As part of the Kolektivo Framework, we are building a Web3 primitive called a fractionalizer. Fractionalization is the process of splitting a NFT into ERC20 tokens. The fractionalizer will allow data producers to be proportionally rewarded with ERC20 datatokens depending on some weighted quality of contribution they make to a common dataset (a DataNFT). This tool benefits projects in the broader web3 ecosystem who aim to incentivize high-quality data production. In parallel, it will advance Kolektivo’s roadmap, creating a new business model for producers of ecological state data.

We believe that fractionalization of ecological datastores is a novel yet effective way to democratize the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) process, unlocking potentially trillions USD of value of ecosystem services. Kolektivo ultimately aims to mitigate data supply shortages in MRV in order to facilitate high quality environmental asset production at scale — e.g. carbon offsets or biodiversity credits.

We initially aim to deploy the fractionalizer on Celo for interoperability with Kolektivo Framework’s complementary modules. After the PoC, our goal is to make the fractionalizer available and useful to projects building on a number of networks.

Problem:

Demand is skyrocketing for high-quality environmental assets, such as carbon offsets or credits. This is due to a potent tripartite mix of corporate net-zero pledges, government regulations, and institutional investment. Beyond the growing popularity of carbon, environmental accounting mechanisms that seek to compensate for the regeneration or conservation of ecosystem services are diversifying their service offering; e.g. biodiversity or plastic removal credits.

Due to today’s high fixed MRV costs, small landholders fail to benefit from this industry growth. This generates an MRV supply shortage centralizing industry production and reinforcing systemic issues where large landholders receive a disproportionate level of market share. Large institutions are already notorious for producing low-quality environmental assets, with a recent piece by the Guardian uncovering their ineptitude.

To address these challenges, Kolektivo proposes to democratize MRV by providing effective infrastructure that aggregates and incentivizes bottom-up data collection efforts.

Solution:

Kolektivo has built the GeoNFT token standard, which brings and standardizes location data for NFTs on-chain. The GeoNFT includes geospatial location and an ecological index — a type of calculated score that provides a quick assessment of a territory.

The GeoNFT is key to bootstrapping an economy for small landholders to monetize their environmental data. For example, in Curacao, the GeoNFT infrastructure allows independent small-scale farmers to pool syntropic agroforestry data to overcome industry hurdles such as minimum territory size — a requirement for issuing environmental assets for key legacy actors, such as the Verra Registry. In short, GeoNFT allows for economies of scale.

To be liquid, the GeoNFT must be fractionalized — i.e. split into a certain number of fungible ERC20 tokens,or shards. Many use-cases are unlocked through this process, such as collateralization, datatokens, outputs-rights tokens (staking to receive revenues from downstream asset production, such as carbon credits), insurance, or ownership.

To determine the number of shards, we will use the fractionalizer, which will take the area of a land being measured, and/or a calculated Ecological Index score, to determine how many shards to mint contributors to a GeoNFT datastore. Generally, the higher the Ecological Index, or the larger the area in which data is being collected, the higher the number of shards attributed to a specific data producer contributing to a GeoNFT. With this, data producers are rewarded proportionally to the size of the area they are reporting for, or the quality of their submission (according to the index-scoring calculation).

Project State:

In October, Kolektivo launched its MVP with 30 food forests on the island-nation of Curaçao. The next step for us is to produce ecological data such as yields, water or soil quality, biodiversity, and weather data.

We are collaborating with Ocean protocol through a grant to build this primitive. The initial GeoNFT representing these food forests will be available on Ocean’s marketplace, and the fractionalized ERC20 tokens — which we will call “Regenerative Food Forest Tokens” — will be the access datatokens for the GeoNFT’ datastore. In parallel to our practical experimentation, we will collaborate with Ocean’s ecosystem to gather requirements and articulate the business logic and extensible use cases for the fractionalizer. What types of datasets are most appropriate for this mechanism? Where can incentivized, weighted quality data production be disruptive? What data unionization primitives are extensible to governance of the fractionalizer?

Team:

Kolektivo is the product of collaboration amongst various Web3-native builder groups, all experts of their fields. The implementation of the GeoNFT is led by Curve Labs – the technical group responsible for designing and developing Kolektivo’s tokenomics, monetary, and governance modules. Our team is made up of designers, economists, software engineers and researchers aspiring to develop OS frameworks and tooling for a decentralized world. We have extensive experience in protocol design, smart contract architecture and development, dApp design and development.

We are engaging supporters like IoTeX and the OpenEarth Foundation, the latter of which we are exploring W3bstream’s Web3 native IoT devices and working to integrate their pebble trackers to the Kolektivo MVP for automated environmental data collection.