Proof-of-Care

Figure 9: Illustration of a GainForest Proof-of-Care

Impact evaluation

Proof-of-Care is verified impact evaluation that is generated in collaboration of GainForest with local conservation and restoration efforts to transparently display their progress to the investor community. Proof-of-Care results impact the release of parked funds, thus creating verified and traceable impact for individual payment to milestones. Oracles channels decisions within Proof-of-Care to smart contract functions that release reports and key tokens to communities to unlock funds.

Impact governance

Proof-of-Care mints governance tokens thus linking the capability and trust of GainForest's monitoring framework directly to the value and price of the governance token. This can be economically modeled through the player's belief function that a governance token is minted (see Chapter 4). The increased trust of the community in real-world-based monitoring and crypto-based oracle system will lead to increased adoption of the governance token.

Figure 10: High-level overview of GainForest proof-of-care

Leveraging artificial intelligence for monitoring

Together with our technical collaborators, we aim to provide NFTree-issuing conservation and restoration projects with digital tools to transparently monitor their sites. Newly planted seedlings and small trees are registered and monitored through the Tree App. Plants that reach a certain size can be scalably monitored and tracked through drone and satellite imagery.

Figure 11: In Proof-of-Care, forest stewards are able to monitor their conservation site and collect data through digital tools that are synced with the GainForest platform. If trees reach a certain size, the platform can verify citizen-science data with public satellite monitoring

Trickling down trust

We believe that depending on monitoring levels, there is a trade-off to be made between audibility (satellite data from NASA and ESA have the highest trust level) and resolution (field measurements are providing individual tree information). GainForest's proof-of-care leverages the insight that we can provide guarantees from one level to the next. E.g. we can provide estimates of the likelihood that citizen-science-submitted drone imagery is truthfully reporting location and time by querying the corresponding satellite image and comparing visual and structural similarity (see our academic work on TrueBranch). This will enable landowners to submit and verify their own drone imagery. Our hierarchical monitoring concept aims to provide the flexibility for conservation projects to self-report progress with verifiable guarantees by trickling down uncertainty estimates from coarse satellite monitoring down to precise individual plant-based field monitoring.