Ep. 12 Live @ ETH Denver

Join us live at the Ethereum Denver conference! The pulse of the conference is vibrant, and there is a resounding narrative of regerneration. We are joined with Alan Ransil of Filecoin Green & William Skinner of Helios. A thing to note, the ETH Denver podcast studio had software to mute the background noise, which at times makes the audio not 100%, please excuse that for this episode, as the content the guests cover is not to be missed!

Yes, there is still degens abounding at the conference, but there were two entire days dedicated to regenerative finance and blockchain tools that can help solve climate change. Our discussion peels back the layers of how Filecoin Green builds tools using decentralized data to monitor and verifiably reduce the environmental impacts of networks and businesses.  Alan also shares with us his new project launch, Liquid Cert, which is addressing the rampant greenwashing issues around trust. Liqua Cert fosters trust and transparency by making verifiable claims in the world of regenerative finance, ensuring that eco-projects are both well-intentioned and impactful.

William Skinner's passion & commitment to sustainability and renewable energy is seen as he shares Helios with us. Helios is allowing liquidity to more easily drive capital to the imparative need for investing in solar, while giving retail investors a stable return.

We wrap up with a look at decentralized ownership models and their transformative impact on land ownership and ecological preservation. This discussion shines a spotlight on companies like Jasmine Energy who are on the cutting edge of innovation with the tokenization of renewable energy credits, propelling us towards a more sustainable blockchain industry.
***Disclaimer: Helios brought me on to advise on solar projects***

Alan's Twitter
Filecoin Green
Liquacert

Helios
William's Twitter

Transcript

Cash Upton: 0:11

Welcome to Refi Generation, the podcast that talks to experts and leaders in the new frontier of regenerative finance to examine how blockchain technology is creating the next generation of environmental and humanitarian initiatives. I'm your host, cash Uptem. Welcome to Refi Generation. We have an exciting live episode here today with Alan Ransill. We are live at ETH Denver. How you doing, alan? They're really good. Happy to be here. Yeah, we're really excited to be able to do this live recording to fill in on what's been happening so far at ETH Denver and then kind of just talk about what we're still excited about. Alan, I was really excited to see you at the Flow Carbon Carbon Smart event on Wednesday, focusing entirely on tokenization of carbon and eco-credit type assets on chain, and was just really inspired after that day. So, to start, maybe, though, why don't we just fill our listeners in what your work is generally up to and then kind of why you're in the refi space?

Alan Ransil: 1:26

Yeah, of course. So I started Filecoin Green, which is the sort of sustainability initiative for Filecoin, and we started doing two different things. So, firstly, connecting Filecoin itself to renewable energy and trying to understand, if you store data on Filecoin, what's the environmental impact of that and what can we do to measure that, validate that and try to minimize that and really give both people storing data on Filecoin and also storage providers the tools that they need to do that really lower their environmental impact as much as possible. The other thing that we do is work on decentralized data and verifiable data for sustainability. So for things like carbon, things like renewable energy, things like electronic waste or e-waste recycling all of these places where there exist systems that just aren't that verifiable to go through and validate what your project did the positive impact in this case of your project and so that's things like if you pay attention to the space in the news, you've probably seen over the past year a little over a year there have been all of these headlines about 90% of rainforest offsets. Don't do what they say. They're doing things like cook stoves. That just came out last month, in January I guess it's March now, so the month before last that these cook stove projects that are supposed to reduce emissions from cooking in a lot of developing countries are overstating their impact by 1000%, so they're only avoiding a tiny, tiny fraction of the emissions that they claim to. The largest carbon offset project in the world, the Kareba project, just collapsed last year, and a lot of this comes down to the fact that people don't have good systems for validating who to trust.

Alan Ransil: 3:14

If I'm making some claim, which is that either this product is made with renewable energy or this can is made with recycled aluminum or something, right now, people just see those claims kind of flying around and don't really have any way to double click on them and say, all right, show me the proof, show me the data that actually goes into this.

Alan Ransil: 3:35

We just an example of this is we just deployed a website on Heroku and I wanted to figure out what's the environmental impact of this website and the infrastructure that we're running on, and when I tried to figure this out on the Heroku website, they just literally have a link to the sales force, like sustainability, like PDF, right, and so these systems aren't verifiable on there, very granular, and so we're building a bunch of different tools to try and fix this and applying this both within Filecoin and sort of across the refi space in order to give people the ability to take these claims and back up from them right and say like all right, you're telling me this thing. Like why should I trust that? What's all the data that goes into that and establish these trust trails from me and people I know to trust to that data backing up that claim?

