Veritree’s revolutionary solution built on the Cardano blockchain

Veritree

Can we collectively restore natural landscapes and the breadth of ecosystems they encompass?

Can we change the way business impacts the world and watch communities around the world thrive in a more just, more equitable balance?

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Can we strive for transformative change, on a global scale?

Veritree believes so, and they’re proving it.

Founded by Derrick Emsley, Stephen Emsley, David Luba, and Kalen Emsley, Veritree is spearheading what they call: “The Restorative Operating System”.

The Restorative Operating System enables stakeholders to track, record, and share verifiable, and accurate data. Corporate restoration projects are verified, ensuring that their restoration goals are being met while removing the ability to greenwash their claims.

Veritree’s primary goal is to tackle the issue of questionable ownership in the corporate restoration world. Currently, there is little to no transparency in restoration activities leaving avenues for fraud and uncertainty with regards to how much land was restored, and who funded it. For instance, when a company is looking to offset their carbon emissions through restoration work they are required to audit the planting site in order to verify that work is being done on the ground; this is an expensive and unscalable solution. Also how can you be absolutely sure another company isn’t coming to “audit” the same planting site a week after you leave?

Currently, there is a critical lack of scalable solutions for corporate members trying to prove their restoration efforts. This has created an environment of distrust where it is difficult to verify the validity of claims issued by corporate members and planting organizations. Multiple companies could have been sent the same data , a phenomenon known as ‘double counting’. Essentially, it’s when two companies claim the impacts of the same trees. Veritree believes that “blockchain is an absolutely perfect solution for more of a global focus”.

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How the technology works:

Veritree has created “The world’s only purpose built, Nature-Based Solutions monitoring tool connecting tree planters, planting organizations, businesses, and consumers on one secure platform”.

• On-the-ground data collection, aggregation, and management securely tracks and helps efficiently manage Nature-Based Solutions projects.

• Data is stored using Cardano’s blockchain technology and offline encryption, making Veritree one of the most secure data storage platforms.

• Veritree’s system gives partners, their customers, and project funders the transparency needed to have confidence in their impact,bringing them to life through interactive portals.

Key Components:

Cardano’s blockchain Ledger: Harnessing blockchain to mitigate the risk of double counting trees, and to add transparency to project funders. This provides a cloud-based, verifiable procedure for producing carbon credits in the future.

Ground-level data collection & Verification: Pairing work done at the planting site to a digital signature and asset generation on the blockchain, providing a tamper-proof data chain for verification.

Tree token & QR code application: Tokenizing each tree allows a unique tree code or QR code to be generated and distributed to customers, employers, or other stakeholders to showcase their specific impact.

Remote sensing integration: Generating a unique tree token when each tree is planted and linking planting associated planting information and co-benefits ensures no double counting and allows tree tracking through the Veritree platform.

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Cardano Blockchain – An evolution in Trust

Veritree’s solution enables a new level of transparency to be possible. This has led to Veritree partnering with fortune 500 companies like Samsung, and helping offset Cardano’s CO2 emissions with the Initial Tree Offering (ITO).

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Why Veritree chose Cardano

As one of the leads on the ITO, Duncan helped form the partnership between Veritree and The Cardano Foundation. Before joining Veritree he was exploring green finance within the blockchain space, specifically, how blockchain can improve reporting to investors. During this exploration, Duncan met with Veritree and was given a job to help them incorporate his research.

“The Cardano Blockchain uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism which requires much less energy when compared to its counterpart, proof of work. Where Bitcoin and current Ethereum deployment consume a tremendous amount of energy to process transactions. Cardano has optimized their incentive structure to support a different algorithm.” – Duncan Brown

Jeremy Firster, Head of Partnerships and Executive Officer at Cardano Foundation, presented a deck about the Cardano Forest to Veritree during the summer of 2021. Duncan and Jeremy both came to the meeting ultimately presenting to each other the same exact thing.

Duncan shared how “Veritree could tokenize trees, and publish them to Cardano’s blockchain”, and Jeremy came to Veritree saying that “Cardano could tokenize trees”. Duncan says “it was a great meeting of minds”. The two of them had a discussion on how to get the Cardano community, and the entire ecosystem to contribute. This process took about three months before the entire (ITO) was sold out, and the community accomplished the 1 million tree goal.

A key solution for the Cardano Forest was the Veritree token. A collectible NFTree and proof of donation record with future utility. Artwork for the NFTrees was designed by the team at Cardano Trees, demonstrating the first full on-chain evolutive art, living and growing in Cardano’s Blockchain!

Currently, Veritree is exploring how to create a metaverse forest experience, allowing owners of the forest to interact with their trees in a whole new way. It is estimated that the Cardano forest is expected to sequester 334,000 tons of carbon over the next 25 years, calculated using conservative internal metrics which are 3 mangroves to 1 metric ton of carbon sequestered. This achievement will help the Cardano blockchain offset its carbon emissions over the next 20+ years.

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Cardano Initial Tree Offering (ITO)

Veritree makes it simple to incorporate Nature-Based Solutions into any business model, as seen with the Cardano ITO. It was a massive success, raising 1 million ADA to plant 1 million trees in an effort to offset the Cardano blockchain.

Blockchain for Sustainability – 1 Million Trees Planted in Partnership with Veritree

Data from the Climate Neutral Cardano team indicates that to offset the Cardano blockchain for 5 years they have to plant 218,000 trees. With the recent goal of 1 million trees donated by the Cardano community, this means this project alone will potentially offset the blockchain for 20+ years. We also see this with the recent partnership between Samsung and Veritree to plant 2 million trees, helping Samsung offset their emissions. Veritree enables Samsung to report and share live data for their investors, and consumers.

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How Veritree is Sustainable:

Enable sustainable lifestyles through your products and services.

• Embed positive impacts into your product or service making it easy for your customers to live sustainably.

Be a changemaker in the net-zero transition.

• Integrate climate action into your business’ DNA, allowing customers to make climate positive choices.

Prepare to be a trailblazer in a carbon constrained world.

• Invest in verifiable Nature-Based Solutions today to hedge against the future cost of carbon.

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How does Veritree connect with the UN SDGs?

“UN SDGs are essential to our business model, however, reporting on them from an international level is not done in an accurate way. We would like to standardize tree planting data to provide accurate numbers which then can be reported on for SDGs.” – Duncan Brown

This new level of trust between both the planting partners, and corporate businesses will allow for these goals and metrics to be tracked and accounted for. Helping our global society meet the goal of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Veritree aims to plant 1 billion trees by 2030, but they’re not content with just planting trees. According to Duncan, Veritree “doesn’t want to just plant trees. We want to educate people on what that means for local communities, what that means for the regions…how it really will change the world through changing business models and giving back.” – Duncan Brown

To follow and learn more about Veritree:

• https://www.instagram.com/veritreeofficial

• https://twitter.com/veritree_

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