Hi all, thanks so much for all your support and engagement in the forum as well as 1:1 conversations. We're excited to see this proposal pass consensus check and for the opportunity to work more closely with the Uniswap community on the future of ReFi.

We're currently working with Uniswap Labs to define a standard approach for informing the Uniswap community on cross-chain governance. We want to make sure we're following a well laid out process that ensures a strong and continued collaboration between us and the Uniswap community. Once these details are finalized, we'll plan to move forward and make a formal on chain governance proposal.

More to come soon and look forward to continuing this journey with you all.

Also, several climate experts in the Celo ecosystem including the Climate Collective had some additional thoughts they wanted to add to the conversation above but looks like it was flagged as spam for some reason. Sharing again here for visibility:

"Thank you for the thoughtful writeup - I couldn’t agree more and we’re happy to support the Uniswap community in the way they feel is best to push forward, whether that’s part of this specific proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on Celo or continued collaboration separately. Let me share our thinking around natural capital backed assets

We believe that bringing natural capital on-chain can have a massive impact because it provides for the possibility to link DeFi innovation with the protection and preservation of natural resources. This can generate incremental and continuous capital flow to project developers and environmental service providers and can have a lasting and substantial environmental impact.

But - as you pointed out - this impact depends critically on the premise that the capital flow towards the tokenized asset translates into tangible impact in the real world. And we should not be naive here. Tokenized natural capital can only be an abstraction layer, a representation of past, ongoing or future activity in the real world. So the key challenge is to make sure that activity on the abstraction layer translates into real world impact.

To clarify the abstraction layer with respect to comments in this thread: the Celo Reserve requires governance for initial asset allocation (for eg. 0.5% MCO2), but the subsequent “rebalancing” with Uniswap will maintain this percentage allocation as the Reserve expands/contracts in line with demand for stablecoins, and would not require further governance from the Celo community.

We believe that careful due diligence in the asset selection will be key in this process, which is why we are currently working with a team of economists, lawyers, engineers and ESG experts at cLabs and the broader Climate Collective community on guidance and processes for asset screening and onboarding. We believe that the screening process should cover four key areas (finance, legal, technical, and environmental impact) and we hope by leveraging expert knowledge in the broader Celo ecosystem we can provide for the necessary informational transparency that is required to make meaningful asset selection decisions that generate a lasting impact.

And we fully agree that generating real world impact should be the driving force. The literature on theory of change may serve as a useful guiding principle here as it lays out a testable, empirical ‘reality check’ at its core:

• Plausibility: How does adding the asset to the reserve contribute towards achieving the desired outcome?
• Feasibility: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, is everything in place to achieve the desired outcome?
• Testability: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, are there clear metrics in place that measure the reserves contribution to the desired outcome?

The voluntary carbon market was the natural first step. While it is not perfect, it allowed us to rely on established verification and screening mechanisms through trusted registries (e.g. by purchasing bridged Verra credits). For future assets, verification standards may not be available. At some point, third-party verification may no longer be necessary (imagine e.g. high-definition satellite image or drone footage data + other sensor sampling data reported on-chain through oracles). In other cases, verification might involve onsite visits by local experts. It will be difficult to define one-solution-fits-all criteria but what we hope to achieve is to raise the awareness for proper screening and to provide the necessary information to our communities to make informed decisions. And we of course welcome any input that you or other expert members of the Uniswap community may have in this direction.

Regarding measuring and addressing the environmental impacts of Uniswap itself: we fully support this initiative if it’s something the Uniswap community wishes to see. To this end we would be happy to share methodologies used at Celo, as well as expertise from across the ecosystem including Offsetra’s Carbon.FYI, Microsoft’s Green Software Engineering, and SouthPole’s Climate Neutral product label. As mentioned in the discussion, this would require holistic research into the known-unknowns pertaining to upstream, downstream, and embodied processes during the initial scoping and feasibility phase."

