AMA 过程中,Mitchell Hammer 表示:XELS 致力于利用区块链技术应对气候变化的宏伟任务,是一个基于区块链的碳信用和自然资本市场,为企业、政府和个人提供了一种透明的方式来获取、交易和核算碳足迹和抵消。它利用区块链将高质量的碳信用转化为易于交换的资产,并通过加密资产市场实现流动性。
以下为 AMA 全文
月月:What are the advantages and innovations of XELS?
XELS 的优势和创新是什么?
Takeshi Nojima:Globally, carbon offset markets suffer from fragmented implementation, lack of cross-market exchange of value and quite often incorrect parameterization of the carbon ratio of given projects such that carbon credits granted and/or retired often do not actually reflect their true environmental effect, creating demand-supply imbalances. This has resulted in hyperinflation in carbon credits and therefore not incentivizing the correct behavior in emitters or propagating trust in carbon credit markets generally.
Carbon credits, which put a price on carbon reductions and provide revenue for such forestry protection projects, therefore represent a clear way in which companies and inpiduals can be empowered to reduce or offset the negative or unavoidable impact of their business and choices on the environment. By placing a value on the ecosystems that support our planet, carbon credits internalize the invisible costs of everyday choices and allow a sustainable market place to emerge.
However, since its inception, carbon trading has suffered from some issues that have suppressed its potential. The market is beset by a lack of visibility, which prevents people from trusting the carbon credit as an asset. Differing standards and regulations in different jurisdictions and the potential for double counting (where the same credit is sold more than once) have resulted in a lack of confidence from potential market participants. And without a universal ledger it isn’t easy to track how much carbon you’ve used or – if you offset it – what the impact of your reduction has been on a tangible level. As an inpidual, it is hard to incorporate carbon credits into your daily life.
Yet even if every country satisfied their Paris commitments to reduce carbon emissions, this would still not be sufficient to create a safe climate. Inpiduals and businesses will need to do more to plug this gap, and we urgently need to find a way to help them do this, while working on longer-term shifts in parallel.
Xels is created in collaboration with strategic partners and industry leaders. Xels is a blockchain-based carbon credit and natural capital marketplace that provides a transparent way for corporations, governments and inpiduals to acquire, trade and account for carbon footprints and offsets. It utilizes the blockchain to turn high-quality carbon credits into easily exchanged assets, and enables liquidity through a crypto-asset marketplace.
Our mission is to accelerate the transition from an unsustainable extractive economic model to a fully regenerative economy by embedded environmental impact costs (externalities) into the costs of all goods and services we consume. Our platform is unique in many ways. With it, we can transact small amounts of carbon credits, for the first time, allowing us to integrate the carbon market with the retail sector.
Our platform is truly end-to-end, connecting polluters and consumers around the world. Using our blockchain-based platform, carbon credits will be managed throughout their entire lifecycle. It will offer transparency, traceability, and monitoring at every step. While it will of course sit alongside the structural improvements that businesses are making to lower their emissions, it offers the critical acceleration in activity and funding for emission reduction projects, driving the changes necessary for sustainable global development。
月月:The sustainable development of climate change is a topic of great concern around the world. Why did XELS choose it and devote to it? What are the expected positive effects on the global environment?
Mitchell Hammer:Climate change is indeed one of the critical issues of our time. Business managers should care because ultimately business cannot succeed in a world that’s failing.
The recent surge of superstorms that have been battering the Caribbean and the Southern US, the fires in Western Canada, and the extreme flooding experienced in many parts of the world have helped raised awareness of the impact of warming temperatures.
During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where Bill Clinton was talking about climate change. He argued that if we were able to decrease global carbon emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050 it would still take 1000 years for the planet to cool down. In the meantime, he said, you can expect a lot of bad things to happen – like a billion people losing most of their water supply in the next decade.
We can all imagine the human tragedy that would result – death, migration, wars, and increased terrorism just for starters.
我们都可以想象由此带来的人类悲剧——死亡、移民、战争和恐怖主义的增加只是开始。
Clearly (to anyone who believes in science) climate change is arguably the world’s most daunting challenge. Virtually every scientist now agrees that the debate is over. Rising average surface temperatures combined with rapidly expanding deserts, melting Arctic sea ice caps and ocean acidification now provide unequivocal evidence that human activities are fundamentally altering the Earth’s climate. In fact the planet appears to be changing faster than even the pessimists expected—way faster.
