Ilana Mikes is the founder of ePioneers, a business that’s leveraging web 3 infrastructure to fight climate change. ePioneers is the world’s largest climate tech infrastructure for nature-based solutions and carbon outcomes.
Share with the audience a bit about yourself.
I’m an entrepreneur, a self-taught software designer, with a background in finance.
At the end of 2020, I decided to focus my time on contributing to the climate crisis that we’re starting to see in some regions of the world.
What problem are you and your team tackling towards sustainability with your business?
Currently, there’s no market infrastructure for the carbon market that’s boomed in Europe this past year. We’d discovered we could translate nature into carbon offsets and then sell this to the market. Of course, this is not a sustainable solution since it gives companies permission to continue polluting.
When you’re investing in carbon-positive solutions, like nature-based solutions, you can create a positive balance. With all these problems we’d asked how we could not just create a new visa for people to connect internationally to the country, but also integrate the blockchain into this ecosystem.
This would allow us to trace funding in terms of carbon offsets and convert natural ecosystems into NFTs or other types of tech-based assets. People would then be enabled to trade and invest in these types of systems.
Give readers an explanation of what web 3 is.
Web 3 allows you not only to interact with an interface or website online but also enables users to own assets like your own data. In terms of architecture, web 3 is more decentralized. For example, you can communicate peer-to-peer or with a central database.
How’s your company epioneers using web 3 to help protect biodiversity?
We are enabling the value representation of nature by translating living ecosystems into web 3 assets. So whether those are NFTs or tokens. And then the other way that we’re enabling kind of web three into the equation is to enable people who are funding this to trace where their funding is going, and also where the assets are coming from. So these are kind of two main use usages that we’re using with like blockchain.
For those wanting to get involved with sustainability and web 3, what’s a great way to start?
I’d recommend first trying to understand some of the blockchains that currently exist. Additionally, if you want to learn more go to our blog at epioneer.io. We have some articles that help explain how to get started with web 3. Some of our articles were written by different types of organizations that are neutral in their analysis.
I hope you enjoyed my talk with Ilana and that you took away some value. If you want to listen to the entire interview, click play below or head over to your favorite platform (Apple, Spotify, or Google.)
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