The point of funding the study would be to first figure out how to best go about measuring Uniswap’s impact relative to all other ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ impacts (ethereum, personal electricity usage of users visiting app.uniswap.org, the emissions from Uniswap Labs corporate activity, etc). An essential part of nearly all environmental assessment work is to conduct this initial scoping and feasibility phase, which answers your question about what is and isn’t material. In economic systems that are defined by their interconnectedness before isolation, a concept the environmental sector uses to wrangle this is 'scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.' Although I have my own hunches about where the line should be drawn (see below), it’s important to not make pursuing this research contingent upon me having a tidy answer to all these questions beforehand. That’s why we’d be funding the research in the first place.

In the (in my opinion, unlikely) scenario that the research quickly found that it was entirely unfeasible to adequately research the emissions of Uniswap relative to that of Ethereum, then the rest of the earmarked funds would be reallocated to their original purpose as liquidity mining incentives.

My own hunch for scope is that this research would first peer-review the preexisting estimates of Eth PoW assessments, figure out whether or not Uniswap V2/V3 contract’s share of gas consumption (somewhere on the order of 5-10% of the network total) is proportional with total electricity consumption and/or total emissions estimates from preexisting research, and then piece together all the other auxiliary inputs and outputs for what is needed to make Uniswap function economically.

The research would ideally leave us with both best-case and worst-care scenarios for Uniswap’s share of emissions from Eth PoW and other sources. Even in the best-case scenario, with as narrow of a scope as possible, we can all agree that Uniswap is responsible for something, right? It seems like an easy win to have a qualified research team help us at least estimate this minimum impact. Just because it might not be a neat process of determining this beforehand, doesn’t mean that we shouldn't pursue this work. Especially considering that it's being funded by Celo.

Thank you for the thoughtful writeup - I couldn’t agree more and we’re happy to support the Uniswap community in the way they feel is best to push forward, whether that’s part of this specific proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on Celo or continued collaboration separately. Let me share our thinking around natural capital backed assets

We believe that bringing natural capital on-chain can have a massive impact because it provides for the possibility to link DeFi innovation with the protection and preservation of natural resources. This can generate incremental and continuous capital flow to project developers and environmental service providers and can have a lasting and substantial environmental impact.

But - as you pointed out - this impact depends critically on the premise that the capital flow towards the tokenized asset translates into tangible impact in the real world. And we should not be naive here. Tokenized natural capital can only be an abstraction layer, a representation of past, ongoing or future activity in the real world. So the key challenge is to make sure that activity on the abstraction layer translates into real world impact.

To clarify the abstraction layer with respect to comments in this thread: the Celo Reserve requires governance for initial asset allocation (for eg. 0.5% MCO2), but the subsequent “rebalancing” with Uniswap will maintain this percentage allocation as the Reserve expands/contracts in line with demand for stablecoins, and would not require further governance from the Celo community.

We believe that careful due diligence in the asset selection will be key in this process, which is why we are currently working with a team of economists, lawyers, engineers and ESG experts at cLabs and the broader Climate Collective community on guidance and processes for asset screening and onboarding. We believe that the screening process should cover four key areas (finance, legal, technical, and environmental impact) and we hope by leveraging expert knowledge in the broader Celo ecosystem we can provide for the necessary informational transparency that is required to make meaningful asset selection decisions that generate a lasting impact.

And we fully agree that generating real world impact should be the driving force. The literature on theory of change may serve as a useful guiding principle here as it lays out a testable, empirical ‘reality check’ at its core:

• Plausibility: How does adding the asset to the reserve contribute towards achieving the desired outcome?
• Feasibility: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, is everything in place to achieve the desired outcome?
• Testability: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, are there clear metrics in place that measure the reserves contribution to the desired outcome?

