Welcome to gossip about gossip powered by Hedera hashgraph, and each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. My name is Zenobia God's talk and I'm the SVP of communications at Hedera Hashgraph. Today, I am joined by West geisenberger with the foundation. Many of you may know West from his time at hadera, but we are excited to hear today about what he is doing with the foundation. Welcome with. I'm great, zenobia, how are you doing? Good, good. We would love to. I know a lot of members of our community know you very well from your previous role at Hedera. But can you share with us a little bit about what you are focused on now that you were at the foundation? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really excited to be at the foundation and working on an important project around the foundation sustainable impact fund. It's one of the four key pillars for the foundation. It's 100 plus million fund. And what we're doing is we're giving out grants to organizations to improve transparency around markets for sustainability. And what that really means is we're working with grant recipients to build open source infrastructure platforms and help deploy those platforms so that we improve the transparency of how we use DLT and DLT to get transparent assets on ledger. What that leads to is better facilitation of auditability these assets, better discoverability of these assets. It could be something like environmental emissions. Accounting could be something like carbon offsets, proving that we're actually making the difference of capturing greenhouse gas emissions or things like renewable energy credits and trading energy to prove that I'm actually using renewable energy. I'm producing renewable energy. Or if I'm consuming energy that's not auditable. Or maybe I need to go buy things to offset that renewable energy. And those are the types of things that we're looking at. But it really doesn't just end there in these environmental markets. We're looking at this for water rights, biodiversity conservation and really anywhere within UN Sustainable Development Goals scope. And what we're hoping to do is have a really big impact on how the world sees these assets not just as commodities, but as assets that have the full context of the audit trails that we can use. DLT and Hedera specifically to improve at the speed of the real world with the security that they're bringing to the table, and transactions that can then be adopted to prove the impact we're making, whether it's at large scale companies like governing council members or individual entrepreneur levels where they have access to take small shareholder farms and get credit for things like carbon offsets that they're producing and get paid for the work that they're doing. And that's really what we're focused on, and those are just a few examples, but we're really excited about the impact that we can make here. Very exciting. And I know this is near and dear to your heart. Sustainability is a conversation that's happening across all different industries. Why was it important to specifically allocate funds in the sustainable impact fund from the foundation? So sustainability is really important to me, but I think it's also really important to the Hedera network. We are an extremely low carbon footprint public network, but I think the goal is not to just say, hey, we have the lowest carbon emissions. Of course, no network would have zero carbon emissions if we didn't have networks that existed. So what we're really focused on is trying to drive these outcomes in a way that maps to the real world, which is really good from a wider perspective and using Hedera as a tool to achieve transparency, discoverability and ultimately liquidity for these assets. Hydra has great properties within our token service and our consensus service to be able to move things at the speed of the real world, Tens of thousands of transactions, a second and bring in programmability through things like smart contracts and look at things like identities, identities at scale that map to accounts on the Hedera network so we can prove the veracity of information coming from them to say, well, if I'm a farmer and I have an account that holds a carbon offset that I produced, and I have different identifiers of actors who have helped account for this following an auditable process, we can do that at scale on it. There are not many networks can say I can have all this information coming in real time with the security of the network to put all those transactions in order, coming from devices, coming from manual inputs, coming from phones, coming from all types of assets. And what we can do with the sustainable impact fund is look at this area as a strategic point of growth for the network where we can see broad scale adoption, both on the supply side of the network, where we are creating offsets or renewable energy credits or water rights tokens and other use cases. And we can marry that with the demand side of the network and where we say, well, we can look at a large scale supply chain measure, scope one, two and 3 emissions scope one. Emissions you can think of is measuring materials to create a given good scope to being energy that is tied to emissions or say. Of that good and scope 3 emissions, as maybe when you send that good out to the customer sites and we have to capture all this information from all different data sources. And when we finally tokenize that because a lot of these things, almost everything in these supply chains eventually be tokenized, have to interact with the rest of the world to offset that. And on haddara, the beautiful thing is we have the network capacity to build robust economies that can measure both the demand in those carbon emission tokens as an example or demand tokens for, say, I'm allowed to consume x amount of water. And on the supply side of that, for carbon offsets or renewable energy credits or a supply token for water are permitted to consume that water and that all is possible on Hydrow. And we actually have new types of systems that we're researching and developing to enable liquidity for these assets, even when they're nonfungible or semi fungible. So these native token service tokens can interact together on the network in a high velocity way and a high liquidity way that other networks just don't have the opportunity to do based on the technical primitives. So you've given