Project Summary
IC Footprint is an ESG platform with the technology to track and reduce the environmental impact of all ICP network actors. Growing consumer climate awareness, tightening environmental regulations, and a surge in energy-intensive computing activity (primarily due to AI) drive demand for climate-conscious digital products and sophisticated energy management systems.
IC Footprint 2.0’s launch means the product to date, i) tracks all ICP Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and attributes them to specific network activity and users, ii) stores the data in an on-chain ledger (ESG wallet), and iii), connects user ESG wallets with an environmental commodity exchange to enable decarbonisation. The updated product further creates the foundation for implementing new, commercially proven technologies in the near future, not least energy management capabilities.
Technology
IC Footprint combines global energy data and ICP network activity data with a proprietary methodology to achieve real-time GHG emissions tracking. GHG emissions that are attributed to a specific network user are assigned to that user’s ESG wallet, alongside any other environmental metrics such as electricity consumption and water usage.
Via their ESG wallets, users can purchase environmental commodities from an exchange, and match it to specific environmental metrics in order to decarbonise. For example, a user could purchase 10 carbon credits of 1 tonne each, and offset 10 tonnes of GHG emissions from their ESG wallet. Or purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) to green their electricity consumption. Any vendor of an environmental commodity that is scientifically backed can integrate into the exchange, and have it immediately become available in all ESG wallets.
Roadmap & ICP Advantages
Adaptability
ICP canisters support complex code and provide on-chain storage, enabling the implementation of nearly any form of software-based climate or energy technology. Energy software is already the number one climate investment recipient, with >$15bn invested in 2022 alone. This highlights the enormous potential of developing cutting-edge climate technologies on ICP, and then commercialising them cross-chain and in Web2 industries.
Already, the available high-fidelity, real-time data enables use cases such as grid balancing, compute load shifting, energy trading and automated reporting. Algorithms or even sophisticated AI models could be plugged in to optimise compute/energy usage or execute transactions on an exchange. In this way, energy management and decarbonisation strategies can be extremely flexible and potentially even autonomous. In short, ICP canisters open up a whole new frontier of potential climate technology implementations.
Traceability
Blockchain’s inherent traceability addresses the credibility issues facing climate monitoring and decarbonisation efforts. Developing climate tooling on ICP confers the benefits of traceability to all IC Footprint products. All emissions and decarbonisation transactions (e.g. buying carbon credits to reach net zero) are tracked in an on-chain ledger: creating a continuous, tamperproof audit trail from resource consumption, to climate impact, to climate action.
Tokenisation & Exchange
Environmental initiatives often use market-based mechanisms to achieve decarbonisation. Cap-and-trade schemes, carbon credits and even renewable energy purchases rely on certificates that represent a certain environmental benefit. These are known as environmental commodities. Tokenisation provides a powerful mechanism for fluidly tracking and trading these environmental commodities.
Moreover, tokenomic models in DAOs or across the protocol can be designed to reward certain kinds of behaviour. Incentives for users or builders to decarbonise can be built into reward models, fostering decentralised and collaborative decarbonisation activity across a complex array of actors and use cases.
Resources:
IC Footprint Platform
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