The voluntary carbon market was the natural first step. While it is not perfect, it allowed us to rely on established verification and screening mechanisms through trusted registries (e.g. by purchasing bridged Verra credits). For future assets, verification standards may not be available. At some point, third-party verification may no longer be necessary (imagine e.g. high-definition satellite image or drone footage data + other sensor sampling data reported on-chain through oracles). In other cases, verification might involve onsite visits by local experts. It will be difficult to define one-solution-fits-all criteria but what we hope to achieve is to raise the awareness for proper screening and to provide the necessary information to our communities to make informed decisions. And we of course welcome any input that you or other expert members of the Uniswap community may have in this direction.

Regarding measuring and addressing the environmental impacts of Uniswap itself: we fully support this initiative if it’s something the Uniswap community wishes to see. To this end we would be happy to share methodologies used at Celo, as well as expertise from across the ecosystem including Offsetra’s Carbon.FYI, Microsoft’s Green Software Engineering, and SouthPole’s Climate Neutral product label. As mentioned in the discussion, this would require holistic research into the known-unknowns pertaining to upstream, downstream, and embodied processes during the initial scoping and feasibility phase.

From Nirvaan (Program Manager, Climate Collective) & Slobodan (Partner, cLabs)

Hi all, thanks so much for all your support and engagement in the forum as well as 1:1 conversations. We're excited to see this proposal pass consensus check and for the opportunity to work more closely with the Uniswap community on the future of ReFi.

We're currently working with Uniswap Labs to define a standard approach for informing the Uniswap community on cross-chain governance. We want to make sure we're following a well laid out process that ensures a strong and continued collaboration between us and the Uniswap community. Once these details are finalized, we'll plan to move forward and make a formal on chain governance proposal.

More to come soon and look forward to continuing this journey with you all.

Also, several climate experts in the Celo ecosystem including the Climate Collective had some additional thoughts they wanted to add to the conversation above but looks like it was flagged as spam for some reason. Sharing again here for visibility:

"Thank you for the thoughtful writeup - I couldn’t agree more and we’re happy to support the Uniswap community in the way they feel is best to push forward, whether that’s part of this specific proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on Celo or continued collaboration separately. Let me share our thinking around natural capital backed assets

We believe that bringing natural capital on-chain can have a massive impact because it provides for the possibility to link DeFi innovation with the protection and preservation of natural resources. This can generate incremental and continuous capital flow to project developers and environmental service providers and can have a lasting and substantial environmental impact.

But - as you pointed out - this impact depends critically on the premise that the capital flow towards the tokenized asset translates into tangible impact in the real world. And we should not be naive here. Tokenized natural capital can only be an abstraction layer, a representation of past, ongoing or future activity in the real world. So the key challenge is to make sure that activity on the abstraction layer translates into real world impact.

To clarify the abstraction layer with respect to comments in this thread: the Celo Reserve requires governance for initial asset allocation (for eg. 0.5% MCO2), but the subsequent “rebalancing” with Uniswap will maintain this percentage allocation as the Reserve expands/contracts in line with demand for stablecoins, and would not require further governance from the Celo community.

We believe that careful due diligence in the asset selection will be key in this process, which is why we are currently working with a team of economists, lawyers, engineers and ESG experts at cLabs and the broader Climate Collective community on guidance and processes for asset screening and onboarding. We believe that the screening process should cover four key areas (finance, legal, technical, and environmental impact) and we hope by leveraging expert knowledge in the broader Celo ecosystem we can provide for the necessary informational transparency that is required to make meaningful asset selection decisions that generate a lasting impact.

And we fully agree that generating real world impact should be the driving force. The literature on theory of change may serve as a useful guiding principle here as it lays out a testable, empirical ‘reality check’ at its core:

• Plausibility: How does adding the asset to the reserve contribute towards achieving the desired outcome?
• Feasibility: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, is everything in place to achieve the desired outcome?
• Testability: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, are there clear metrics in place that measure the reserves contribution to the desired outcome?

