# TOKEN2049 - Blockchain for Social Impact

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Oe2L9tpJRJ8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe2L9tpJRJ8

## Transcript

good afternoon everybody thanks so much for taking time to discuss this very important topic today everybody is getting hilariously rich and you're not that was the headline in January of 2018 in The New York Times in reference to the crypto boom everybody is getting hilariously rich and you're not this was what the world thought of our industry and our culture when there was a ton of money in this space and perhaps not enough adoption those of us who have been in this space for as long of time as myself and I'm sure many of you are working very hard to try and change the impression of what the world thinks of crypto and especially blockchain technology and that's how we come to the subject of social impact I am the co-founder of kinetic which is a blockchain investment firm I'm also the founder of the etherium Meetup and as we've kind of taken this journey in developing blockchain technology and investing in this space we've come to the conclusion that there has to be more than just the commercial aspect and for the world to take us seriously and for us to really show traction adoption we must turn towards how we can seriously and substantially help our fellow people so Nydia and I we started something called social alpha and I have to say that it's probably one of the organizations that I hope will really be part of the legacy of what we leave behind and we hope that it will be part of that effort to really make change in the world using the types of resources that we have been fortunate enough to try and help grow in blockchain and crypto directed towards actually making the world a better place so with that I want to turn it over to Nydia who is the chairman and co-founder of social alpha to talk a little bit about the mission of social alpha and also the types of collaborations we're doing thank you good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is Nydia Chang I am the co-founder and chairman of social Alpha Foundation thank you to Han for the kind introduction and I want to share a little bit of social Alfa's origin story as you know we started this panel social foundation was funded in late 2007 team as it was a exciting a special time when cryptocurrency and blotching start to enter the mainstream media and society it was a time that we see tremendous amount of capital interests at people rushing into the space trying to build try to create I try to make things happen and that was also at the time we realized we actually need to rebuild and to reshape the image of blotching so the general public so different industries different sectors can actually see what the real blotching potential can deliver with that saying we started social off a foundation in 2017 that social foundation is a non-for-profit grant making foundation that's supporting education and blotching application we offer no string attached grants and support for fundamental blotching research and study on emphasize of social impact and we also offer application grants for non-commercial blotching applications that tackle social welfare issues with a focus of public health education and environment in 2018 it was a amazing year for a young organizations like us we compete six grants and the grantees range from individuals to watching applications and branding institutions at universities we work with sovereign IT projects we work with researchers and we work with Qin Han University Cornell University think tanks like us think tanks they knew America and agents like you NOP s so in 2019 social of a foundation we have made a decision that we want to see the environment as our 2019 s focus because in the scope of the world that we see environmental issues has already entered a point that not only request immediately action from every member every community and every country in this planet but also requires the innovation from exponential in powerful technology like blotching that can potentially offer solutions and tools to help alleviate the environmental crisis that the world is facing so I'm here we are very proud a very excited to announce our first grantee in 2019 which is the open lab initiative instead of a Yale University so marching who's sitting next to me is a founder of the open lab so the open line initiative is a joint initiative between the tie center for innovative thinking and center for business and environment instead of yellow university this is an amazing initiative that not only incubate blotching for environment projects but also help to create a robust blotching education ecosystem inside of Yale University so without further ado I'm gonna hand it over to Martine to elaborate this initiative a little bit further Thank You Nydia and honestly it's it's exciting to be able to work with both of you and social alpha and in this challenge Yale University has a strong history on environmental studies and in action and when we started the open lab was with the premise that global earth system challenges are the opportunity for us to collaborate as a civilization and so we look at Grand Challenges and the intersection of emerging technology with a focus on blockchain and from there incubate and produce open source projects that can leverage radical collaboration around these efforts and so a it is thanks to having visionaries that have this idea that blockchain also brings an important layer for global environmental action that we can do what what we are said to do and I can definitely talk a bit about some projects that we have but particularly the one that has connected us which relates to our own climate change and perhaps I can I can talk a bit about the underpin of how how tangible this challenge is and this has been part of our conversations in the last couple of months that has also been inspiring from from our side to be able to share that climate change is a problem that is not going anywhere it's just gonna keep coming back every year for us to have an idea we have increased temperature by one degree relative to pre-industrial levels and with total scientific unequivocal consensus we need to prevent that warming above 1.5 degrees in two degrees in 2015 in the Paris agreement and the UN F Triple C the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change we agreed that we would make efforts to prevent warming to above 1.5 now what that produces is that we now have a very limited carbon budget amount of emissions that we can bring into our atmosphere to stay within