Blockchains offer a wealth of potential for advancing sustainability initiatives, opening up multiple avenues for promoting environmental protection and replenishment through their transparent and permissionless nature. With blockchain-based hybrid smart contracts, anyone can create decentralized finance (DeFi) or parametric insurance products that address environmental issues, including green bonds, on-chain carbon credit systems, and parametric hazard insurance contracts. However, since blockchains are closed systems, one of the main restrictions holding back green blockchain innovation is the lack of high-quality climate data available directly on-chain. 

To this end, we are pleased to announce that the Chainlink Community Grant Program is awarding Shamba with a grant to bring more high-quality climate data on-chain. Shamba Dynamic’s in-depth datasets enable environmentally-focused DeFi and insurance applications that can reach a global audience of users. 

As part of this grant, Shamba aims to complete the following objectives:

• Research which data types are most beneficial to the blockchain industry to help build new analytics solutions and prioritize the rollout of more data.
• Build a geospatial data and analytics service featuring a wide array of real-world environmental data that will be made available to the Chainlink Network. 
• Create developer tooling, external adapters, and a web-based application for a more seamless integration experience for developers who want to integrate the data.

Shamba is a geospatial data and analytics provider specializing in agricultural and environmental applications. Its team has extensive experience collaborating in projects with NASA-SERVIR, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Dalberg Research, CIAT-CGIAR, and others to develop unique climate-based datasets. Shamba aims to support the blockchain industry with high-quality climate datasets collected by satellites, drones, and various other sensors to power social impact projects in the blockchain industry. The Shamba team has divided its vast catalog into priority levels based on estimated demand, use cases, geographical coverage, and other parameters. Accordingly, the datasets Shamba will initially bring on-chain include vegetative indices from multiple sensors, weather datasets including rainfall, temperature, and evapotranspiration, as well as soil moisture.

Shamba’s datasets facilitate vegetation monitoring for applications such as crop yield analysis. They also allow for more sophisticated parametric insurance products based on soil moisture data and a variety of climatic variables. The additional ability to detect hazards such as fire will accelerate the innovation of new products to manage climate risks such as wildfires. Through Chainlink, developers will be able to harness these datasets to bring novel DeFi and insurance applications to a global audience, promoting green finance initiatives while providing individuals access to insurance where it was not previously available. For instance, fire hazard data can be used in parametric insurance contracts as a payment trigger when fires are detected. Similarly, developers can use soil moisture and vegetative index data to build reliable prediction markets around crop yield estimates, as well as insurance products

“We’re thrilled to receive a social impact grant to help bring geospatial data on-chain through the Chainlink Network so that DeFi projects can leverage it to build green financial services, while insurance companies can use it to build novel crop and hazard insurance products,” stated Kennedy Ng’ang’a, founder of Shamba. “We also look forward to doing more extensive research to bring more in-demand climate data on-chain. We’re excited to make a positive environmental impact and bring more sustainability-focused projects to the blockchain industry.” 

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 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. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in cash and/or LINK.