The voluntary carbon market was the natural first step. While it is not perfect, it allowed us to rely on established verification and screening mechanisms through trusted registries (e.g. by purchasing bridged Verra credits). For future assets, verification standards may not be available. At some point, third-party verification may no longer be necessary (imagine e.g. high-definition satellite image or drone footage data + other sensor sampling data reported on-chain through oracles). In other cases, verification might involve onsite visits by local experts. It will be difficult to define one-solution-fits-all criteria but what we hope to achieve is to raise the awareness for proper screening and to provide the necessary information to our communities to make informed decisions. And we of course welcome any input that you or other expert members of the Uniswap community may have in this direction.

Regarding measuring and addressing the environmental impacts of Uniswap itself: we fully support this initiative if it’s something the Uniswap community wishes to see. To this end we would be happy to share methodologies used at Celo, as well as expertise from across the ecosystem including Offsetra’s Carbon.FYI, Microsoft’s Green Software Engineering, and SouthPole’s Climate Neutral product label. As mentioned in the discussion, this would require holistic research into the known-unknowns pertaining to upstream, downstream, and embodied processes during the initial scoping and feasibility phase."

The point of funding the study would be to first figure out how to best go about measuring Uniswap’s impact relative to all other ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ impacts (ethereum, personal electricity usage of users visiting app.uniswap.org, the emissions from Uniswap Labs corporate activity, etc). An essential part of nearly all environmental assessment work is to conduct this initial scoping and feasibility phase, which answers your question about what is and isn’t material. In economic systems that are defined by their interconnectedness before isolation, a concept the environmental sector uses to wrangle this is 'scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.' Although I have my own hunches about where the line should be drawn (see below), it’s important to not make pursuing this research contingent upon me having a tidy answer to all these questions beforehand. That’s why we’d be funding the research in the first place.

In the (in my opinion, unlikely) scenario that the research quickly found that it was entirely unfeasible to adequately research the emissions of Uniswap relative to that of Ethereum, then the rest of the earmarked funds would be reallocated to their original purpose as liquidity mining incentives.

My own hunch for scope is that this research would first peer-review the preexisting estimates of Eth PoW assessments, figure out whether or not Uniswap V2/V3 contract’s share of gas consumption (somewhere on the order of 5-10% of the network total) is proportional with total electricity consumption and/or total emissions estimates from preexisting research, and then piece together all the other auxiliary inputs and outputs for what is needed to make Uniswap function economically.

The research would ideally leave us with both best-case and worst-care scenarios for Uniswap’s share of emissions from Eth PoW and other sources. Even in the best-case scenario, with as narrow of a scope as possible, we can all agree that Uniswap is responsible for something, right? It seems like an easy win to have a qualified research team help us at least estimate this minimum impact. Just because it might not be a neat process of determining this beforehand, doesn’t mean that we shouldn't pursue this work. Especially considering that it's being funded by Celo.

Thank you for the thoughtful writeup - I couldn’t agree more and we’re happy to support the Uniswap community in the way they feel is best to push forward, whether that’s part of this specific proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on Celo or continued collaboration separately. Let me share our thinking around natural capital backed assets

We believe that bringing natural capital on-chain can have a massive impact because it provides for the possibility to link DeFi innovation with the protection and preservation of natural resources. This can generate incremental and continuous capital flow to project developers and environmental service providers and can have a lasting and substantial environmental impact.

But - as you pointed out - this impact depends critically on the premise that the capital flow towards the tokenized asset translates into tangible impact in the real world. And we should not be naive here. Tokenized natural capital can only be an abstraction layer, a representation of past, ongoing or future activity in the real world. So the key challenge is to make sure that activity on the abstraction layer translates into real world impact.

To clarify the abstraction layer with respect to comments in this thread: the Celo Reserve requires governance for initial asset allocation (for eg. 0.5% MCO2), but the subsequent “rebalancing” with Uniswap will maintain this percentage allocation as the Reserve expands/contracts in line with demand for stablecoins, and would not require further governance from the Celo community.

We believe that careful due diligence in the asset selection will be key in this process, which is why we are currently working with a team of economists, lawyers, engineers and ESG experts at cLabs and the broader Climate Collective community on guidance and processes for asset screening and onboarding. We believe that the screening process should cover four key areas (finance, legal, technical, and environmental impact) and we hope by leveraging expert knowledge in the broader Celo ecosystem we can provide for the necessary informational transparency that is required to make meaningful asset selection decisions that generate a lasting impact.

