard
- Certified pursuant to a nature-based methodology from the above registries (i.e. REDD/REDD+, ARR, IFM)
- Vintage (issuance) year not more than five years old
The projects initially seeded into the Goddess Nature Token pool at launch include, among many others:
- Katingan Mentaya is a very large forest conservation project in Indonesia that protects 943,676 hectares of rainforest and the habitats of 39 endangered species.
- Luangwa Community Forests Project, a large-scale REDD+ project implemented in Eastern and Lusaka Province, Zambia with a project area of 943,676 hectares.
- Russas Project, is a large-scale forest conservation project in the State of Acre, Brazil with a project area of 41,976 hectares.
- NIHT Topaiyo REDD+ Project is a REDD+ project in Papua New Guinea focused on the protection of sensitive forest areas from industrial logging in the New Ireland and East New Britain regions. The project area is around 110,000 hectares.
- Valparaiso Project is a large-scale forest conservation project in Brazil with a project area of 28,096 hectares.
Minting - The Two Way Bridge
Each GC02 token represents exactly one un-retired carbon credit, held by flowcarbon in a bankruptcy-remote, professionally managed, third party SPV account at one of the accepted registries, e.g. Verra, and attributed with a universally unique identifier (UUID). These UUIDs are published on flowcarbon’s website and are used to create a checksum that links the individual carbon credits with unique tokens.
GC02 tokens can be minted and deposited into GNT bundle tokens (more below) by anyone holding qualifying underlying carbon credits, by transferring those carbon credits to the SPV. Currently, no limits on minting are built-in; however, they could be added later, by community governance.
Bundle Contracts
While a VCU and the resulting GCO2 token originate from a specific project, its abstract properties may be the same as other credits. Hence, some VCUs have full fungibility across projects and can be bundled to represent a standardized underlying commodity. Multiple projects are thus bundled into one ERC-20 token contract – the GNT bundle token – which represents the underlying commodity. GCO2 tokens can be added and withdrawn from the bundle.
Any token holder can unwrap the GNT for an individual GC02 from a bundle contract, for a fee. Additionally, any token holder can redeem a GNT for a live carbon credit, for a fee. In this case, the live credit will be transferred to the token holder’s registry account off-chain. Retirements of GNT tokens to claim an offset can occur without a fee (more below.)
GNT is the first bundle contract to be created and will comprise all nature-based credits. Future pools will have additional filters to create a variety of pools that serve different goals.
Retiring
The underlying carbon credit is retired when the token holder decides to do so. Retirement happens on-chain first and is later finalized in the SPV. Users will be able to retire GNT tokens held in their wallets using the Dapp. There is no fee for retiring a bundle token to claim an offset.
To retire the underlying VCU of a GC02 token, the token needs to be burnt. For GNT, the contract burns the underlying GC02 project token and increases the retirement balance on the bundle. When a minimum number of tokens have been burnt on-chain and are awaiting retirement, the retirements take place in the SPV’s registry account as a batch, which receives a UUID. Checksums are used to link between off-chain and on-chain processes explicitly and in a tamper-proof manner. This allows for retirements of partial tons. Users who wish to have large batches of retirements made at the registries in a specific fashion can have those instructions executed by the SPV.
Purchasing & Trading
GNT will trade on decentralized exchanges and AMMs for anyone to purchase.
flowcarbon will be seeding the initial liquidity of the AMMs with a minimum of $5,000,000.
Third-Party Audit and Attestation
flowcarbon has completed a security audit from Quantstamp. Details can be found here:
flowcarbon has engaged a well-respected US accounting firm to conduct specified procedures that support the following assertions:
- At any given point in time, the number of live credits held by the SPV matches the total supply on-chain for any given project
- At any given point in time, the number of retired credits held by the SPV matches the total of retired tokens for any given project
Values can be independently verified on a blockchain scanner, and on Verra. To verify the individual tokens, the event log is checked to confirm that the UUIDs match the checksums and the amount. If a token is added to a bundle, it is examined together with the bundle.
GNT on Celo
Once GNT has been launched on Celo, Celo users, dApps, and smart contracts can use the token for offsetting purposes. Any smart contract could automatically implement an offsetting function for its carbon footprint. If you’re interested in learning more about this, visit our Discord.
We also think that GNT would be a valuable addition to the Celo Reserve, along with other carbon assets like cMCO2. We are excited to bring more green assets into the Celo ecosystem to help the Celo reserve meet its multi-year goal of reaching 40% of reserve assets being green assets.