our audience a little bit of a sense of the goals there. Anything more specific in terms of the kinds of companies that you're looking for or you'd love to hear from who you'd like to support with the fund? Absolutely and I think I think there's some really great examples that have come to fruition, like dodoo, like timeless as early examples mico and civic ledger. But the types of companies that we're looking for are companies that are interested in creating further transparency in the sustainability markets and these environmental markets. And what they're focused on doing is doing it with high quality attributes tied to these assets where they want to get to that degree of information and have transparent assets that they can take to the market, which have higher value because of their degrees of transparency. And when we work with these parties, we want to find folks who can do that at scale. We have an interest in scaling up to go, change how the industry works and work with large players, maybe some governing council members and other enterprises around the world that can change how we think about transparency in large scale systems, how we map that to our environment, how we map that to our supply chains and make a better, better, more sustainable world. And you know, I know we are in early days, but you mentioned a couple of the companies that you've already started working with. Anything else you'd like to share any other companies or things about those Vu and timeless and others that you want our audience to know? Yeah, absolutely. And we can think about these companies working in different areas of the ecosystem, know the infrastructure area. You probably hear a lot from envision blockchain, who's helping doing open source development and the Guardian going up the stack. Folks, like those who are using the guardian, folks like civic ledger, folks like timeless are all using the guardian. But we have other folks who are building critical infrastructure projects for us. We heard from nico, who's building an Explorer and a decentralized identifier wallet to manage identities in what we call these trust chains to know the rules and actors of the ecosystem. Those are all different great companies that we've invested in early on in the funds, and we'll hear about a lot more, both at the infrastructure level as well as the platform level. And eventually, I think we'll hear a lot about how those applications are being deployed with large scale customers. I think folks like timeless have teased out some of their customers, whether it's on troth or the government of Queensland as examples. But there's a lot of other great players out there that will be adopting this technology, and we're really excited about some of the activity that's happening from these initial platforms and other ones. We're working with that, we'll be able to share in the future. Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of this is going to, you know, we may end up using some of these things in our day to day lives and never even realize that they're powered by Hedera. How do you see public ledgers and Web3 supporting sustainability efforts across both? You know, obviously startups, but also really big organizations moving forward. I think I think the neat thing about this and kind of a good way to think about this is it's an ecosystem effect not one company can solve. For all the measuring all the emissions in the world. Not one company can even sell for measure and all the emissions of the single type in the world, let alone capturing data around sequestering carbon in 1,000 different ways in hundreds of different countries. That's all. That's not that's not possible today. And so as we build a strong and robust ecosystem, these companies have to work together. We can think about the folks that individual farmer who is capturing carbon. Maybe their credits are bought by members of the governing council. Maybe those credits are being bought by companies halfway around the world, or even across town where they otherwise couldn't interact. And I think what's neat is we're building an ecosystem is not only environmentally sustainable, but from a business perspective. It's sustainable to be able to interact with each other and bring more and more folks onto Hadera to solve a mutual problem where they can actually create a supply of assets that are valuable to other companies that they otherwise won't be able to interact with. And I think that really ties back to the original vision when we talked about shared worlds earlier on in the days of haddara, and I think that's a really cool opportunity. Yeah, I think it's really exciting to hear even some of the early companies engaging and, like you said, using things like the guardian, using other tools that have been built on Haidara and other frameworks that those take time to put into place. But now that some of them are starting to be ready to use, you can build on the shoulders of those Giants. Wes, thank you for joining us today. As we wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to share? And then also, if people are interested in working with you. And with a sustainable impact fund, where should they go? Absolutely so so I think one thing I want to share is this is really. A fund that's here to change how the world works. We're trying to make the world more transparent. Grow the sustainability economy to build that transparency in a way that everyone can understand. And so we encourage everyone to engage. We encourage folks to go to our foundation website. Each foundation dot org apply. Apply for grant. But think about as you're applying for the grant, how you're going to enable that transparency, how you're going to enable a better auditability and think through the process, how we build a sustainable business, models that can do so. That's something we're really excited about working with different companies with and encourage you to also engage with the projects that are out there, announced in the community trying to make that change because we've talked about the timeless eco civic ledger. And there's going to be many more engaged with those companies because there's oftentimes opportunities to grow not just the platforms that don't exist, but the platforms that do. And so I'll thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here, and I look forward to joining you next time. Absolutely thank you, Wes.