And we fully agree that generating real world impact should be the driving force. The literature on theory of change may serve as a useful guiding principle here as it lays out a testable, empirical ‘reality check’ at its core:

• Plausibility: How does adding the asset to the reserve contribute towards achieving the desired outcome?
• Feasibility: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, is everything in place to achieve the desired outcome?
• Testability: Assuming that the asset is included in the reserve, are there clear metrics in place that measure the reserves contribution to the desired outcome?

The voluntary carbon market was the natural first step. While it is not perfect, it allowed us to rely on established verification and screening mechanisms through trusted registries (e.g. by purchasing bridged Verra credits). For future assets, verification standards may not be available. At some point, third-party verification may no longer be necessary (imagine e.g. high-definition satellite image or drone footage data + other sensor sampling data reported on-chain through oracles). In other cases, verification might involve onsite visits by local experts. It will be difficult to define one-solution-fits-all criteria but what we hope to achieve is to raise the awareness for proper screening and to provide the necessary information to our communities to make informed decisions. And we of course welcome any input that you or other expert members of the Uniswap community may have in this direction.

Regarding measuring and addressing the environmental impacts of Uniswap itself: we fully support this initiative if it’s something the Uniswap community wishes to see. To this end we would be happy to share methodologies used at Celo, as well as expertise from across the ecosystem including Offsetra’s Carbon.FYI, Microsoft’s Green Software Engineering, and SouthPole’s Climate Neutral product label. As mentioned in the discussion, this would require holistic research into the known-unknowns pertaining to upstream, downstream, and embodied processes during the initial scoping and feasibility phase.

From Nirvaan (Program Manager, Climate Collective) & Slobodan (Partner, cLabs)

This is Bryan Lehrer responding on behalf of Other Internet.

We are generally supportive of this proposal but want to provide some critical commentary and clarification for the Uniswap community. @tentonfinance in the temperature check thread commented that the green “incentives” from Celo are a “cherry on top,” but I would urge us to consider this proposal in such as way that frames the environmental benefits and scaling of ‘ReFi’ as a central component. I don’t say this for altruistic reasons (although I do have opinions here, see below). I say this because beyond publicity and the $10M in other liquidity incentives which will not necessarily accrue to everyone in the Uniswap community evenly, the main heft of this proposal is creating a mechanism to increase the supply of ‘nature backed assets’ in DeFi. In supporting this proposal we are directly supporting the creations of these assets and the provisioning of their liquidity. As such we should be more aware of what these assets actually are, and what their underlying utility is.

Given this, and given that most in the Uniswap community are likely not experts on the particulars of the climate / ecological regeneration solutions that ReFi assets back, I figured it would be helpful to provide a layman’s translation of what’s on the table. (I have a climate background).

TLDR; I think that the proposal Celo has put forward is strong, and it opens up a question of how Uniswap is addressing its own environmental impacts. We (Uniswap governance delegates) should leverage our control over access to an additional use license to get more out of this proposal, and to help catalyze work into improving the negatives impacts of Uniswap when it comes to climate change.

I’ll start by translating each of the proposal’s bullet points into simpler terms, just so we’re all clear what’s being discussed.

Increase Uniswap’s influence through $10M in financial incentives to Uniswap users, as well as additional grant funding provided by the Celo Foundation to utilize Uniswap as a financial building block

Celo is offering us $10M of “financial incentives.” I spoke with Nikhil of Celo who confirmed that these incentives are liquidity mining incentives for green asset liquidity pools/CELO liquidity pools that are accessed through V3, where additional LP incentives are in the form of $CELO. And yes, a third of these incentives will be placed in a multisig right after passing on the proposal, so it appears that we can have more confidence in their delivery than we can with what has happened with Polygon.