Cash Upton: 4:22

Yeah, that's really cool. I feel like we're in the greenwashing era and to be able to actually prove impact is what we need to actually make sure that we solve climate change. You led a panel, which I thought was really great the Prove your Impact with Joe Chilc, Casador and Mark Johnson, and what I really love was that concept of the web of trust. So you're building a liquid cert as a project that would kind of let different people attest to different projects. That could then get you back to where you're looking to see if you can trust something or not, and I thought that was a really cool way, because there are scams. You want to support a project but you've never heard of it. Well, has someone that you trust heard of it? And then they can attest to it being verifiable Exactly yeah, and what liquid cert does.

Alan Ransil: 5:13

So if you go to liquid certio, you can create a community, you can say who that community trusts and then, if you have an attestation about data, exactly like you were saying, you can find a path from that data to a community that you actually trust. And so you could use that by putting data up and saying I trust it and telling other people to trust it because you say they should trust your community, but maybe they don't know whether to trust you or not. So we want to make those tools automatic to be able to trace this through two or three or five steps and be able to say I trust this person in this area, maybe I trust this NGO who does a really good job on sustainable seafood or renewable energy or something, and they've gone through and done the work to validate who they trust, and then maybe someone they trust has attested to this claim and so being able to follow those trust trails. The inspiration for this really came from looking at this concept in sociology and political science, which is called an issue public, which is that in society no one has the time to actually go through and actually validate in detail every single thing they have to trust, and so the way we do this in the analog world is by finding people or organizations that we think are doing a good job in a particular area and we trust them, and when they give us a recommendation, we trust that, and we've built up a lot of the kind of foundation that we would need to do something like that in Web 3 or in cyberspace in general.

Alan Ransil: 6:46

But so we have attestations, we have lower level primitives for verifying data, we have blockchain, obviously, we have decentralized oracles, lots of different tools that we can use, but in order to actually trace trust automatically, we need this higher level idea of I should trust this because this person trusts this, because this person trusts this, and it doesn't get reduced to a score or just a thumbs up, thumbs down. You want to be able to maintain that context, so then if there's a question later on, you can go back and say all right, why? Actually, you can sort of interrogate that and understand what is the context for this trust that I'm placing.

Cash Upton: 7:20

That's really cool, because everyone's doing their own due diligence and you don't have time to vet every project. And if so, that's it, thank you. Thank you if it's already been vetted and you can trust that. It makes me think of the get coin passport kind of concept of how much impact do you have based on the verifiability of your actions and what you've done on chain or off chain even? Yeah.

Alan Ransil: 7:42

Like another amazing primitive right for being able to take these sort of notions of social proof and your notion of identity from all of these different sources right and be able to tie those together into something that's a lot more meaningful than just like. I have the secret key for this wallet.

Cash Upton: 7:56

That's really cool. Does Liqurassert currently have that passport type thing built? Or like, how does? If someone went to liqurassertio, what's like? What should they expect to see?

Alan Ransil: 8:07

Yeah, so right now you can log in with your wallet and so we don't have sort of authentication that's very complicated built into it.

Alan Ransil: 8:14

Yet it's a pretty recent development.

Alan Ransil: 8:18

But what you can do is then you can say I'm creating a community and you can delegate trust to other wallets, and so those may be other communities or they may be individual contributors.

Alan Ransil: 8:30

And the sort of next steps on this roadmap are, firstly, to add more different types of attestations, so we were able to pull attestations not just from signing something with your wallet, but from something like C2PA or the Ethereum Attestation Service or all these other services that give you attestations. Be able to pull those Because we're interested in the trust trail right, it's like we're fine with a bunch of different types of attestations as endpoints or destinations in this trust trail. And then the other thing that we're certainly going to add in the near future is more sort of rich, complex, contextualized logins, like you were talking about, like Gatkling Passport would be a great one. And then this notion of scope so being able to say not just like I delegate trust to this other user or this other community in general, but to say I trust them within the domain of renewable energy, or I trust them within the domain of recycling or something.

Cash Upton: 9:28

That's cool, yeah, and it makes a lot more nuance On stage. To paraphrase you said, binary signals are not actually that great or trustworthy, so just a yes or no. No, you really want to see that whole ecosystem of who trusts them, what do they get attested to and then be able to go from there.

Alan Ransil: 9:47

It's not actually that useful if you just have thumbs up or thumbs down. If there's a conflict or you want to understand and double click on why did we make this decision and audit that later or try to decide. I'm looking at these tools and they're suggesting that I should do a certain thing be able to understand, all right, dig into that and really say what are the arguments that I should or shouldn't trust this thing, but also have that be automatic and easy to sort through without you having to spend the time to manually go through and decide who you trust and what.