that climate boundary if we want to give numbers to it that's around 600 Giga tons of carbon dioxide that we can still bring into the environment and stay within this threshold past the threshold we're going into irreversible damage of the climate fabric at a planetary level and we every year pump into around 40 Giga tons so we are now in the capacity of burned through our carbon budget in under 15 years so when we think about blockchain what we now have is a single budget a single ledger and every time we emit we are introducing records into that ledger it doesn't yet exist it exists in the natural world now what what our task is is to really explore and develop some of the key solutions that blockchain can have in this climate and in carbon accounting world and I can go share a bit of about how we've come about this challenged because there's a lot of work done in the climate space and there there's almost like no need to come and reinvent climate science and since the blockchain world started there's been a lot of little snippets of innovation also happening one thing that we know blockchain can do is help through interconnection with IOT devices verify an action certifying action produce a record with almost a non fungible token out of that and then we can trade carbon credits now it would be great if we could solve this problem by things around for example a Nydia plans trees somewhere produce a token carbon credit I buy it and I offset my flight from from my trip to New York but those things are extremely important and that technology is advancing what our approach is where does this fit at the global context and for this we normally divide it into two parts on one side we have the planetary track of accounting that is a single budget a single atmospheric space and the consumption of that relates to understanding provenance of emissions so the integration of for example fossil fuel extraction and being able to bring IOT and blockchain into records of every single gallon of crude oil that comes into our system this is going to be very important and to have consensus around how we're consuming that budget the other side is all the sets of social structures that we've built around our world so countries cities organizations so we we also find that the role that blockchain has on keeping immutable records of every time there's a climate action pledge for example Hong Kong a couple of years ago pledged to reduce its total carbon intensity by around 60% which is a net carbon reduction of around 30% by 2030 but we think that being able to give accountability to these actions is very important they a grenade to a global level that we were able to bring in projects that are attached to that climate pledge and that we're able to bring in a lot of the tool bags from the block chain space smart contracts that can fit on top of records to be able to track exactly how those projects are advancing we're also able to think about whether those climate pledges are strong enough if if we think strictly around a planetary budget the world needs to be Net Zero Carbon by 2050 that means 35 years from now the entire energy system as we know it needs to change radically so the amount of capital that needs to go towards that is huge so we have to see how we're going to track these pledges to see if they indeed stack up to a 2050 target so we are we are excited to to bring in both our long legacy at Yale University on fund environmental studies and leveraging also from both of your work at social elfin kinetic a lot of the lessons learned from the blockchain world because in this intersection we think there's a very promising partnership our approaches universities I guess separate to maybe what a start-up approach is is we we need to start working with the key stakeholders that are involved in Earth System governance today by that I mean the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and their existing platforms so blockchain might have a very critical layer that we think can be built into that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is the fundamental scientific board around that and at the end of the day what our project is based on is radical collaborations so totally open-source inviting any participant that is working on a technological solution that can plug into this to work with us and the way we're planning this next year thanks to social alpha support is to do a series of multi-stakeholder design sprints to elucidate very clearly which one is the best leverage point where blockchain can have a very critical game-changing effect on carbon and climate accounting and then do fast prototyping to it bring in more partnerships around that great thanks for that very comprehensive explanation I think you know again for those of us who are you know native to the kind of blockchain and crypto community as investors or practitioners and developers I think it's important for us to be talking about things other than our own industry and other than you know the business side of it so the reason why we chose to support Martine and Yael is partially because as we experienced in the blockchain world one of the biggest challenges is actually adoption you know we're building great technology you know theoretically it all works but actually getting users into the system has proven to be very very difficult and that's no different in the in the social impact space as it is in our space and I think that you know part of what you mentioned you mentioned the kind of the frame way that you're doing that you're creating for the ledger one of the reasons we were very interested in this particular solution is because of Yale's position in the overall context of kind of environmental causes and research and I think one of the things we learned is that as you're trying to drive adoption it takes more than just the technology it literally takes a consensus and the buy-in of different stakeholders who can drive that adoption through more than just you know straight kind of a consumer acquisition or customer acquisition can you tell us a bit about Yale's position in the ecosystem where we think this solution would have ideally a better chance of being adopted then say a startup who's going after the same thing the UN the types of framework and tell us a bit about the mechanism by which a global Universal ledger would be adopted by governments such that it could you know produce and track as we would like it to right well I think that the role that we have as universities we need to be stewards of knowledge we need to be stewards of neutral perspectives to somebody and