Create green asset liquidity pools with natural capital backed assets such as tokenized carbon credits (e.g. MCO2 and TCO2) and future nature backed assets issued on Celo like land and forests

There’s a lot to unpack here, given the variable nature and credibility of ‘nature backed assets’ now and in the near-to-mid future.

The long story short is that nature backed assets can represent carbon-credits, or any other service being provided to either protect or grow natural capital. I think the general momentum of this space, which has exploded in the last year, is positive, although I have concerns about the scientific foundations that many of these assets sit on. One simple illustration of this is that many carbon coins are tokenized units of Verra offsets, which despite being common in the voluntary carbon offset markets, are often based on forest management projects, which in some scenarios have been proven to be non-additional carbon sequestration efforts. To quote one of the largest managers of offsets in the US in an article recently published in Bloomberg, “There’s a distinct possibility that a great deal of existing carbon offsets are effectively fake.”

Back in the Celo context, the offsets that are currently used to back up their Reserve are MCO2 tokens, representing tons of avoided carbon from several Verra-verified forestry projects around the Amazon rainforest, all managed by a broker called Moss. These specific assets appear by my initial analysis to be legitimate, but can the same be said of all future nature based assets that we would be creating markets for?

Since the way proponents of ‘ReFi’ talk about the future of that niche as more or less an interlinked component of DeFi, I worry that not enough critical analysis is being applied towards the underlying quality of nature backed assets. Obviously as a decentralized protocol, no single entity like Uniswap Labs has control over which assets are listed on V3. Still, as actors interested in the overall health of DeFi, there is an obvious need for us to track the health of its underlying assets.

I don’t think that the expansion of nature backed assets is problematic in the context of this license deal. Matter of fact I think that Celo’s increased support of nature backed assets is a positive development that we should support. I do think that in the scenario that this license deal grows Uniswap’s involvement in the provisioning of liquidity of these type assets, we should take time to be aware of what they are actually backing.

Use Uniswap as a decentralized mechanism to rebalance the Celo Reserve with nature backed assets rather than relying on centralized exchanges

See above. I am in support of Celo increasing their supply of nature backed assets held in the Reserve.

It’s important to note that Celo needs governance approval for this rebalancing, and so the extent (up to 40%) of this remains uncertain. I think this is something for us to check back in on at a later date.

Foster pathways for future green use cases on Uniswap

See above. I think this would be a positive development but it should come with an increased capacity to understand the underlying health/quality of these assets.

A proposal amendment

This proposal is a good deal for Uniswap, as proven by the near unanimously passed Temperature Check (and likely soon to be, Consensus Check). However, I think that there is one area where we can ask for a slightly better terms from Celo — that is, to use this proposal as a way to directly confront Uniswap’s own impact on climate change.

Even considering liquidity incentives as an ulterior motive, I find it odd that Uniswap governance would be so strongly in support of nature backed assets considering that we’ve collectively done very little when it comes to understanding our own protocol’s effect on the environment.

While it is difficult to assign emissions responsibility within a decentralized computational network like Ethereum, saying that Uniswap, even in its most headless form, is not liable for any climate impact, is simply incorrect and irresponsible. Even in the future scenario where a transition to PoS eliminates the vast majority of Ethereum emissions, to date Uniswap has facilitated potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of historical CO2 emissions. Just because there is no centralized corporate sustainability team to investigate this doesn’t mean the responsibility goes away.

What Other Internet proposes as an amendment to this proposal is to divert 1% of the $10M in liquidity incentives put up by Celo to go towards funding an investigation into Uniswap protocol’s climate impact, followed by a (potentially partial) mitigation phase.

These funds would otherwise be put towards liquidity mining, of which the marginal impact for Uniswap from 9.9M —> 10M is very insignificant. On the other hand, the marginal impact of $0 —> $100k spent towards proving to regulators and users that we take responsibility for our negative externalities is much higher.

Earmarked research funds can be stored in the same multisig as the liquidity incentives, and if not fully deployed, or spent by a given date, can be reverted back to additional liquidity incentives.