Cash Upton: 10:21

This is so great because, where my head is now asking the question or trying to put all the pieces together, yes, at the panel you're then kind of saying that it could be applied to the whole life cycle of a carbon offset or renewable energy credit or an eco credit. Right, so from the creation of that for whatever's been doing on the ground, to the marketplace, to the retirement and actually being able to trust that something's retired has a lot of impact in the refi space? Yeah, certainly.

Alan Ransil: 10:51

Yeah, and one of the things that we are working towards is this notion of end-to-end traceability in sort of any of these spaces. Right, because if you have a carbon offset and you really want to do a good job of showing the world what impact you had, ideally you'd like to not just have number of tons of carbon right and not just have, ok, number of tons of carbon validated by this auditor or registered on this exchange, but you'd really like to have a path all the way back to what did people do on the ground that led to this impact. And so that's why we're building infrastructure the way we are is that we'd really like you to be able to say, all right, we had this data from all these different sources and I can understand why I should trust this data, and so renewable energy might be a really good example for this. Be able to say, ok, here is the source of data on the amount of electricity we used at a given time and I trust that data because it was signed by someone who's at the data center or involved in this project. Then you could say another flow into this compute pipeline or this graph.

Alan Ransil: 12:03

This compute graph might be.

Alan Ransil: 12:07

I have the amount of energy, but then I have the carbon intensity of that energy here, right?

Alan Ransil: 12:11

So that's how much carbon is emitted per kilowatt hour of electricity that was used, and I might trust that, but for a completely different reason.

Alan Ransil: 12:19

So I might trust that because I trust the folks at Watt Time, which is a nonprofit in Oakland, california, that works on this and does a lot of research on figuring out for different grids what can we tell about their carbon intensities, which is actually pretty complicated and then you combine those and the output is this number of tons of CO2. And so you want to be able to have all of that be automatically computed. So if what you want to do is quickly get to an answer that you can trust, you can just trace all this through and say only give me input data that I trust through valid trust trials and give me data that then was combined and the compute was done at a data center that I trust or with a provider that I trust, and then giving the output. But then also, if you want to interrogate any piece of that or double click on that, or also have that be modular and be able to reuse that for another project that just comes natively built into the system, I love it.

Cash Upton: 13:12

Yeah, and it gets rid of all that noise. And again, why this is important, I think goes back to the broken existing system of carbon markets or very untransparent, no liquidity. You can't verify the type of carbon offset all the time. You don't know if it's already been retired. Like you said, is it a carbon offset or renewable energy credit from a solar project or from a coal scrubber, or from nuclear or from reforestation, and you can choose what projects you're supporting. Maybe you're really passionate about Bison and you want to help restore Bison and then be able to get eco-credits from that, and so it seems like the why is something important to remember is that the existing markets aren't very transparent or opaque and there's a few big players in the space. It takes a lot of energy and time to get on Vera like one of the main big carbon market distributors. So a lot of smaller projects or projects in the global south don't necessarily have access to the resources where they can put these, these carbon markets together.

Alan Ransil: 14:26

Which is another really exciting sort of development, instead of projects in the space that are working on that problem.

Alan Ransil: 14:33

So, like you said, if you have a nature-based solutions project or a regenerative farming project, if you want to register your project on Vera or ACR, like one of the big carbon registries, that is extremely expensive because it comes with all this overhead, you have to physically fly people out who are employed by someone who is employed by the registry.

Alan Ransil: 14:54

Right, in order to that wasn't me restating myself, that was like they hire a, they contract it out, who contracts you know, to someone who contracts it out and like it's just like very expensive and like hard to do.

Alan Ransil: 15:07

And one of the one of the theses sort of in this space of many, many projects in ReFi, right, is that, like we have better ways of validating data than flying someone from Italy to Indonesia to like validate this nature-based solutions project, right, and so what we can do is we can take data from a bunch of different inputs, right, so you might have people on the ground who are part of this project, you might have different remote services providers, you have satellite data, you might have UAV data, you might have like data from all these different sources and be able to just track the provenance of that data, verify that and then what that lets you do, then, because you've taken a lot of that and one like given people better data, like a richer data set underlying this carbon offset, but you've also taken much of that and automated it. What that means is you should be able to reduce the project size at which you break even for auditing right.

Alan Ransil: 16:00

So, like so open forest protocol, for example, is taking the like minimum project size that economically makes sense to issue carbon offsets from, and reducing that from something like 100 hectares to like less than half-actare, right. And so there's open forest protocol and other folks who are like doing similar things in the space, or like the Regen Network and like Gain Forest touches on a lot of this, and you know, renoster does more radians, but like they take these like types of data sets and like use them to sort of understand what's going on in these projects. Right, it's all about like can you? Or a big thrust of refiles, like can you take data that is richer and more contextualized and more verifiable and use that to make claims with less overhead, so we can ultimately support more climate action.

