Omnii

Humanity faces the compounding crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. In the race to a net-zero carbon economy, the carbon markets are booming and expected to grow 100 times by 2050.

Toucan’s platform bringing carbon on-chain provides the massive potential to support the shift to a regenerative economy, where climate change and the greenhouse gas effect are public goods, to incentivize reducing and avoiding carbon emissions.

But, the current verification process to award carbon credits is off-chain, inefficient (manual), opaque and expensive. This results in higher risk carbon-offset projects, and a bottleneck in the supply of verified carbon credits. With this current process, we are unable to achieve the scale required to meet the carbon credit demand. In response, we’re bringing the verification process into Web3. Omnii is a flexible oracle that uses real-time satellite and other environmental data to scale the verification of carbon credit awards in the Toucan protocol.

With Omnii we can automate the various complex carbon accounting methodologies via our Oracle. Omnii is built in a modular way that could allow for a vast range of environmental data feeds and oracles. This could open up incentives to address wider sustainable development challenges e.g., biodiversity loss etc.

Further, we could allow for innovation and improvement of these methodology standards and bring on-chain diverse parameters for what good looks like, including for example, the implementation of DAO to vote on what the standards should be. This could radically support the shift to an incentive mechanism that reflects the needs and wants of the project’s wider stakeholders beyond that of the project developers.

In this way, Omnii could present an improved environmental project verification standard that could replace off-chain verification, feeding projects directly into Toucan’s meta registry shown in our desired product here.

Our proof-of-concept illustrates how Omnii can transform the arduous process of project carbon accounting by measuring the diameter of trees in the field with just one click on a dashboard by leveraging the analysis of satellite data. Omnii saves time, carbon footprint, decreases cost and technical resources, and increases transparency and accountability.

Our vision will democratise access to carbon-offset project verification and, therefore, the development of projects - opening the opportunity for more people to produce carbon credits, de-risk carbon credit projects through real-time data monitoring, therefore, enable participation in the regenerative economy at scale whilst providing alternative livelihoods in developing nations accelerating carbon mitigation and adaptation and injecting value back into the environment, to move towards a regenerative economy.

Our project uses the Polygon chain for minting of ERC721 NFTs as proof of verification of Toucan carbon projects, using hardhat and Ethers.js was used for blockchain development. We use IPFS for storage of additional NFT metadata relating to the metrics used for project verification. For the front-end demo of project verification we used React and Next.js. The validation algorithm was based on data from deClimate and Verra, it was deployed in python with a Restful API.