For many people, those consequences seem distant, and it’s certainly true that the worst of it will be inherited by future generations. Given the short-term thinking that dominates our political systems, our economy, our capital markets, and our day-to-day decision-making as inpiduals, it is easy to be dismissive of the notion that humankind will suddenly become motivated by a sense of inter-generational justice to make the deep and difficult adjustments that are required to avert global ecological disruption.
It’s one thing for governments or corporations to take action, but more is needed – a global change in human behavior. But what will it take to cause all of us radically reduce our own carbon footprint?
So we are working on the ambitious mission to combat climate change by using blockchain technology.
XELS will engage millions of people to help fight climate change by encouraging them to making smart choices about their carbon consumption. The company plans to purchase carbon credits, or invest in carbon reduction programs, then distribute the offsets via major retailers and brands as loyalty tokens that will help incent people to make carbon-friendly decisions in their day-to-day purchases of goods and services. The tokens earned will be tradable on the our platform, or can be exchanged for goods and services, other reward program points, or other digital currencies.
月月:How can ordinary people participate in the XELS ecosystem?
普通群众如何参与到 XELS 生态中来 ?
Takeshi Nojima:Blockchain has the potential to accelerate the deployment of emissions trading systems (ETS) worldwide and improve upon the efficiency of existing systems. XELS is developing a a model for a permissioned blockchain implementation based on the successful European Union (EU) ETS as it has many potential advantages over existing technology. We are creating an ETS model that is both backwards compatible and future-proof, characterised by interconnectedness, transparency, tamper-resistance and high liquidity.
This is where blockchain technology comes in. Put simply, blockchain is the name for a digital ledger in which transactions (often made with "tokens" or a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin) are recorded chronologically and publicly. Applying this to carbon credits to create a "carbon currency" is the key to demystifying and consolidating the carbon market so it can scale up. Carbon credits are the perfect candidate for a digital currency as they are data-driven, rely on multiple approval steps and exist separately to the physical impacts to which they correlate.
Imagine a world in which carbon emissions and credits can be tracked transparently and reliably. Retailers will be able to sell a product and take into account the carbon impact it creates at the same time. Governments will be able to measure, track and trade emissions transparently. And crucially, for the first time consumers will be able to understand the environmental impact of the products they are buying – both positive and negative – at the point of sale, and will be able to mitigate this in an instant, with millions of micro-transactions scaling up to make a huge collective impact.
Momentum is building towards natural solutions to climate change, and not a moment too soon. Pressure on businesses from consumers to improve the sustainability of their supply chains and their products will soon be matched by regulatory pressures and quotas if we are to stand any chance of reversing the climate damage that is a reality today.
It is not an overstatement to say that we all need to take responsibility for the carbon consequences of every choice we make. What is exciting is that by creating a global, trusted and accessible carbon currency, with the help of new digital technologies available to us, we are on the cusp of being able to do so.
Mitchell Hammer:Building a Better Market. One of the promises of blockchain technology is that it can bring efficiencies and access to virtually every market. XELS will promise to try to build a better carbon trading market.
Our objective: To bring efficiencies to developing, managing, and trading carbon credits, with the ultimate goal of reducing carbon emissions. By doing so on a public blockchain, they combat the issues of corruption and lack of transparency.
The ability to create immutable transactions on blockchain helps ensure that the data is traceable, transparent and visible in real time to all stakeholders. The entire carbon trading process becomes more shareable as well, which naturally streamlines it.
The results: Reduced time-to-market for carbon assets (projects with a more significant reduction in emissions), reduced cost, greater transparency, and better security. Participants can easily track their carbon footprint and better understand when to buy or sell in the carbon asset market. And regulators can more easily monitor progress against quotas to ensure that participants meet carbon reduction goals.