Cash Upton: 16:45

Yes, yes, and supporting smaller climate action projects, Like you said.

Cash Upton: 16:49

I mean, going from a hundred hectare project down to a half.

Cash Upton: 16:53

I mean that's just incredible and it lets people who are maybe traditionally priced out of these projects to do the work that's necessary. And yeah, I think that's just something that I really like peeling the onion on, because, you know, when people traditionally think of blockchain, they think of pump and dumps and DGNs and more wealthier people having access to these tools, but really the creation of, like decentralized Ethereum and DeFi was to, you know, bring banking tools, to bring financial assets to people who are traditionally unbanked and who don't have access to credit. Or you know a traditional financial system in the United States that we all take for granted, and so that would be something. Just, I'd love to hear you just more on how crypto can help bring people in, like alleviate poverty, how you know it can help people in the global South, Like do you see that there's barriers to entry with people coming into the space? I mean, so many people have a smartphone now and they don't have a bank account, right, yeah, absolutely One, and sort of.

Alan Ransil: 17:59

In addition to the you know the fact that it's expensive, right, to start a carbon asset project and we can reduce that barrier to entry. There's also questions of sovereignty, right of you know, many of these projects, and carbon especially, or biodiversity have a lot to do with how you manage land right, and it doesn't always make sense to you know it doesn't make sense, right, to have, you know, some random, you know some organization in Europe or the US or somewhere, decide. You know how you're gonna manage your land for this project in Indonesia, or you know, somewhere in Africa or somewhere in South America. Right, and so many of the projects in the space, right in ReFi, work very closely with indigenous communities or led by indigenous communities, and you know an example of this is in the region network. Right, you can prove that you are following a methodology and you can self-issue credits and so that democratizes access to carbon markets by allowing you to say, okay, we've looked through the options and we've decided that this is the right way for our community to manage this land. And then you can, you know, be very rigorous in how you prove that you're actually doing good climate action but you're not sort of answerable to one of these registries, right? That is, telling you in detail what to do with land that you like have this longstanding connection to, right? Yes, and so you know.

Alan Ransil: 19:31

I think that's an example. Another is Gainforest works on this project called Measure to Earn, which is where you know, because we want to understand things like forestation and mangrove. So we want to understand, we want to document deforestation in the Amazon, all of these things that you know local people can contribute to by documenting what is happening. Right, gainforest allows them to do things like measure mangrove trees or take UAVs and use them to map areas of forest and then, because that data is extremely valuable, get compensated for providing that data, and so that's another way of establishing that cash is actually flowing to people on the ground in these communities in exchange for climate action.

Cash Upton: 20:12

Okay, cool. Yeah, the boots on the ground monitoring where local indigenous members of communities can do that work. That's really cool. Yeah, my latest episode was with Jimmy Cohen of TreeGens and, yeah, you know, huge mangrove planter and going for the world record of trees. So we're gunning for you, jimmy. Well, we're all going to be part of that record, right? Because it's the let's grow down tree gen community, right? So he needs millions of people to plant 560 million trees in one day with him. So it's going to be great. I loved what you said about the indigenous side of things. Douglas Gaten from Ecological Benefits Framework said how 2024 will be the year of indigenous MRV and, really, like you said, having different methodologies that relate to how their knowledge of the land management for the last thousands of years has been, as opposed to this Western, imposed more, maybe more quantitative data driven instead of qualitative data driven, right, and so there's that shift coming that he sees, and I think that's really cool that ReFi and Blockchain can help with that decentralization and going back to indigenous knowledge.

Alan Ransil: 21:22

Yeah, absolutely. And there is this pretty great confluence of the fact that the tech and validation of data and data networks right are sort of at a point where you really can build these tools and offer these tools in a way that you can allow people to have that kind of impact right and kind of square indigenous and traditional knowledge and ways of managing land with being able to actually rigorously document what's going on and be able to draw really solid conclusions from that. And that has to happen for climate and biodiversity to be solved right, because a tremendous fraction of the world's biodiversity is under the stewardship of indigenous people and there's kind of no other way to fix this.

Cash Upton: 22:09

Yeah, and then I think the Dow, the decentralized ownership model, can make it so that those communities are actively owning and holding land, instead of some of the tricky stuff that's been happening of Western projects buying up swaths of land in global south places that are not necessarily should be for sale. Yeah, they're being preserved, but who should really own them? And that's what this can really help with and I'm excited for this conversation. I think I'll definitely share it with Douglas and ask him to ponder your feedback on how it allows democratization tools instead of exclusionary ones. Yeah, DBF is doing great work. I love their whole framework.

