Blockchain ecosystem services
Blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and token sales are all the rage right now. However, as I wrote about a few months ago, the rise of Ethereum with its Turing-complete scripting language and the ability for developers to include state in each block, has paved the way for smart contract development. There are certainly many projects that fall into the gray area and could fit into multiple categories. For the most part, these projects were created with the intention of building a better currency for various use cases and represent either a store of value, medium of exchange, or a unit of account.
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Blockchain ecosystem services
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Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS)
Can blockchain help locals in Africa better protect wildlife? And can it do so with the help of tamper-proof blockchain smart contracts? Daniel Oberhauser from the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford has investigated these questions in a study.
The global South is home to some of the most valuable natural resources on earth. It is therefore key to addressing the pressing environmental challenges of our time.
Payments for ecosystem services PES have recently become more important in environmental policy. PES is an environmental economic tool to incentivize the continued provision of ecosystem services. For example, climate change can be mitigated through carbon offset payments. Payments are designed to halt biodiversity loss and conserve wildlife. However, such payment systems face many challenges in the Global South. Questions like these have been explored in a study by Daniel Oberhauser of the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University.
The following text is an abridged version of his excellent work. The scientist uses a proof-of-concept POC of a blockchain-based system for his study. Namely, for wildlife conservation payments in Namibia. This involves assessing the habitat integrity of an elephant corridor using remote sensing algorithms. These, in turn, trigger notional blockchain smart contract payments to surrounding communities. The application allows for a practical discussion of the potential of blockchain technology in relation to three key aspects of eco-payments:.
The case presented by Oberhauser is an example of linking the digital blockchain sphere with practical challenges of natural resource management in the real world. However, it also shows that blockchain technology is unlikely to provide transformative solutions in areas with complex environmental governance. Human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss present unprecedented challenges to humanity.
In both areas, environmental governance based on conventional command-and-control approaches is losing its grip. As a result, much hope is pinned on market-based governance tools such as payments for ecosystem services PES. The underlying ecosystem services framework, a utilitarian view of nature as a service provider to humanity, is gaining traction in economic and political decision-making, as Roberto Costanza also reported.
Under PES, landowners receive financial incentives to adopt land use practices that provide desired ecosystem services. There is remarkable overlap between the problems cited in the PSE literature and the promises of blockchain enthusiasts.
First, distributed ledgers could be used to register land titles immutably and secure property rights. This is one of the key institutional requirements for PES mentioned in both the environmental-economic approach and the ecological-economic approach.
Ultimately, blockchains could revolutionize governance by decentralizing power. In doing so, they enable the reconfiguration of power structures called for by political ecology critics of PES. The PES program that is the focus of this case study is a performance payment system for wildlife conservation. In southern Africa, nature conservation has evolved from centralized government management to decentralized multi-actor governance including CBNRM, as Muchapondwa and Stage report.
As of , there are 83 registered protected areas. The Namibian CBNRM framework was designed as a biodiversity PES system in which protected areas protect the provision of ecosystem services through conservation and receive benefits in return.
For example, protected areas provide natural environmental and wildlife resources and receive payments from safari tourism and trophy hunting in return. Against a backdrop of growing wildlife populations and increasing human-wildlife conflict, protected areas need better compensation. Wildlife Credits is a payment system that offers protected areas direct payments for wildlife sightings in their area and for habitat conservation, mainly in the form of migration corridors.
Wildlife Credits is currently being prototyped in four Namibian conservation areas. Established in , Sobbe is home to approximately 1, people living in an area of km2. Sobbe has designated a wildlife corridor that crosses two roads and connects the two protected areas. This link is critical for transboundary wildlife migrations as it forms the heart of the Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Conservation Area between Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The conservancy wants to preserve the corridor because members believe it would reduce human-wildlife conflicts. However, agricultural activities are increasingly developing along the roads, slowly encroaching on the corridor.
The payments are in recognition of the important service the Preserve provides to protect large-scale wildlife migrations in the region. The incentive payments for maintaining the corridor are the subject of this study. It consists of three components.
First, an Ethereum backbone consisting of an Ethereum smart contract and two Ethereum accounts. Third, a link based on the Oraclize web service that connects the above components. The backbone of the application is an Ethereum smart contract. The Ethereum blockchain is used because it allows the implementation of arbitrarily complex programs in its blocks.
Google Earth Engine is used for land cover classification. GEE is an open-access, cloud-based remote sensing service from Google. The requests to the API were written in a Python script. The script first specifies relevant geometric objects, including a bounding box of the study area, the outline of an elephant corridor, and a training region for land cover classification.
Second, the script procures remote sensing imagery. Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery of the study area is used. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar provides high-resolution imagery that is independent of daylight, cloud cover, and weather conditions.
The C-band GHz , as provided by Sentinel, is commonly used for remote sensing in agriculture. Bare ground reflects radar waves, while woody vegetation scatters the signal, resulting in a reduced radar echo.
To illustrate the potential and limitations of the POC, it is hypothetically applied to wildlife credit payments for an elephant corridor in the Sobbe Conservancy. The institutional set-up of the payment system in the Conservancy is very simple. Currently, an annual payment is made after the PES buyer manually evaluates satellite imagery of the elephant corridor at the end of the calendar year.
