TL;DR:
Digital Gaia is building the decentralized foundations for environmental impact measurement and certification:
- Infrastructure for algorithmic, probabilistic and transparent forecasting and measurement of impact, based on decentralized science;
- Incentivized knowledge feeds to connect and reward the global communities of nature stewards, domain experts, and data scientists;
- An Impact Oracle that can back dynamic Proof of Impact NFTs.
Our thesis on Proof of Impact (PoI)
Tokenized impact certificates must be far more legitimate than their legacy counterparts. Most proposals assume (implicitly or explicitly) such legitimacy can be derived from attestation by some trusted governance body, and, once issued, has a well-defined and immutable “face value”, i.e., some metric of success (ideally according to ex ante criteria). This is reflected in Vitalik’s own proposal of a Results Oracle for public goods funding. We believe this sort of model is insufficient for efficient externality pricing, particularly for natural impact, which involves a context-dependent, long-running interplay of global and local factors.
In our proposal, the basic Web3 primitive is a dynamic, algorithmic assessment of an intervention’s impact. This judgment is achieved by an autonomous (AI) agent which integrates and weighs the available evidence and knowledge contributed by (a fully open and untrusted community of) humans, using commonly accepted principles of science and decision theory, such as Bayesian inference and free energy minimization. The source of its legitimacy is the scientific method itself - based not on authority, but on an evolving and transparent paper trail of inferences cross-validated against real-world data.
These impact tokens, and the economy built on top of them, will generate ongoing incentives for communities to contribute further knowledge and create a commons of impact assessment know-how, eventually arbitraging away structural uncertainty, noise and disinformation, while gaining resilience due to the strong upside to contrarian views, whistleblowing etc. Finally, arbitrarily high-grade impact credits can be minted as derivatives (”99.99% certainty that 1 ton of CO2 was removed by this project”).
It’s worth mentioning that this would also be the foundation for algorithmic impact investing, and therefore self-funded public goods.
About Digital Gaia
- Our team and partner network combines expertise in both active inference and deep learning AI, data science, economics, community engagement, climate business, and collective intelligence.
- We are building: (1) the basic primitive mentioned above; (2) MVP contribution & engagement apps for nature stewards and scientists; (3) Python SDKs for data scientists.
- We have already built PoCs for a large portion of (1) and (2).
- We have completed a draft whitepaper describing our architecture and validated it with world leaders in AI, data science and collective intelligence.
Ask
We’re raising $200,000 to complete MVP development over the next 3-6 months.