Now, I don't want you to get the impression that the blockchain is the solution to everything, even though the media has said that it's going to end world poverty, it's also going to solve the counterfeit drug problem and potentially save the rainforest. The truth is, this technology is in its infancy, and we're going to need to see a lot of experiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of the use cases for our economy. But there are tons of people working on this, from financial institutions to technology companies, start-ups and universities. And one of the reasons is that it's not just an economic evolution. It's also an innovation in computer science.
Blockchains give us the technological capability of creating a record of human exchange, of exchange of currency, of all kinds of digital and physical assets, even of our own personal attributes, in a totally new way. So in some ways, they become a technological institution that has a lot of the benefits of the traditional institutions we're used to using in society, but it does this in a decentralized way. It does this by converting a lot of our uncertainties into certainties.
So I think we need to start preparing ourselves, because we are about to face a world where distributed, autonomous institutions have quite a significant role.
因此,我认为我们需要开始做好准备,因为我们将要面对一个分布式、自治的机构发挥重要作用的世界。
XELS applies traditional commodity exchange architecture to carbon credits. Traditional commodities trade digital receipts representing commodities held in a warehouse. These warehouses are organized around predefined specs.
Similarly, we currently securitize carbon credits into tradable carbon asset classes. We organize credits around the markets they serve. Carbon credits held by the exchange are held in a Trust. For every credit deposited into the Trust, a corresponding amount of Tokens resides on the Exchange.
Our platform is unique in many ways. With it, we can transact small amounts of carbon credits, for the first time, allowing us to integrate the carbon market with the retail sector. Our platform is truly end-to-end, connecting polluters and consumers around the world.
Using our blockchain-based platform, carbon credits will be managed throughout their entire lifecycle. It will offer transparency, traceability, and monitoring at every step. While it will of course sit alongside the structural improvements that businesses are making to lower their emissions, it offers the critical acceleration in activity and funding for emission reduction projects, driving the changes necessary for sustainable global development.
Our immediate focus is the integration of the Xels platform with retailers around the world,
as this is the fastest moving and most scalable market. When a consumer buys a product like a shoe at a retailer, our platform can calculate its carbon footprint. When the payment is made, an offset with 22kg of carbon credits, representing 110% of the emissions, is used to make the purchase climate positive. The user experience is seamless and shortly after the purchase a notification is sent to the optional mobile app, if the user chooses to register for this service
A logical second target market is made up of corporate and government entities who want to offset their own carbon emissions, as for example to satisfy the legal obligations under Article 6 of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. When a corporation or government decides to offset its carbon emissions using the Xels platform, our Footprint engine calculates the carbon footprint and selects the best carbon credits using an array of criteria. Once a transaction is made, a certificate is issued as verification for the offset.
The fourth target market is crucial for the token economics, as the arbitrage opportunity provided by the trading of carbon credits on the xels platform by large corporations will ensure that the value on secondary markets will stay above the carbon rate, the exchange rate we fix internally at Xels against the global carbon market value.
A trader can quickly and conveniently trade carbon credits on the platform by converting
Tokens. Each token represents part of a carbon credit. It is possible to select the emission reductions project the carbon credit originated from and using the blockchain integration, a trader can view all of its lifecycle details. tokens can either be allocated to a trader’s account on the platform or the underlying carbon credit delivered to a trader’s registry account outside Xels. The trader has full ownership of tokens and which he can trade with other participants on secondary markets. In most cases, a trader is ultimately selling the purchased carbon credits to a corporate or government entity that wants to use them to offset their carbon emissions, as for example to satisfy requirements under Article 6 of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement.
Takeshi Nojima:Further, we identify key challenges to implementation of a blockchain ETS, as well as areas of future work required to enable a fully-decentralised blockchain ETS. On top of launching this Carbon trade platform we are looking to extend this to developing a platform for personal carbon rationing.
Carbon rationing, as a means of reducing CO2 emissions to contain climate change, could take any of several forms. One of them, personal carbon trading, is the generic term for a number of proposed emissions trading schemes under which emissions credits would be allocated to adult inpiduals on a (broadly) equal per capita basis, within national carbon budgets. Inpiduals then surrender these credits when buying fuel or electricity. Inpiduals wanting or needing to emit at a level above that permitted by their initial allocation would be able to purchase additional credits from those using less, creating a profit for those inpiduals who emit at a level below that permitted by their initial allocation.
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