If an increase in agricultural activities in the corridor is detected, payments are reduced or discontinued. Lack of capacity in financial management is a major challenge for institutional development of the CBNRM program, as indicated by several interviewees. The policy guidelines for protected area management state that developing accountability and good governance in protected areas is one of the most important aspects of protected area development and operation.
In practice, however, several interviewees indicated that elite capture of funds and corruption are not uncommon. While most conservancies hold annual general meetings, plans to distribute profits are rarely rigorously enforced.
Administrative costs are often inflated, or profits are raked in by the conservation committee and do not reach members. This has two effects:. The POC presented here has three features that are relevant to benefit distribution.
First, smart contracts can make benefit distribution technically tamper-proof. In the example smart contract, the EOA of the recipient of the PES payment is defined in a constant state variable in the contract code. Once the contract is implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, this address cannot be changed. Therefore, any transaction executed by the remittance function will transfer the predefined amount of Ether only to the specified recipient. While the smart contract contains only one recipient EOA, which here represents the Sobbe Conservancy, it could theoretically contain any number of recipient addresses.
In addition, the transfer function could specify how the payment is distributed among these recipients. For example, it would be possible to divide the payment according to a distribution plan agreed upon by the democratic institutions of the Conservancy.
The smart contract could then serve as an immutable mechanism for distributing benefits, guaranteeing that payments reach their rightful recipients.
The Ethereum blockchain records executed transactions as new blocks on the blockchain. Therefore, there is a perfect record of how benefits were distributed in the past.
Since Ethereum is a public blockchain, this record is technically accessible to everyone. Thus, in theory, there is full transparency about the distribution of benefits. Even if the smart contract were to be abused, for example, if incorrect information about recipient addresses were provided during contract development, there is at least a public record of this that can be used to hold those responsible accountable.
Third, the contract allows for detailed transaction timing. In the proof-of-concept, this is a random time for the execution of a single transaction.
Transactions can be scheduled to recur at predefined intervals or to end after a specified period of time. In this case, the satellite used provides new images of the corridor at bi-weekly intervals, and payments can be adjusted accordingly.
More frequent payments could increase the subjective tangibility and thus the effectiveness of the PES payments. Overall, the precise timing of PES payments is an improvement in benefit distribution because payments cannot be withheld by individuals, and recipients can therefore rely on the payments being delivered on time. While this is tempting in theory, the case study shows that there are several obstacles in practice.
Most importantly, using smart contracts requires technological knowledge. To reap the benefits of immutability and transparency, stakeholders must be able to understand the technology. If they do not, a trusted intermediary is required, which undermines the core concept of blockchain. In the case study presented here, none of the local stakeholders involved had the necessary technological knowledge to verify the code of smart contracts or remote sensing algorithms.
Namely, neither the conservation committee nor individual households, supporting NGOs, or government agencies. About a quarter of the population in the study region is illiterate. Furthermore, the governance of benefit distribution will not change just because a new technology is available.
The smart contract presented could, in theory, safely distribute benefits to the rightful recipients. But it cannot determine who those recipients should be. What is a fair way to distribute benefits is arbitrary and depends on power relations in the local context.
Mapping the blockchain project ecosystem
First there was Nature. Sometimes an Edenic garden, whose fruitfulness we live with in peace and reciprocity; sometimes a vast wilderness to be feared, tamed or worshiped. But always a lively mesh of entities, whose magnificent diversity is now threatened by a single biological species — Homo sapiens. Then came Nature 2.
Blockchain Ecosystem
Skip to search form Skip to main content Skip to account menu You are currently offline. Some features of the site may not work correctly. Yet, parallel ecosystems like cryptocurrencies that substitute products and services of traditional financial institutions emerged. However, literature does not provide a structured overview of the blockchain ecosystem. By analyzing blockchain companies reported in the Crunchbase database, this paper… Expand. View Paper. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert.
TRUSTED AGENTS GLOBALLY
Blockchain-as-a-service BaaS is the third-party creation and management of cloud-based networks for companies in the business of building blockchain applications. These third-party services are a relatively new development in the growing field of blockchain technology. The application of blockchain technology has moved well beyond its best-known use in cryptocurrency transactions and has broadened to address secure transactions of all kinds. As a result, there is a demand for hosting services.
Blockchain Ecosystem Payments
Members don't have to put trust in a central authority. No single point of failure. Less censorship. Each sector leverages its own digital currency that acts like a bond backed by tokenized instruments yielding an excess return. Leveraging an abundance in design strategy, the Ecosystem elements include technologies that act as enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to a new kind of Ecosystem that empowers the Human Identity to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent and shared value realm.
Your Gateway into Blockchain
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Select your location Close country language switcher. Blockchains will do for networks of enterprises and business ecosystems what enterprise resource planning ERP did for the single company. Blockchain will integrate information and process within and across enterprise boundaries and has the potential to streamline and accelerate your business processes, increase protection against cybersecurity and reduce or eliminate the roles of intermediaries.
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Ackee Blockchain is a team of auditors and white hat hackers who perform security audits and assessments. Our mission is to contribute to a stronger blockchain ecosystem by sharing our knowledge. Our team of engineers will perform a security audit including tool analysis, manual code review, automated tests and bug bounty contest. We offer both one time audits and continuous auditing as a service. Our blockchain developers create secure Ethereum smart contracts with Solidity or develop with Rust on Solana.
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Thank you for the very valuable information. It was very useful to me.