As someone with a climate consulting background I would be happy to help manage the dispersion towards a research team that would conduct only the most scientifically rigorous investigation.

There are potentially several other ways that Uniswap governance can go about exploring the protocol’s climate impact and doing something about it, but I see this as a low-cost, high-upside way for us to get the ball rolling on this work.

I’ve already talked with Celo representatives and they would be open to this amendment of their proposal, so all we would need is continued approval from governance.

This is Bryan Lehrer responding on behalf of Other Internet.

We are generally supportive of this proposal but want to provide some critical commentary and clarification for the Uniswap community. @tentonfinance in the temperature check thread commented that the green “incentives” from Celo are a “cherry on top,” but I would urge us to consider this proposal in such as way that frames the environmental benefits and scaling of ‘ReFi’ as a central component. I don’t say this for altruistic reasons (although I do have opinions here, see below). I say this because beyond publicity and the $10M in other liquidity incentives which will not necessarily accrue to everyone in the Uniswap community evenly, the main heft of this proposal is creating a mechanism to increase the supply of ‘nature backed assets’ in DeFi. In supporting this proposal we are directly supporting the creations of these assets and the provisioning of their liquidity. As such we should be more aware of what these assets actually are, and what their underlying utility is.

Given this, and given that most in the Uniswap community are likely not experts on the particulars of the climate / ecological regeneration solutions that ReFi assets back, I figured it would be helpful to provide a layman’s translation of what’s on the table. (I have a climate background).

TLDR; I think that the proposal Celo has put forward is strong, and it opens up a question of how Uniswap is addressing its own environmental impacts. We (Uniswap governance delegates) should leverage our control over access to an additional use license to get more out of this proposal, and to help catalyze work into improving the negatives impacts of Uniswap when it comes to climate change.

I’ll start by translating each of the proposal’s bullet points into simpler terms, just so we’re all clear what’s being discussed.

Increase Uniswap’s influence through $10M in financial incentives to Uniswap users, as well as additional grant funding provided by the Celo Foundation to utilize Uniswap as a financial building block

Celo is offering us $10M of “financial incentives.” I spoke with Nikhil of Celo who confirmed that these incentives are liquidity mining incentives for green asset liquidity pools/CELO liquidity pools that are accessed through V3, where additional LP incentives are in the form of $CELO. And yes, a third of these incentives will be placed in a multisig right after passing on the proposal, so it appears that we can have more confidence in their delivery than we can with what has happened with Polygon.

Create green asset liquidity pools with natural capital backed assets such as tokenized carbon credits (e.g. MCO2 and TCO2) and future nature backed assets issued on Celo like land and forests

There’s a lot to unpack here, given the variable nature and credibility of ‘nature backed assets’ now and in the near-to-mid future.

The long story short is that nature backed assets can represent carbon-credits, or any other service being provided to either protect or grow natural capital. I think the general momentum of this space, which has exploded in the last year, is positive, although I have concerns about the scientific foundations that many of these assets sit on. One simple illustration of this is that many carbon coins are tokenized units of Verra offsets, which despite being common in the voluntary carbon offset markets, are often based on forest management projects, which in some scenarios have been proven to be non-additional carbon sequestration efforts. To quote one of the largest managers of offsets in the US in an article recently published in Bloomberg, “There’s a distinct possibility that a great deal of existing carbon offsets are effectively fake.”

Back in the Celo context, the offsets that are currently used to back up their Reserve are MCO2 tokens, representing tons of avoided carbon from several Verra-verified forestry projects around the Amazon rainforest, all managed by a broker called Moss. These specific assets appear by my initial analysis to be legitimate, but can the same be said of all future nature based assets that we would be creating markets for?

Since the way proponents of ‘ReFi’ talk about the future of that niche as more or less an interlinked component of DeFi, I worry that not enough critical analysis is being applied towards the underlying quality of nature backed assets. Obviously as a decentralized protocol, no single entity like Uniswap Labs has control over which assets are listed on V3. Still, as actors interested in the overall health of DeFi, there is an obvious need for us to track the health of its underlying assets.

