CIRCULAR

CIRCULAR applied circular economy, climate change and biodiversity to scaling Ethereum.

After a bit of to-and-fro, the "what" started to take shape: By now, most people have heard of global crises related to climate change, biodiversity, water shortages, socio-economic instability, and food security. We narrowed our focus to urban farming to address key ESG (environmental, social and governance) challenges.

Urban farming solves many issues, but its key challenge - among many other impact projects - include financing.

Challenges to urban individuals include, but are not limited to:
Lack of awareness to create edible gardens Lack of capital and project knowhow Lack of marketing, business and distribution logistics skills

Challenges to impact investors include, but are not limited to:
Lack of access to projects Lack of impact analysis

We solve the above issues with NFTs:

• Use NFTs as a marketing vehicle to advocate urban farm projects in easy-to-find and easy-to-consume way for financiers.

• Use NFTs as a common anchor point to deliver needed project documents.

• Use ENS (and Fleek in our demo) to bring blockchain world in familiar way closer to people.

This is not straightforward, though. People do not just "tokenize urban farms", there are not even many urban farms to be established that could be tokenized. Most of the people have not even heard of tokens.

We produce tokens through an easy to use application for individuals that ‘creates’ the projects, handles required documentation and handles the technicalities in a familiar way (e.g. using ENS and Fleek). We also attempt to lower costs associated with minting both fungible and non-fungible tokens to remove barriers to entry. There are also market obstacles to TradFi adoption and expansion, and the larger Ethereum ecosystem is likely addressing this.

The idea is fairly simple: We build a bridge (using ENS) to get people who have not heard of Ethereum or tokenization to make use of this technology in urban farming space. This way we create urban farming opportunities for people who might be interested and get these projects off the ground. This means scaling Ethereum within the real world and address technical hurdles as they are adopted in different spaces, including applications and UX.

We recognized the need to bridge the mainstream to blockchain and NFTs as the launching pad of the project. We applied ENS and "plain web,” as in https://scalingethhack.humanefinance.eth.link/, to easily create project pages through an application and tokenize the “urban farm financing projects.”

These pages would present data in well-defined, easy-to-use format that is needed to finance the projects. Then, we mint tokens that point to these pages and so the tokens become like anchors - or rally-flags - to direct resources to these projects. This makes projects easily searchable and visible to potential investors, financing mechanisms of Ethereum, and traditional methods.

In order to accelerate adoption, we identified the need to lower costs as much as possible, while creating a quick and easy UX. We addressed this through minting ERC-1155 tokens on L2 as an option. There are also privacy requirements going forwards.

Our technical scalability bottleneck started to reveal itself. We could perhaps use Cairo to build a facility to mint ERC-1155 tokens on L2. We understand this would make minting tokens cheaper, faster, and possibly use Cairo in other ways.

Eventually we did not get to implement ERC-1155 minting on L2, but we continue working on this case after the hackathon.

(We also know there are issues about storing offline data, regulations, laws and trust creation outside of this hackathon, but we’re confident these are solvable. We're in fact working elsewhere already on standardized technology to solve these technical issues and crack the business cases.)