PEP-22: Carbon Neutral Pocket

Attributes

  • **Author(s): Nigel Dollentas + Adam Liposky
  • **Recipient(s): Nigel to be delegated to buy on-chain carbon credits
  • Category: Imbursement
  • Fulfills: N/A
  • **Related Installments: N/A
  • Asking Amount: What is the sum of POKT being requested? 10,000 POKT/month (or more, depending on carbon output)

Summary

Allocating an amount of wPOKT/POKT/USDC to market buy carbon tokens from Toucan protocol. This can be executed by me, Adam, or the Foundation if trust is a concern.

Abstract

We’d like to buy on-chain carbon credits issued by Toucan Protocol to offset Pocket Network’s carbon footprint.

For reference, Toucan is the primary lego/primitive (think Maker creating DAI, Spell creating MIM, etc.) and Klima is something built on top (Yearn Finance to complete the DAI analogy).

Motivation

Explain why the endowment/relationship is worthwhile. How will it benefit the Pocket Network ecosystem? What is the expected ROI?

The main and primary objective is offsetting Pocket Network's carbon footprint.

To give readers a sense for carbon outputs on a per server basis.

At this point, we are 30,000+ nodes strong. This means, at best, we are emitting about 5M KG equivalent or 5500 tons of C02 equivalent yearly. In the worst-case scenario, it’s more along the lines of 14.2M KG C02 equivalent or 15650 tons of CO2 equivalent.`

Purchasing these tokens and subsequently retiring on them on-chain through Klima will help us go green, carbon neutral, and eventually zero carbon (in that order).

Further, There are a few excellent marketing angles here as well:

  • If Pocket Network becomes green, so do the chains that we support. Cryptocurrencies, nft projects, apps in general now have an easy way to become green and decentralized at the same time.
  • This is an additional differentiator from Alchemy, Infura, etc.
  • Synergies incredibly well with wPOKT. Regen finance is wPOKT, and so is this regenerative finance.

Needs Being Met

Carbon neutrality is yet another angle we can point to as a benefit over traditional providers, making it painfully obvious that Pocket is the right choice.

Budget

Outline in detail how the funds will be deployed. All funds must be accounted for or your proposal will not be permissible.

  1. $10,000 or more of USDC or POKT(which will be converted to USDC via OTC, bridging to wPOKT , or CEX by the proposer) is used to buy carbon tokens monthly from Toucan protocol on Polygon in perpetuity.
  2. Carbon tokens are retired every 3 months (or more frequently) to offset our carbon.
  3. A designated person(s) reports to the broader Pocket community every time tokens are purchased and retired.

Rationale

Cheaper alternatives would be going directly to Vera/Terrapass/another third party non crypto provider and purchasing directly from them.

This was quickly discarded in lieu for Toucan Protocol for exponentially higher liquidity, competitive pricing, and the future optionality doing this on chain holds (as well as various aligned ethos/philosophical reasons).

The $10,000 number monthly was chosen for its roundness, and for a little bit of futureproofing. Side node, this proposal started when we were at 18,000 nodes and we’re past 31,000.

Dissenting Opinions

Acknowledge all opinions which disagree with the rationale of this proposal.

Opinion: Pocket doesn’t emit THAT much C02.

Answer: If we take the average of above calculations, we’re emitting around 10,000 tons of C02 yearly. To contextualize that, 50 trees must grow for a year to capture 1 ton of C02.

Deliverable(s)

The proposers of this proposal will be responsible for sourcing on-chain carbon offsets.

@Nigel Dollentas will use on chain node count to calculate carbon offsets, buying and retiring the appropriate amount per month. This task could also be multiple people, if roles should be divided. The process would look as follows:

  1. This proposal is successfully passed.
  2. Funding is secured/allocated to @Nigel Dollentas on a monthly basis
  3. @Nigel Dollentas trades tokens for carbon offsets
  4. @Nigel Dollentas retires carbon offsets as necessary to ensure a monthly carbon offset
  5. @Nigel Dollentas provides accurate reporting to the DAO/Foundation

Contributor(s)

I (Nigel Dollentas) volunteer as lead who will do the above listed in Deliverables. If others are brought on, the process will be transparent and available for anyone to see at any time.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

7 Likes

I would support this, but don’t see the need to work with Klima for retirement.

I also think it’s important to understand that not all climate credits in the voluntary market are created equally, so it’s important that we’re only purchasing and retiring high quality credits, otherwise we risk doing more harm than good.

(For instance, REDD credits basically fund private armies and CFC credits incentivize more carbon dumping. We will want to only buy NATURE BASED credits. These are credits that are generated by actively planting trees, regenerative soil projects, and cookstove projects [which have a lot of social and health benefits as well])

3 Likes

I would just like to mention a node does not equal a server though. An R710 with a pair of Xeons can easily go to 96 vCPUs with hyperthreading. Considering the network currently has way more nodes than it needs, and that relays are bursty in nature as sessions are established, one can probably run a lot of nodes on a single piece of hardware by overcommitting the hardware resources to virtual machines. Those nodes would also spend a significant amount of time idle.

