Floodlight Receives Chainlink Grant To Build Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data Feed

The climate emergency is accelerating at a great pace. Every effort must be made to reduce emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), a series of agreements were made around market mechanisms that would make carbon credits transferable between countries. Subsequently, issuing carbon credits based on CO2 reductions, which can be verified by geospatial satellite data, has been recognized as a high-potential opportunity for incentivizing private investment in reforestation and ecosystem restoration. In order for these initiatives to be enacted, an open-source infrastructure that enables a diverse group of stakeholders to coalesce around a shared source of truth for carbon emissions data is required. Hybrid smart contracts—blockchain applications that use oracles to access real-world data—offer a viable solution.

To support the application of hybrid smart contracts for green finance initiatives, we’re excited to announce that Floodlight, a data and analytics platform that provides investors and asset managers with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant. This grant will support the development of a data feed that makes geospatial data accessible on-chain through the Chainlink Network, enabling developers to build hybrid smart contracts that incentivize reforestation and sustainable farming practices, which reduce carbon emissions. 

Floodlight aims to provide reliable and up-to-date ESG data to the blockchain space via a Chainlink External Adapter. The data feed will initially focus on climate-related data, biomass, and carbon analytics, including CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately this data will support DeFi protocols that incentivize reforestation, sustainable farming, and other climate-focused initiatives. 

Through this grant initiative, Floodlight aims to complete the following deliverables: 

  • Create a compendium of ESG and geospatial datasets and identify their potential use cases for DeFi applications. 
  • Build an open-source geospatial API service and accompanying documentation serving the most important climate-focused datasets and analytics. 
  • Develop open-source Chainlink External Adapters that enable Chainlink nodes to fetch data from the API and deliver it into leading blockchain environments.

Making climate data available on-chain can help build a more robust green finance ecosystem. Specifically, carbon emissions data can support protocols that incentivize reforestation and sustainable farming through carbon trading marketplaces. Immutable on-chain ESG data can help mitigate greenwashing and enable companies and governments to be held accountable for air pollution, land degradation, and hazardous waste disposal practices. Being an early publisher of very precise ESG data opens the doors to more stakeholders seeking to force change by their actions, instead of just empty mission statements.

Floodlight’s mission is to provide unbiased information to the world, empowering investment professionals to make investment decisions that align with their client’s values. Founded in 2019, Floodlight was selected for the Techstars Barclays Accelerator program and has now delivered ESG data to an array of asset managers, enabling investors to evaluate a company’s ESG performance based on real-world data rather than stated intentions. Floodlight is led by co-founder and CEO Nate Wyne, who specialized in capital markets as a senior foreign exchange advisor at Silicon Valley Bank and Wells Fargo. 

“We’re excited to receive this Chainlink Community Grant to help us bring climate data on-chain through a Chainlink External Adapter. Instead of having to worry about the technical challenges of accessing geospatial climate data, smart contract developers will be able to easily access it through the Chainlink oracle network,” stated Nate Wyne, co-founder and CEO of Floodlight. “We believe that making this data available to the DeFi ecosystem will help drive capital towards projects and organizations that empower climate initiatives.”

Through the Community Grants Program, Chainlink continues to enable 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 recent 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.

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