science always goes to that objective angle so the university itself is older than United in the United States and it has a very prestigious environmental program there's been a lot of work done in climate change analysis are one of our lead economists and in climate and economic studies has won the Nobel price this year and that was a great honor for the University so and this also ties with our annual around the open innovation lab is fundamentally everything we do is is out public and open to the world so I think that gives us a neutrality that we there's no specific gain for the university other than the pursuit of knowledge and the preservation of nature which is what scientific knowledge is telling us and that that makes it obviously very a bit more credible to work with governmental and intergovernmental organisations but fundamentally as well these global organisations also look towards universities for anchor points around how to guide our actions most of the climate science work around the world is a decentralized effort from universities and institutes around the world that get together at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and they give their definitive information towards the United Nation about what should be the direction so it's always science in its basic part that informs governance but in the case of technology we can also inform about really there's also a lot of noise and and by really going into deep fundamental premises about the blockchains merits to some of these efforts it allows us to also inform where that technological layer has indeed a role and your second question on adoption really comes in through being able to work directly with on one side entered multilateral organizations and UN is obviously an important one but thankfully the UN in the last couple years have been a lot more open to mix top-down and bottom-up approaches the Paris agreement fundamentally was a bottom-up approach because the UN opened its doors and told countries you tell us what you're doing about climate change and in this sense the community can speak and so with that opening around UN's vision blockchain also brings a lot of great tool bags for bottom-up action and and recording information okay one more question for you and then I have a question for Nidhi as well from a layman's perspective the this you know kind of we have what was it 15 potentially 15 years before we've expanded our climate budget what happens if we go past it a user perspective from a user perspective it's not gonna be you're gonna wake up one morning and things are going to change it's going to look the same and this is one of the fundamental problems of climate change the feedback mechanism that the planet has to ourselves has fundamental latency we don't equate weather and climate we don't go out and we don't realize radical changes overnight we have been realizing this with economic expansion and the growth of new power plants that produce pollution where it is unavoidable but in the greater scheme of things the way the climate sends signals back takes time so the 1.5 degree what it means is that by that time we're going to understand how that excess heat is going to unleash more intensity on all the climate impacts and particularly one of the sensitive points are ice caps in the poles also they work around fundamental inertia where something that happens now will affect 100 years from now but also positive feedbacks as soon as you start melting more ice the entire planet reflects less energy and so it heats up more so these are very sensitive points but I think something like a consensus on a specific ledger and also on science consensus what we're going to see as a user perspective is we've really crossed a line and there's no way back so I think we almost to certain extent we need the shock the peer to peer the media and the information shock of what it is that happens and we don't really realize that's why it's hard to act on it and this is going to hopefully perhaps change what indeed we think needs to change which is a higher degree of consciousness at the individual level and from there at the collective level there is no way of solving this problem by pointing fingers oh it's it's this country or it's this regulation everyone has a role everyone is part of the planet and as soon as we start getting more direct signals around our irreversible damage perhaps perhaps it starts realizing how we are indeed a global planetary civilization and we have to work together I want to actually just mention one last thing is that one of the key things about the open innovation lab and leverage and collaboration is that collaboration brings the mindset that we're all in in something together whereas competition and the driver of innovation really feeds into this illusions of separation here's me there's you and I I just wanted to share how much it's been nice for us to work with with you social alpha because I think you really bring in this mindset around and perhaps it also might come in from the culture from the blockchain world around a global community and the important role that that you have and so I really want to thank you and I think that's we're conscious in a consciousness level partnerships in that we appreciate that of course the pleasure is all ours nidia you mentioned that the the kind of exponential impact side of the technology and I think that I completely agree that you if we are to take like a linear approach to trying to solve climate change we will probably die before we actually get there and so perhaps an exponential an extra linear type of solution that we all know and love about blockchain is perhaps a good way to to try and and you know leap that gap in a way I guess from the you know the the focus on environment for social alpha this year do you want to talk about why you focus why we're focusing on on the environment and then specifically perhaps the the process of grant making and and vetting this grant so that people who are also interested to get involved have a sense of like how it works absolutely I think to answer your first question the reason behind why we have chosen that the environment will be our 2019 focus is it's really just because there's an urgency period that you know I was reading the 2019 war economy forum report there is a one sentence that you stick with me which is I off of all risks and crisis that the environment is actually the one that we are slowly walking into a catastrophe so I mean is I smarting that it's not gonna be like 20 35 years later that the one morning that we woke up and then we're like okay so