With growing global concern around the climate emergency and unsustainable agricultural practices, many countries, enterprises, and startups are collaborating to build sustainable solutions that tackle the harmful effects of climate change. At the forefront of the battle against climate change are extensive efforts to lower carbon emissions. While many methods have been proposed to manage the carbon output of modern economies, hybrid smart contracts—blockchain-based applications that use oracles to access real-world data and perform advanced computations—offer an alternative where cryptographic truth and automated incentive structures can help establish more impactful green initiatives.

To support the use of smart contracts in aid of sustainable climate initiatives, the Chainlink Community Grants Program is awarding a social impact grant to Coorest—a platform for sustainable solutions that bridge the gap between the real and the digital world—for the creation of a decentralized application for carbon trading and offsetting and a satellite-based global biomass monitor.

As part of the grant, Coorest will develop a dApp that enables farmers and reforestation projects to generate and trade CO2 tokens that individuals and businesses can use to compensate for their CO2 emissions. The Coorest dApp will also provide a wide array of geospatial data, such as biomass and CO2 sequestration data supplied by Floodlight data feeds (also supported by a Chainlink grant), to support accurate CO2 absorption calculations and enable the tokenization of CO2 emissions through the Chainlink decentralized oracle network. To help ensure that the supply of CO2 tokens reflects the data reported by real-world satellites, the minting of CO2 tokens will be validated using Chainlink Proof of Reserve (PoR), a solution enabling secure, decentralized, and automated verification.

The initial pilot will be conducted with Di Marjan Su Lda using mango and passion fruit trees in Angola. The long-term objectives of the Coorest service are to enable farmers, reforestation projects, and other environmentally conscious initiatives to get free and easy access to carbon trading so they can generate an additional income stream and to provide these projects with reliable and up-to-date information about the real world with high-quality data collected by satellites.

Coorest is building an ecosystem of blockchain solutions that bridge the real and digital worlds. Based in Estonia with team members all over the world, Coorest aims to support sustainability by creating innovative solutions that bridge the real world with blockchain technology. ​​Transparency, innovation, creativity, and a firm belief in the benefits of blockchain technology are the most significant sources of motivation for Coorest.

“We’re excited to receive a Chainlink social impact grant to help us build a decentralized application for carbon trading and offsetting as well as a satellite-based global biomass monitor,” stated Nick Zwaneveld, Coorest CTO. “We firmly believe in the benefits of blockchain technology for supporting green initiatives and a more sustainable future. With the support of this Chainlink grant, we can enable farmers, reforestation projects, and ecologically sustainable projects around the globe easily generate CO2 tokens while helping enterprises and individuals to offset their carbon emissions.”

Through the Community Grants Program, Chainlink continues to empower innovative teams, academics, and social impact projects that research and develop key tools and infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of hybrid smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and cutting-edge technology capable of creating a more economically fair world.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

If you want to learn more about the Chainlink Community Grant Program, check out our blog post that further expands upon its goals and the criteria for submission. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you’re a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.