I don’t think that the expansion of nature backed assets is problematic in the context of this license deal. Matter of fact I think that Celo’s increased support of nature backed assets is a positive development that we should support. I do think that in the scenario that this license deal grows Uniswap’s involvement in the provisioning of liquidity of these type assets, we should take time to be aware of what they are actually backing.

Use Uniswap as a decentralized mechanism to rebalance the Celo Reserve with nature backed assets rather than relying on centralized exchanges

See above. I am in support of Celo increasing their supply of nature backed assets held in the Reserve.

It’s important to note that Celo needs governance approval for this rebalancing, and so the extent (up to 40%) of this remains uncertain. I think this is something for us to check back in on at a later date.

Foster pathways for future green use cases on Uniswap

See above. I think this would be a positive development but it should come with an increased capacity to understand the underlying health/quality of these assets.

A proposal amendment

This proposal is a good deal for Uniswap, as proven by the near unanimously passed Temperature Check (and likely soon to be, Consensus Check). However, I think that there is one area where we can ask for a slightly better terms from Celo — that is, to use this proposal as a way to directly confront Uniswap’s own impact on climate change.

Even considering liquidity incentives as an ulterior motive, I find it odd that Uniswap governance would be so strongly in support of nature backed assets considering that we’ve collectively done very little when it comes to understanding our own protocol’s effect on the environment.

While it is difficult to assign emissions responsibility within a decentralized computational network like Ethereum, saying that Uniswap, even in its most headless form, is not liable for any climate impact, is simply incorrect and irresponsible. Even in the future scenario where a transition to PoS eliminates the vast majority of Ethereum emissions, to date Uniswap has facilitated potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of historical CO2 emissions. Just because there is no centralized corporate sustainability team to investigate this doesn’t mean the responsibility goes away.

What Other Internet proposes as an amendment to this proposal is to divert 1% of the $10M in liquidity incentives put up by Celo to go towards funding an investigation into Uniswap protocol’s climate impact, followed by a (potentially partial) mitigation phase.

These funds would otherwise be put towards liquidity mining, of which the marginal impact for Uniswap from 9.9M —> 10M is very insignificant. On the other hand, the marginal impact of $0 —> $100k spent towards proving to regulators and users that we take responsibility for our negative externalities is much higher.

Earmarked research funds can be stored in the same multisig as the liquidity incentives, and if not fully deployed, or spent by a given date, can be reverted back to additional liquidity incentives.

As someone with a climate consulting background I would be happy to help manage the dispersion towards a research team that would conduct only the most scientifically rigorous investigation.

There are potentially several other ways that Uniswap governance can go about exploring the protocol’s climate impact and doing something about it, but I see this as a low-cost, high-upside way for us to get the ball rolling on this work.

I’ve already talked with Celo representatives and they would be open to this amendment of their proposal, so all we would need is continued approval from governance.

How do you envision quantifying the eniviromental impact of Uniswap seperate from Ethereum?

What variables are you taking in to account?

The data is out there for Ethereum PoW. Uniswap isolated from the PoW activity becomes questionable on real world data (do we take into account the electrical usage the personal computer of the swap user, is the user eating and creating a waste product while making a swap etc.)

I like the question you are asking I do wonder if it is a feasible investigation. I am against the amendment unless Other Internet can state more clearly the enviromental impact variables that would be looked at with the $100k study.

How do you envision quantifying the eniviromental impact of Uniswap seperate from Ethereum?

What variables are you taking in to account?

The data is out there for Ethereum PoW. Uniswap isolated from the PoW activity becomes questionable on real world data (do we take into account the electrical usage the personal computer of the swap user, is the user eating and creating a waste product while making a swap etc.)

I like the question you are asking I do wonder if it is a feasible investigation. I am against the amendment unless Other Internet can state more clearly the enviromental impact variables that would be looked at with the $100k study.