Alan Ransil: 22:53

They really are. A lot of their work kind of comes back to this the same point that distilling something to one number doesn't really make sense. Right, we were talking about trust trails before, and with the ecological benefits framework, they're making the point that it's not just carbon and it's not just some biodiversity metric. But you really need to decompose these numbers into their constituent parts that you care about right, and giving people more context. And I think again, it's if what you're trying to do when you manage a project is for a particular thing, if you're trying to get to the end result, we should make it as automatic as possible to validate that end result and so you can get there quickly and efficiently, but also give you the ability to have that context. You can double click on whatever you need to in order to interrogate and figure out are we really having the impact we're trying to?

Cash Upton: 23:43

Speaking of data, one last thing I wanted to touch on from your talk with Mark Johnson was the amount of data and energy or energy that data storage takes, and specifically AI too, and and you guys are doing some projects too, like you said earlier track the energy usage and then offset a lot of that right through renewable energy. So, yeah, what's the the TLD on that?

Alan Ransil: 24:09

Yes, if you, if you go to file coin dot energy, you can see the, the amount of energy use Estimated for the entire file coin network.

Alan Ransil: 24:16

Okay, and that's that's for that's that comes from data on the blockchain.

Alan Ransil: 24:21

So whenever anyone stores data on the file coin network or adds data storage capacity to the file coin network, we can see that and we can estimate, we can put an upper bound and a lower bound in an estimate on the amount of energy that it took them to Add that data and to store that data over time.

Alan Ransil: 24:36

And so then we can use, you know, networking information to try to figure out where we think that that data center is located. Right, so we can see you know what the, the, what grid they're on, and try to try to break down both the energy use and the carbon intensity by location. And then what we can do is we can take that and we can, you know, use that to allow people who are storing data to try to store data with storage writers who are Doing a really good job at being efficient or, like, with no energy, doing a great job at putting solar cells on their roof for doing other things that you you can't tell just based on blockchain information. But you can go and work with those storage writers, have them prove what they're doing to reduce their impact and then steer people toward those, those espies.

Cash Upton: 25:19

That's really cool, yeah, because it's so much of the carbon footprint is data processing and then AI learning Was something that just blew my mind with what you and Mark were talking about in terms of the intensity, just came in at the right time. Speaking of renewable energy, we have William Skinner here of Helios. William, my man, good to have you on Just a quick TLDR for our listeners. I'm sure they know Helios, but essentially, you know, alan, I were just talking about some of the benefits of putting Renewable energy credits, carbon offsets, eco credits on chain, because a lot of the transparency and Composability and and validation, attestation and so you know what's, what's the, the, the benefits that Helios brings by using blockchain as an investment tool for solar energy projects.

William Skinner: 26:10

Right. So the three core value ads for Helios, for blockchain, are accessibility one If you're running a US based fund, you're generally dealing with US based investors. If you want to expand your fund internationally, you need you know offices in each of the countries that he operated in this whole regulatory process. The beauty of blockchain, the beauty of the centralized protocol, is that you can enable access to everyone in the world, and that's so critical for Helios, because our really our core mission is to enable anyone anywhere to directly fight climate change. So you need to be able to get the any one and you need to be able to get the anywhere.

William Skinner: 26:42

Part number two is transparency. This is super big. There's a lot of issues in the green space and the environmental space as a whole, especially an environmental Investing of greenwashing. Essentially, you're you're putting your money into a bank or you know other black box. You're kind of trusting that they are doing what they're saying they're doing. They're creating that impact that they're saying they're creating. You don't really know. You're really 100% relying on that word. So the beauty of blockchain technology in the context of Helios is that the immeasurable ledger is able to bring real-time Transparency to everything that we do, from our wreck generation to our solar energy from kind of, and follow the entire flow of funds to Ensure that every single cent that you invest in Helios is actually going toward building solar projects. Not going to Management fees, not going to external is not going to marketing. That's really one of the biggest things it's actually like. All of it is funding solar.

William Skinner: 27:33

The final piece is liquidity. On this one's a little bit trickier to Explain very concisely. I'm still kind of working on like how can I pitch this in a really, really concise and understandable manner? But essentially, by tokenizing the cash flows of Solar assets rather than a kind of conventional investment structure, you can reduce the lockup periods from 7, 15, 20 year lockup periods down to three to six months. And there's a lot of different ways we do that and it's kind of involves like how our lending like kind of it's mostly reliant on the lending Pool structure as opposed to a traditional fund structure.