right now we're at the end of the world but it's actually the danger of this gradual and that's slowly losing our really the access into our nature is very quite alarming and so for social alpha the reason we have chosen that your open lab is that because first the resource at the network and of course the brand that Yale has built especially when the council environmental causes has been proven that they are one of the best and we want to work with one of the best and that we think is very unique that you as a university and also this initiative between these two important centers has chosen which is we want to use blotching which is a very pioneering act coming from a traditional and historical agent and we appreciate this opportunity and we want to keep a answer and we want to set a example inside of the plotting community to say look there is things that can be done there are people that are willing to work with us there are a group of people that slowly actually also fast in learning what the potential of the technology is and then we are at a very except moment that we can make things happen so yeah so that's one of the one of the reason they have chosen you and the one in console selection process is that in social Alfa we are lucky to have a selection of people to form our vetting committee our adviser our strategic partner and most importantly our patrons so when we started social alpha one of the most important vision that we see is that we want to be the platform that support all the innovation running council botching for social impact but at the same time we also want to encourage and we also want to recruit the first generation of plotting philanthropists because as we think that's just as important as advocating the technology itself imagine back to the 90s if the first case if the first Zakhar birds start to think about let's give back in the 90s the world will probably be a very different place and we are now and then so we want to be one of the first and alongside with us from our own network for our the global community that we can have more and more philanthropies that want to give back so we are so for our vetting committee so they are formed by a group of plotting experts and also charity professionals so together they can evaluate first are the projects are the research are tackling the most urgent issues that the world are facing and secondly is it current blotching technology has support what the project is trying to do as we see well while being visionary we also need to be realistic and do you want to say just a bit about in some ways the function of social Alfa as a charitable organization in terms of how it how it works in the process for for the funds and also maybe even a bit about the the grant for Yale absolutely so our application channel is open for everybody on our website so we receive income applications on a daily basis and then we rebuild them on a quarterly basis the way we deployed our quaint is that we will first host interviews and then if the applicants had made into a final list they will upon signing they will receive half of the initial funding that's promised and we will deploy the remaining funding on a milestone basis and what was the size of the grant fair for the Yale in this case we are giving a u.s. dollar one hundred fifty thousand dollars to Europa lab great so oh thank you so I think we're running out of time but I just wanted to kind of close with with a couple of comments and questions I guess Martine what is it that you kind of hope for you know kind of going forward I mean you're speaking to again what we hope are some of the future philanthropists from our generation of value creators you know coming from the you know a long history in both kind of academia as well as aid what is it that what's the message that you want to give to them well I was I was trying to allude towards it that one thing that global planetary problems produces that it realizes that we're all in this together I really hope that the effort that we put into this project sends the signals back around a new wave of how we can reinvest in into change that every effort we put to a global problem comes back to us in one way or the other in that sense the the planet is mashek sand balances in a very wise way so I really hope we were able to capture more attention from people to understand the the challenge at hand and the row that smarter smarter fund funding initiatives can have in that but I also want to see in general community building around open source projects that address a global problem and this is definitely one of the hypotheses is that if we are to solve this we have to tap into collective intelligence and the open source world the blockchain world has having a lot of advanced in this and very short periods of time and so independent to the actual specific tools of blockchain has in general it's this as a highly collaborative industry it's sometimes might not feel that way but compared to other industries it is and I think that's also part of a decentralization mindset so I definitely would love to see a community building around that definitely if you're working if anything that we've said here our sounds please reach out to us we're a total open platform for for working with anyone from any angle the the grant also allows we are we're going to consolidate a team to start doing development efforts so we're definitely looking out for particular purpose driven but rigorous talent around this and you can read more in open lab yale.edu there's positions available you can read other projects that we're hosting there and it's it's really the the test that it's it's not one university or one project that is going to solve this problem is all of us together bringing in a planetary consciousness thank you and Nydia same last comments or questions comments or messages for again this kind of generation of philanthropists join us join the social foundation family really I mean I I think here that we really want your really acknowledge that really the first kind of bash of people that had you know come and join us as patrons we have to think you know orbs hashed blue cell icon my rows are from blog and also me and your hand we also personally donate a amount of money so I think it's really not about the amount is really about the heart and the willingness to help and to build an ecosystem to build a community to share that you care that I think it's a really the essence about watching and it's about watching community great thank you so much for your time thanks to your attention and I hope you taken with her thank you so much