AEternals
Play to Protect: Pioneering Gamified Regenerative Finance (ReFi)
Project Overview
Co-founded by Emerge, The Æternals combine 3D generative digital art, interactive gamification, and metamorphic change, with transparent and thoughtfully measured impact objectives through blockchain infrastructure. The project was purposefully crafted as an experimental example of a new impactful asset class and financial instrument which can be used to enhance the nature of self-sovereignty and fund/sustain global social/public goods without reliance on traditional fundraising methods - the underlying value of the NFT comes from a collector’s proof-of-impact toward rainforest protection.
Each NFT features a totally unique combination of sub assets, mimicking the rainforest’s biodiversity. These sub assets begin as seedlings and unbloomed flowers, which is why each NFT contains the code for three different states of lushness. As collectors engage with the cause and the community through a custom game, community events, direct donations, and more - the plot blossoms and grows. Each new layer comes with added benefits. Stop contributing and a collector’s plot will slowly regress back toward its original state. These changes are automatically reflected in their wallet.
An Æternals NFT holder is not a passive holder of an asset post a contribution to global public good; they are now transformed into an active agent of change whose self-determined activity adds value to both their NFT and to the global public good simultaneously beyond the purchase of their Æternals itself.The Æternals is a founding member of the World Economic Forum’s Crypto Sustainability Coalition, a working group dedicated to re-imagining economic technology in line with global climate action needs. By working with our partner Tresorio, The Æternals was able to achieve 100% carbon efficiency by reducing our carbon footprint from an estimated 48 tons down to 6.9 tons, recycling our heat to convert it into hot water, which we donated to social housing units across France. The Æternals will be donating approximately 41,000 five-minute hot showers, which saved an additional 16.88 tons of carbon. By working a 1% royalty for carbon credits into our secondary sale contract, we will quickly become a carbon negative project, leveraging digital innovation to fight climate change.
Our DNA at work
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To discover The Æternals’ Ecoverse, please visit www.aeternals.io.
Compost Wallet
Recycling digital assets to fund impact innovation
Overview
Energy is consumed in three main areas across the tech sector: Data centres, data transmission networks, manufacture and use of devices. Whilst digitisation is often the answer to everything due to the convenience the process brings to our everyday life, we must consider its environmental implications. We generate roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, and data centres already consume about 200 TWh of energy per year (ie. around 0.8% of global electricity use). The amount of energy required by the technology sector is increasing steadily by 8% every year. Furthermore, digital technologies are already responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions, and this is expected to double by 2025.
This is digital waste, the environmental consequence of data-driven infrastructure that gives rise to poor data stewardship. It is also synonymous with data waste:, the long-term effects of storing vast amounts of information in a digital format.
Over the last decade, storage of data — from emails, pictures, video and audio files, has increased exponentially. Much of this data is quickly becoming digital waste, forgotten yet stored. In 2021, Bloomberg found that nearly $41 billion worth of cryptocurrency was moved across Ethereum’s NFT marketplaces and wallets. Hundreds of thousands of collections, featuring millions of digital files are quickly piling up in wallets around the world.
For this reason, Emerge and The MetaBlazers have partnered to create a market to breathe new life into forgotten tokens and NFTs. Collectors looking to support impact projects in Web3 can donate NFTs or tokens to our Compost Wallet. Together, Emerge and MetaBlazers will work with our partners to add new dimensions of benefits to them and then leverage them in secondary markets to raise funds that will directly sponsor causes, groups, and projects looking to experiment with blockchain for their communities, causes, and organisations, in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
Our DNA at Work
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To support Emerge’s Compost Wallet or follow our journey along, please click here.
Digital Energy Experiments
Experimenting at the forefront of digital energy lifecycles
Overview
Energetic efficiency and accessibility is a UN SDG and ESG target of increasing global concern. Current efforts focus primarily on the conversion or conservation of energy sources, as well as the distribution of energy through siloed approaches by fragmented service providers. Examples of this include smart grids or algorithmic energy trading. Globally, investing in artificially intelligent approaches to energy related targets had an estimated market value of US$ 3.82 billion in 2022. AI will play an essential role in the global transition to clean energy.
However, there are many barriers to achieving our collective energy goals. Most approaches are too siloed and fragmented, current power sources are currently not renewable enough and not on track to reach net zero emissions in the foreseeable future, power quality, network reliability, and the financial and operational viability of the new electricity sector are low, we lack resilience and recovery to fault events, highly inductive loads affect power quality, individualised needs for renewable energy assets make them complex to make inclusively available, and there are issues with price volatility and long-term derivative monetisation strategies to accelerate investment returns across the industry.
As it stands today, our desire to build a technology forward future is at odds with our desire and need to meet environmental goals. For this reason, Emerge, and its partner Tresorio, experiment at a visionary forefront for energetic efficiency by creating multi-purpose, multi-outcome micro infrastructure and its corresponding services to power communities and businesses. We rework existing digital infrastructure needs to create regenerative energy models, which lower costs and carbon emissions, whilst simultaneously creating new revenue streams.