William Skinner: 28:06

So the important part of that is it really piggybacks on the accessibility. If you're required to lock up your money for 10 years, that's just not a lot of investors that can do that. You have to be quite wealthy to believe Okay, I have, you know, $10,000, I don't need this for 20 years, whereas the everyday person you know you've got got car loans, bad things happen, medical bills, etc. You might need that money. So by reducing those lockup periods we're actually massively expanding access of the overall market of solar assets because for the most part, seven years is the lowest you're gonna find. We're sitting at six months right now.

Alan Ransil: 28:43

Can I double click on something there, really?

Alan Ransil: 28:44

quick is that I feel like that. That third piece right, which you say is a little hard to pitch, but it's like, it's so critical that liquidity piece, because you know, when One of the things that we need to do to fight climate change is to just drive capital into, you know, building more solar, building more wind, building like all of these, all these assets, and that's extremely capital intensive. I, you know there's there's a phrase right that, like last decade was the decade of Bringing the costs down for things like solar and now is the decade of just like building as much of it as we possibly can globally and really scaling. And you know when you, when you're trying to get capital for any of these large projects right, like, especially if you are in, you know we run into this in it with critical labs and web three right, that's like Timescales of these investments, right, if you want, like a web three company to invest, you know, a significant amount in like an actual, like a fund to build solar, and you know that the solar company needs to like get underwriting, they need to like establish that people are gonna pay them or like really gonna be around.

Alan Ransil: 29:47

Maybe you're signing a PPA and if you're drastically funding solar. There's a bunch of different ways to set it up but, like you know, they need an investment of seven to ten years and, like frequently, crypto companies have been around like much Less time than that. Right, and have gone through these like crazy market swings and it's like, if you like, we found a way to do it and in critical labs and put like 30 30 million dollars or so into a Fund that was was doing this, but like, being able to actually like solve that liquidity, like timescale mismatch Problem, is really key to unlocking a huge amount of capital flow into this stuff.

Cash Upton: 30:20

That's really cool. Yeah, we need. The investment was like trillions of dollars invested into clean energy. So, yeah, exciting to see the rails being built. William and Helios is launching any day now, right. Once this is live, it will be very short after that.

William Skinner: 30:34

Yes, we are ready to launch. We actually just completed our audit with trailer bits. It was very, very expensive and time-consuming, but I believe in security. It's super, super important to know that where you're putting your money is safe. So we spread no expense. We went with the best of the best and we've completed our audit.

William Skinner: 30:55

Some issues were identified. We spent a lot of time kind of fixing those issues. I will say like there was no Core issues like the, the major issues, and you can read about him in a report we're publishing it. Um was essentially around like front-running people can kind of use manipulative financial strategies in order to claim more of the yield. Um, I and we had to kind of tighten up some gaps on that. But now we're audit complete. We are live on BASES, sepolia, testnet. We are imminently pushing onto Mainnet. Super excited to get our product out in the world. Super excited to kind of ring something that we've been doing for two and a half years. We've had solar projects online and generating capital for more than two years. Now. We're super excited to unlock the access to the entire world through crypto rails.

Cash Upton: 31:44

Yeah, really exciting and full disclosure. I did get brought onto the Helios team to do some solar consulting for William and I wouldn't be part of the team if I didn't really have passion about what you guys are doing. So, yeah, really excited to be seeing it launch One last nuance. We were talking the other day about renewable energy credits and just carbon offsets and how renewable energy credits can have a little bit more impact in terms of fighting climate change. So do you want to take that Will For a spicy take?

William Skinner: 32:12

Yeah, I'll try not to get too spicy. I think it's more important to focus on the amazingness that is renewable energy credits than to speak disparagingly or otherwise about other programs. I think that climate change really is like a group effort Everyone needs to pitch in and there's so many different avenues that you can do it. My personal belief is that renewable energy credits REX are the absolute best way to do it. There are other ways, the reasons I believe it is the absolute best way to do it. I think what it really comes down to is it's very difficult to ensure that the financial instrument you're purchasing is directly leading to real benefits in the real world, is actually leading to reducing carbon, averting emissions, doing the core things that we, as climate activists, want to do. I believe renewable energy certificates are the best way to do that, especially in a web three context, because you don't need to jump through any hoops of understanding like well, this equals, this, equals, this equals this.

William Skinner: 33:08

It's very much like blockchain uses energy. Data centers use energy. In order to run the blockchain, you need a lot of energy. We produce energy, so we produce energy, they use energy. It's super simple. We're already dealing in the exact same units, so there's no transformations. They're like is this tree going to reduce as much carbon as we think it will? We need to spend the next 20 years making sure that it does. With Helios, with renewable energy credits, it's like well, we made a kilowatt of energy, they used a kilowatt of energy. Pretty reasonable to say. We offset that kilowatt of energy one to one. So I'm a super strong believer in RECs. There's a few really great companies that are doing a lot of great work in the tokenization of RECs.

