Atmospheric carbon has at little regard for international borders, but neither do cryptocurrencies. This can be a source of strength for both markets.
Business model
Our business model is built on other successful economic models that transact with developing world labor en masse including:
Fair-trade coffee...
Paying rural producers a standardized “fair trade” price for specified labor, environmental, and production standards.
Coffee distributors like Starbucks pay smallfarmers in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia a floor price — reducing the risk of free-market capitalism for vulnerable participants, and capturing a large margin from fluctuation-timed trades. In exchange, they derisk market participation for smallholders, provide agriculture supplies and training, and make a large margin as the market fluctuates, simultaneously increasing the quality of the coffee with well-tended microplantations. Fair-trade branded coffee has some economic critiques, but they are public and easy to incorporate in a redesign for a new context.
"The primary way in by which FLO and Fair Trade USA attempt to alleviate poverty and jump-start economic development among coffee growers is a mechanism called a price floor, a limit on how low a price can be charged for a product. As of March 2011, FLO fixed a price floor of $1.40 per pound of green coffee beans. FLO also indexes that floor to the New York Coffee Exchange price, so that when prices rise above $1.40 per pound for commodity, or non-specialty, coffee, the Fair Trade price paid is always at least 20 cents per pound higher than the price for commodity coffee." — Stanford Social Innovation Review, The problem with fair-trade coffee
Uber and other ride-share apps.
Ride-share apps employ autonomous and independent taxi drivers around the globe.
Digital public technology like freely available Google maps can help drive UN SDGs and this is apparent in the rise of ridehailing apps in the developing world like Uber, Lyft, Careem, Grab, Didi. Ride hailings apps have a 30% higher capacity utilization than regular taxis, lowering costs to riders. Consumer surplus is $1.6 for every $1 spent on Uber and both riders and drivers report higher satisfaction. People use them because they are more efficient and research shows the poorest in society are benefitting from that efficiency.
However, ride-hailing apps have legitimate critiques: wage uncertainty, cultural change, complicated earnings calculations, and environmental impact. Some of these critiques can be directly alleviated in our use case because trees grow over a 40-year time-scale, our outcomes are reduced atmospheric CO2, and our payments are very transparent.
"In the case of Mexico, being an Uber driver represents an income opportunity with a very low entrance barrier. It is relatively easy to become a driver, and, even if you do not own a car, you can register as a driver. As a result, Uber is an attractive income opportunity, especially in the light of a very low minimum wage" — Pathways for Prosperity, Ride-sharing platforms in developing nations
Coca Cola distribution network...
CocaCola distribution network. CocaCola is a large multinational company and they have one of the best distribution networks in developing nations.
CocaCola runs innovative manual distribution centers (MDCs) in the developing world . Autonomously owned, inexpensive operations designed to service emerging retail markets more effectively, and efficiently. These centers account for 98% of the distribution in Dar es Salaam and Tanzania. These distributors are first-time business owners and represent a growing middle class.
The model has led to positive business returns and increased sales and market growth in its territories while leading to poverty alleviation and promoting women's economic empowerment.
"The Coca-Cola system uses the full range of distribution methods in Africa. In the most developed, urban parts of the continent, the system uses the more traditional model of supplying large retailers such as grocery stores, hotels, universities, and other institutions using delivery trucks. However, for a large proportion of its retail customers, particularly in East Africa, where they are mostly small neighborhood restaurants or bars, corner stores, and one-person kiosks, the Coca-Cola system has adopted a manual delivery approach working with small-scale distributors to deliver products to small-scale retailers in densely populated urban areas." — Havard Kennedy School, Developing Inclusive Business Models
Like the previous business cases, we rely on the conjunction of autonomous developing-world labor, informed consent, and emerging technologies.
"There is only one way... to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it." — Dale Carnegie
The promise of Web3 is distributed benefits. Innovations like smart contracts, cyptocurrencies, DeFi, and digital ledgers, crowdsource autonomous employment. Web 3 technologies make it possible for the planet's largest global entities to transact fairly and equitably with the smallest and most vulnerable for the mutual benefit of all.
In carbon offset tracking, Web3 enables transactions that could not be done anywhere else. This solves two massive global problems simultaneously:
Regional preservation cannot succeed without the economic empowerment of smallfarmer stakeholders.
Offset tracking must eliminate middlemen while remaining scientifically valid and transparent to all.
Our model
We have an intentionally simple economic model. Our background in chaos and complexity theory has informed our belief that simple interventions are more effective in complex systems (see Chaos theory):
..."the characteristics of a simple intervention: it would have a single implementing organization; a single causal strand; one universal mechanism to explain effects; linear causality with proportional impact; and outcomes that are pre-identified." DeCoste and Puri. Complexity, climate change, and evaluation, 2019
We pay a $5 USD signup fee for each farmer with validation of property ownership directly into their international bank account in their local currency at registration.
If farmers choose to be paid in crypto then they can be paid directly into digital wallets for a 50% reduced transaction fee.
If farmers wish to delegate payee they may do so at signup.
We make monthly micropayments for conserved and reforested land.
We pay a fair-trade market floor price pegged to the low-end global rate for offsets of similar quality, and 25% of any pricing above floor that we receive from offset sales.
We pay incrementally more for biochar addition, Indigenous owners, proof of animal life, forest regrowth, or traditional medicinal plants (see GameFi).
Project staff is 50/50 Savimbo consultants and local landowners. We require farmers to reforest with us to participate in the program but train and employ staff from partnering autonomous entities to procure seedlings, monitor conservation zones, and replant. Farmers are paid at half staff-rate as training days but may find continued work as consultants once their farm is planted.
Organization
The Savimbo Project is led by Todreamalife, a 300-person consulting group of high-IQ "delinquent-savants" who develop high-tech to solve hard scientific and social problems. Its sister nonprofit, Empulsive Ink subsidizes farmers to participate in the market through literacy programs, technology micro-grants, advocacy, and translation services. It provides Web3 services via autonomous entities in UAE (digital ledger) and Switzerland (token issuance and tokeomics). Finally, the project creates, and partners with autonomous entities managed by DAOs representative of Indigenous, and smallholder collectives managing autonomously-held micropreservation zones (see Partnership).