Our DNA at Work
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After validating our hypotheses through The Æternals, we are excited to be launching our first full lifecycle pilot deployments in 2023. These pilots are currently focused on Europe, Central America, and the Middle East. Follow us for updates on their progress or contact us directly to learn how our approach can disrupt your own energetic lifecycle.
Tapistrii
Decentralised social media with privacy-first principles
Overview
Tapistrii is a second generation infrastructure for Web3. Our client makes exploring and managing digital assets fun and simple through decentralised social media (DeSo) with privacy-first principles.
Using a custom recommendation engine, Tapistrii gamifies the discovery process for digital collectibles and allows users to meaningfully connect with their favourite creators, collectors, issuers, and communities.
Tapistrii is natively cross-chain, meaning it supports multiple blockchains, and automatically supports all projects on the blockchains it incorporates.Tapistrii is currently launching its beta testing round with 2000 users. Please contact us directly if you are interested in subscribing to the platform.
Our DNA at Work
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To learn more about Tapistrii, watch the project unveiling at The North American Bitcoin Conference in 2022.
Land & Agriculture
A suite of tools and systems for asset and production management
Overview
Exponential technologies, such as artificial intelligence, automation, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, can support land and production management processes in a number of ways. Emerge and our partner Penta have been working on various tools and systems for asset and production management since 2018. This includes:
- Supply Chain Traceability: From tracking of coffee to apples to cacao, we’ve helped improve traceability, transparency, and accountability for our clients in Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Europe.
- Digitised Documentation: We’ve supported efforts to digitise and verify bills of lading and other import/export documents, as well as land ownership documents, international certifications, and more.
- Asset Management: We have created large scale databases for previously unmapped land in Africa. Data includes information on land distribution and ownership, use of land, owner information, land and soil traits, and more.
- Trust Networks: Emerge is proud to be partnering with Medisonal to explore verifiable trust along the supply chains of cannabis-based medicines and wellness products in Europe.
Our DNA at Work
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We will be releasing in-depth case studies on various clients in 2023. Please contact us directly if you are interested in experimenting with your supply chain value dynamics.
Digital Identity Systems
Strategy, design, development, and execution services for pioneering identity systems
Overview
Verifiable proof of identity is the starting point for socio-economic inclusion. However, we must not assume causation between identity and access or benefits. And we must not reduce the complexities of access to social and financial services to something that can be solved entirely or exclusively by technology — even through self-sovereign identity systems. Throughout the course of history, being identifiable and being identified has led to exclusion as often as it has led to inclusion. As we build systems that collect more and more personal data on people or those that create more portable, ubiquitous records of identity, we must be particularly intentional in building unprecedented on- and off- chain levels of trust, protections, and special considerations for those who have rarely, if ever, benefited from documented participation in our society.
Emerge is dedicated to building a more ethical, effective, and impactful approach to digital identity, both legal and functional. Since 2017, our award-winning work in the identity space includes:
- Functional-Based Identity Solutions: Our award-winning work includes the design and development of a labour-based identity system for refugee resettlement, proof-of-impact based loyalty programs for corporate companies, medical lab test result management systems, land titling, and more.
- Identity Solution Diligence: In alignment with our commitment to ethical identity systems, we have supported the Templeton Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme with tools or screening that assess blockchain-based proposals for identity systems.
- Strategic Advisory for Identity Systems: Emerge is a proud advisor on the applicability of exponential technologies to the development of legal and functional identity solutions. We have supported the Templeton Foundation, the City of Austin, the Honduran National Persons’ Registry, the United Nations Development Programme, the National Employment Service of Mexico, and more. We are also currently members of the World Economic Forum’s working group on digital identity.
- Whistleblowing Content Protection Systems: Our approach focuses on the provision of a chain of custody for information and media assets. We created anonymised authentication of digital content at the time of original submission, and subsequent tracking across digital platforms it was shared to, including social media, to increase trust in the integrity of the material. Our initial pilot of this approach was with the 2018 Central American migrant caravan members. Applications extend from flagging and removing fake news and disinformation, to collaborative networks based on shared content, and/or eliminating or encrypting personal information without reducing trust in the material.
- Privacy-Native Health Record Management: Our work included designing a robust software application for key public health stakeholders to effectively track and manage community transmission of COVID-19 to streamline the process of tracking test results from government authorised testing facilities and to support emergency service providers such as 911 to triage incoming requests in a way that maximises the use of limited resources to help as many patients as possible with minimal exposure to COVID. Users are able to interact with the system by SMS, or through a Progressive Web App (PWA) — meaning there’s no need to download anything onto a device and the system functioned with embedded data minimisation policies, as well as auto-deletion of user-owned sensitive data, preserving only key milestones (blockchain transaction metadata) around vaccination or recovery.
Our DNA at Work
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We will be releasing in-depth case studies on various clients in 2023. Please contact us directly if you are interested in our work within digital identity.