William Skinner: 33:50

Kind of the most reasonable now speaking to is Jasmine Energy. Love what they're doing. There's a few other major players in the space and I think from what I've heard, there are some more players that are coming into the space. So I'm very excited for renewable energy credit as a whole to be growing and people to start focusing on a broader range of products. Then I know that carbon credits really started the REFI movement and I think that's super important. I think they did a lot of really early groundwork. I'm excited for the maturation and the expansion of the space to start including renewable energy credits, to start including PPAs, to start including really a lot of other great things that are definitionally REFI in my mind.

Alan Ransil: 34:30

So, yeah, and can I also jump in on that? I think we don't want to build our own ways of accounting for carbon when there are an entire set of fields of people who already spend every day doing that. And the recommendation, if you follow the protocol from the World Resources Institute as to how you are supposed to top set carbon, is you're supposed to look at what emissions are you generating directly, and then you're supposed to look at what emissions are we generating due to our electricity use, and then what emissions are we generating due to our supply chain, and you generally want to keep electricity with electricity, as you were just saying, and so that's how we've operated is that we want to follow the best practices in the field already.

Cash Upton: 35:25

Yeah, it's already been developed and it's being used.

Alan Ransil: 35:29

So yeah, that makes sense, but I'm very thoughtful, very smart people who have spent decades working on this.

Cash Upton: 35:34

Yeah, because it is a shout out to OGs.

William Skinner: 35:36

Honestly, I'm glad that we can apply technology and start doing really great work, but at the end of the day, we're relying on solar developers with 20 plus years of experience. They've been in climate for so much longer than we have. I think of people like Ben West. I think of Tara, his partner in crime. They've just been on the climate grind for like 30, 40, what feels like an entire lifetime. So I'm super grateful to really extend on the shoulders of giants in the climate space. Absolutely.

Cash Upton: 36:05

Yeah, and we need the whole toolbox. So we need carbon credits, we need renewable energy credits, biodiversity credits, whatever it's going to develop.

William Skinner: 36:13

Yeah, I saw the new Two cans char yeah, I have information. I'd love to chat with you. I know nothing about buyer jar, so I'd love to. I'd love to learn more. It doesn't have to be right now.

Cash Upton: 36:24

Yeah, I did have Rafael on at one point months ago on the block explorer, so we'll have to get back on and talk about that. Because, yeah, biochar has such good properties of clean soil and clean water as well as carbon sequestration, so, yeah, Do you have any? Nuggets on biochar Alan.

Alan Ransil: 36:41

Well, I mean, I just want to make the point that, like, if you're thinking about, like how can we remove carbon from the atmosphere, like tomorrow, today, right, as effectively as possible?

Alan Ransil: 36:51

Right, like we're already through agriculture, right, we're already removing a huge amount of CO2 from the atmosphere All the time anyways, yeah, exactly.

Alan Ransil: 37:01

And then you know, it goes through this, this whole like food production system, where a bunch of that carbon that was removed then ends up either Decomposing into methane or decomposing back into CO2, right, and so just like, just stop that, that last step, right, and then you're, you're pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and not, like, remitting in its greenhouse gases, and that's you know, effectively, what biochar does.

Alan Ransil: 37:22

When, when you know done, well, right, and you really have to document, like this is organic matter that otherwise would have been burned or otherwise would have decomposed, which is, you know, additionality, which comes back to you know some of some of this point about, like it's hard to to prove, depending on what methodology you're using, that like the thing you did actually had a real impact and it needs to be the case that, like, otherwise this stuff would be composed. But if you can make a really good case for that then taking it and Turning it into biochar by heating it up, which is this like very chemically stable form of carbon, and just keeping it like that. And then you were saying it has a bunch of other benefits, like it can be used as fertilizer and sort of improve Moisture and soil and stuff. You know it's really positive.

Cash Upton: 38:04

I love it. Yeah, yeah, definitely interested to know how they are tokenizing it to and what it why blockchain for them, you know, and it sounds like gonna be very similar to what we're talking about, but to see it, to see it happen, really exciting. As we're finishing up, I think it would be great to just kind of hear what you two are excited about. Tomorrow, saturday, is a big refied day. We have real-world assets talks going on and at Shelling Point, and then there's also the regeneration day Put on by region network and Alan, you're giving a talk at the Shelling Point, right? Yeah, we're doing a workshop.

Alan Ransil: 38:36

Okay, everything is there at WA's. People are. People are excited.

Cash Upton: 38:39

Yeah, what's your TLDR on why you're excited for real-world assets coming on chain I?

