[Proposal] Yoyu - Peer 2 Peer Carbon Protocol on Near + Human Guild

Yoyu - P2P Carbon Protocol

We are creating an avoided carbon data marketplace that allows people to directly see the carbon impact of their actions and participate in / be rewarded for avoiding carbon. Today, our first app (Yoyu, already in app stores for the UK) shares a carbon intensity forecast so users can use electricity (run dishwashers or appliances, charge electric vehicles) at the cleanest times of day (carbon intensity varies hourly and daily with the weather) and earn ‘grams’ of avoided carbon.

WIth Human Guild and NEAR, we plan to rapidly scale and decentralise this. This proposal is for the MVP.

The problem we’re solving: A 300 million tonnes of carbon offset deficit is predicted for 2030, because we aren’t going to avoid enough carbon today to meet the 2030 targets of businesses and cities.

The process of getting carbon credits verified is cumbersome, expensive and takes a long time. Carbon markets allow certain projects to be valued today using verified methodologies, but they require lengthy and untransparent processes for assessing and valuing carbon a project will avoid. Participation is limited to the larger companies (project developers) that can navigate the process. And yet, over half of the actions needed by 2030 are a combination of behaviour AND technology (adopting new technologies like electric heating/vehicles and using those appropriately) so we really need to rapidly increase participation in carbon markets - creating many more options for people in their daily lives to avoid carbon as soon as possible.

The Goals for the project: We aim to solve this by building a P2P (Peer 2 Peer) Carbon Protocol that will make it easy for people to avoid carbon in their own lifestyles, or ‘offset’ their footprint by exchanging the avoided carbon that others create. In our project, grams (of carbon avoided) tokens are mined with social behaviour. Buyers of grams earn ‘reputation’ tokens for participating in the marketplace. Validation of social mining by peers or algorithms (with the potential for IoT integration to devices or appliances) will be developed as part of the governance model.

Components for the delivery phase

Planned to deliver MVP on Near for September 2022.

• Develop an easy way to see the earned and swapped tokens (starting with the Yoyu community)
• Technical verification implementation (MVP)
  • ie: with smart meters or social validation mechanisms ie: using mobile phones
• Governance MVP and roadmap for further integration with wider ecosystem of citizen verifiers - design, simulation and economic prototyping (computer science, human and computer interaction)
• Token model design
• Front end development in mobile app to retire grams (MVP version)
• Back end development in mobile app to retire grams
• Burning tokens (retired grams)
• Potential to test with Near (currently Near pays for carbon offsets. Yoyu grams to be used instead)

Our use cases are B2C and B2B. B2B is being developed to provide the functionality above to integrate with third parties doing smart charging for electric vehicles or smart appliances.
Deck available upon request

About the team:

Molly Webb has been working at the intersection of climate change and information and communications technology since 2007 in advocacy and startup roles. She has worked on the Exergy project (blockchain to facilitate and incentivise energy data exchange) and supported innovators in the energy sector on policy and market entry through the non profit Energy Unlocked. Molly has spent the last year going deep on carbon accounting for ‘demand side flexibility’ - the half-hourly building-level changes that can be made to avoid carbon and how to measure it.

Elaine Trimble has an economics, planning and technology background at firms like Arup and Siemens and has recently started a community energy company in her neighbourhood. Her understanding of data and the built environment help us to build recognised verification mechanisms for those outside the energy sector.

Molly along with Magic Powered and Sebnem Rusitschka (Younergy and Electraseed) formed a hackathon team back in 2020 and are re-uniting to build this. Magic Powered has worked on NEAR AstroDao.