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Welcome to the Open Forest Protocol!

Dear friends of OFP,

We are happy to greet you with our inaugural newsletter! Every two weeks, you will be hearing from us with a roundup of Open Forest Protocol’s major milestones and a curated reading list on crypto and climate news. To kick things off, our co-founders Fred and Michael have shared a few words.

I have worked to replant and conserve forests for a good chunk of my life. My partner Aureline and I are very familiar with the challenges facing the reforestation, afforestation, and conservation (henceforth, forestation) sector from our work at On a Mission, the sustainable reforestation non-profit we co-founded. In our conversations with project managers all around the world, we found that the main trouble comes from forestation data MRV (measurement, recording, and verification). Planting trees is one thing, and tracking those trees and their carbon offsets are another. The problem is that the current forestation MRV process is centralized under a handful of agencies with each their own methodologies, which makes MRV altogether expensive, intransparent, and inaccessible to smaller projects.

CEO Fred Fournier presenting at the Swiss Fintech Fair 2021.

This is why we are building Open Forest Protocol, a blockchain-based MRV solution for forestation data. OFP makes forest MRV much more affordable and approachable by decentralizing the verification process from a handful of agencies to a distributed network of on-chain monitoring experts, who observe a scientifically rigorous methodology. At the same time, with all data publicly and immutably uploaded and verified on-chain, the increased transparency invites investor confidence in forestation projects and helps forest operators qualify for carbon financing schemes.

The simple truth is that we need to plant more trees and conserve more forests, as forests are one of the most promising nature-based solutions to combat climate change. But we are held back by the inefficiencies of the current market. Our hope with OFP is to remove this blocker and let forest projects scale at the level that we need to, and that too in the right way. This is why we are passionate about OFP and excited to invite you all on our journey forward!

A little over two years ago, what is today known as the “Open Forest Protocol'' started as a series of conversations between Dr. Rich Miller (Creighton University), Dr. Christopher Maurtius (CIFOR), and myself. I’d spend many late nights stuck on this idea: How could we design a protocol to track and verify things like trees, using blockchain technology? These chats formed the basis of the different components of the OFP Ecosystem. It’s a fond memory and maybe the best example I have of sportive creation.

Working deeply in the NEAR Protocol ecosystem, I knew the potential blockchain had for answering many old and persistent problems such as lack of data transparency, centralized storage, and scalability bottlenecks. When I was introduced to Fred and Aureline, a sportive project became a serious reality. Learning more about the forestation sector and the current state of carbon markets, I realized that OFP was not only a good idea but a necessary one for productively mobilizing capital to combat the destruction of our environment.

CPO Michael Kelly leading the Sustainability, Climate, and Crypto Panel featuring CEO Frederic Fournier at NEARCON Alpha in Lisbon.

Today, we live in an age in which blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are starting to mature well above and beyond the potential they promised over a decade ago in Bitcoin’s whitepaper. Networks like Ethereum and NEAR are blossoming fully-fledged ecosystems: we are now equipped with DeFi (decentralized finance), NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organization) to onboard the world onto Web3.

By building OFP on NEAR, we are leveraging the infrastructure and vision NEAR has for onboarding the first billion users onto a blockchain ecosystem. We are not only creating a technological solution for forestation data, but bringing the entire business of tree planting and conservation on-chain. What we envision goes far beyond tooling. Our ambition is to lay the grounds of a fully on-chain carbon economy: an entire ecosystem of financial products, marketplaces, artwork, and so on, derived from real forests and the carbon they sequester. We at OFP are determined to bring this future forward.

OFP Community: Events & More 🌍

CEO Frederic Founier’s Presentation “Bridging Climate and Blockchain” at NEARCON (Starts at 34:15) 👇

NEARCON | Alpha - Day 1

Join the OFP Community

🌲 Become a part of the community in the Open Forest Society Discord Server

🗣 Start chatting with the team on the official OFP Telegram Group

🧑‍💻 Read about OFP and more on our blog