Alan Ransil: 38:44

mean, I'm excited about real-world claims, which is this, this idea that, like we, you know, when we are doing things on chain that rely on claims about the real world, like everything We've just been talking about right, we need better tools that Allow us to educate those claims and like keep that context right and be able to do that automatically, as automatically as possible, but also be able to like dig into those claims and and auto them. So, yeah, so you know, shelling Point is always always an amazing sort of group of people focused on the public goods side of crypto, sort of around the get coin ecosystem. And, yeah, we're doing a workshop on Real-world claims and in refi, I love it.

Cash Upton: 39:27

Yeah, so yeah, going back to the attestation, the verifiability, the trust, networks of real-world Assets that that need that claim to back them up, yeah, exactly, okay, cool. What about you?

William Skinner: 39:38

William, I Gotta be honest. I was checking my phone. I haven't been accepted to Shelling Point yet, so if any of the Shelling Point organizers are listening, I volunteered there two years in a row. Please let me in like I want to come to your event. I'm really excited about the generation event, which didn't accept me, so super excited to go hang out with my, my green pill homies, see a lot of old friends and, yeah, I mean one of my most excited about.

William Skinner: 40:11

I've just really enjoyed Tracking the refi space over the past like two and a half three years and just seeing its evolution. And my favorite thing is just like seeing the same people over and over and over again to just know like this wasn't a fad, this wasn't something that kind of like came and went. This wasn't. You know, there's a lot of. There's a lot of temporary trends in crypto, a lot of things kind of you know really explode and then really burn out and Unfortunately, often there's a lot of misbehavior involved and kind of that up and down. But within the refi space it's. It's been pretty beautiful to see that a lot of the people who really started the wave you know the folks at Toucan, the folks at Klima, the folks at regen Network, absolutely People like Gregory Landau and you know real OG's like they're still here. They're still preaching exactly the same message. They're still building. You know what they've always been building and just building and expanding and improving and it's just been awesome to see the space grow and to see the, the key players persist, because it it really gives me a lot of faith and gives me a lot of hope as someone who's been in space for some time that like I'm not crazy, like it's not just me thinking, like I'm pretty sure this works.

William Skinner: 41:18

But, like you know, refi still feels kind of like on the outskirts of crypto. I love that real world assets are like really breaking into the main. I'm a little bit sad that T bills kind of took all the fire because, you know, two years ago People were making fun of me like man if I wanted to invest in such low yield that just buy T bills. And now the hottest thing in crypto is T bills, like Excuse me. Anyway, yeah, I'm glad that I hope that the real world asset movement kind of brings a lot of this real world efforts in the refi space Kind of deeper into the spotlight, because I know there's a lot of hype in that space. So seeing old friends, seeing kind of the long-term growth trajectory of the refi space which I'm still incredibly bullish on and kind of seeing how real old assets is helping us to really Get that exposure and get that spotlight that you know refi has deserved all along in my opinion so yeah, amen.

Cash Upton: 42:10

I think that inspiration in the space is what's keeping me here. I mean going to school and graduating in 2010 for, you know, environmental sustainability felt like doom and gloom and like what are we doing? And everyone's looking at you like what sustainability? And then now it's like everyone's talking about it and the the energy in the refi space is one that is about collaboration. You know there's competitors in the space that are collaborating incredibly well together because we know that we need to work together To solve climate change. And, yeah, big shout out to region network. Dave Fortson is here in spirit, but he had to get ready for their regeneration event so he wasn't able to join us. But, yeah, definitely love what Gregory Landua and their whole team is doing in the space To really, you know, move the needle.

Alan Ransil: 42:56

So I'm like Dave Dave Fortson said. Dave Fortson Fortson said at carbon smart, you know if you, if you're still in refi after the best two years, you know, congratulations, thank you. And you know it's what happens when you're really a, you know, in a space, you know, like you said, that is Full of people who are very mission driven and are here because we really want to want to do something Really good for the world.

Cash Upton: 43:20

Yeah, yeah, people here have tenacity and passion and it's exciting to be here and I'm glad I got to meet you, alan, and Thanks for coming on, you guys. I think, unless there's any other pressing things, we'll we'll sign off and get to some more refi networking, huh.

Alan Ransil: 43:36

It's a great time. Thank you so much. I'm down.

Cash Upton: 43:38

Yeah, awesome, thank you. Signing off from ethereum dimmer 2024 cheers, guys. Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the refi generation production, including the music mixing and editing. As a reminder, none of this is financial advice, and feedback is the breakfast of champions. Please subscribe to our show and send your thoughts, critiques and ideas for future content. Be well, take care of each other and do something good today.