It would be interesting to benchmark just how much energy a relay takes, on average. Like plug a server into a Kill-A Watt, see how many relays your serve over 3 months, see how much electricity you consumed, and come up with a watt per relay. Then you could come up with a carbon footprint number that is based on relay count.

This is true. Toucan Protocol (Klima is an OHM-esque lego and entirely different protocol built on top which is not necessary to work with) has actually worked on two different products, ones they are considering a base ton of carbon and a higher quality “NCT” they are describing as:

Nature Carbon Tonne is a premium carbon pool that restricts TCO2 qualification to nature-based projects such as forestry and regenerative agriculture.

I think this would satisfy your concern about sticking with higher quality sources? The other choices which led to Toucan were liquidity, on-chain verification, and the potential to work with Klima and other protocols that may come up

1 Like

Excellent point. I agree this would be a greater accurate number here, plus a little bit of overhead to factor in the nodes still idling require energy. I would still favor being over purchasing compared to under purchasing because there are still a bunch of factors unconsidered (acquisition of new equipment, installation, and other carbon-intensive steps throughout the entire lifecycle of a node)

Assuming the calculations are correct, would you agree with the proposal in every other aspect?

2 Likes

In general I think being able to say 0 carbon emissions would be valuable marketing wise. But I think the calculation is faulty, and since everything else hinges on that, it would need rework. A power usage benchmark of some sort would be needed imo.

Also, is there a way to accomplish this using smart contracts - having to trust some person to do the right thing and move money around is so 20th century.

1 Like

Hi Nigel,

Love the proposal and initiative that you’ve put forth in presenting this.

Klima Infinity might be worth considering:
https://www.klimadao.finance/blog/klima-infinity-to-carbon-neutral-and-beyond

In short, determine the organization’s footprint (sounds like you’ve got a good handle on that), determine if capable to achieve climate positivity, then calculate and buy $KLIMA needed to keep yield in parity with footprint, convert yield to tokenized carbon to retire in real-time or on-demand. Use forthcoming dashboards to highlight the footprint and steps taken to offset.

This gives you exposure to Klima and its benefits to the ReFi ecosystem.

2 Likes

I support this proposal without reservations.

Even if one does not care about the environment at all, they can find solace in the idea that there will be lots of opportunities in the future for this investment to pay back handsomely.

3 Likes

First, welcome to the community! It seems this is your first time replying and I appreciate your participation and voice :slight_smile:

Secondly this is great! It seems this wasn’t a product I stumbled upon in research and it seems it was only launch few days ago. truly new stuff.

I think this needs further understanding - the onchain carbon space is so small and new. I’m a big fan of action and would love to switch over to this (if after research it aligns with our goals and desires) but for the time being I think this is a stretch goal to be considered in the near future.

Indeed calculations were slightly more refined than napkin math and it will need to be refined to ensure we’re being accurate (even though overestimating isn’t a bad thing and probably desireable in this situation)

A the time being there is no way to use smart contracts unless we do consider going forward in the future with Klima Infinity

1 Like

I’d be interested in seeing accurate calculations before we commit to $10k/m.

I think you speak for the majority of the community but as stated above it just simply it would be impractical to kill-a-watt every type of configuration for nodes out there. We could do a survey and ask community members to kill-a-watt their nodes? I would love your suggestions here on how you think we could come to a better number.

We could also get coordination from the top largest node runners (C0d3r, Blockspaces, etc.) and that could greatly expedite things but they may have optimized setups which are not accurate for the “average” node runner.

Like I argued above, I think 10k a month is a number that is not roughly too far off, and some overhead is good for extra node growth, as well as factoring in all the other carbon Pocket incurs (flights to/from events, company retreats, etc.)

Lastly, assuming we do get an accurate number, are you in favor of the proposal as it stands or do you have other issues you’d like to bring up?

It’s wonderful to see this proposal and the support it has generated. Disclosure: I’m with the team at Toucan and have had the opportunity to speak with the proposal’s authors.

One note on the topic of retirements: right around the time of this proposal being published, we released our offsetting module. Details specific to retiring nature-based credits are available in this post:

Also, on sharing the messaging around this, we could definitely launch a co-marketing package and we’d be happy to do so.

Thanks for your consideration – it truly is exciting to see Pocket putting the climate first. Please know that the Toucan team is here to support this initiative however we can.

Reach out with questions, comments, or concerns.

1 Like

This proposal is now up for voting Snapshot

1 Like

This proposal has failed to gain majority approval through apparent abstention by voters. Snapshot