Initiatives

Pilot Projects

• Digital Verification Standard for Carbon Sequestration Tracking

• State-Level Model Legislative Initiatives

• Ricardian Contract Repository

The DLGA works with both the public and private sectors leaders to convene, coordinate and collaborate leaders in the emerging distributed ledger industry. To accomplish this goal we facilitate pilots, identify best practices, develop standards and building a community with a common agenda. We aim to leverage our many assets to create a thriving industry.

Partners: Carbon Accounting Company (CAC), Distributed Ledger Governance Association (DLGA), Glenrock Energy (Glenrock), Petroleum Technology Research Center (PTRC), Kamu Data (Kamu), Kanata Clean Power & Climate Technologies Corp (Kanata), and University of Wyoming Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation (CBDI).

Purpose: to help create a standard for certifying and financializing the credits for carbon offsets achieved by carbon sequestration through active geological and mineralization into rock or passive biological absorption.

Goals:

• Pilot existing geological sequestration well with IoT tracking.

• Determine minimum standards to verify:

  • Geological sequestration injection and custody tracking,

  • Mineralization sequestration,

  • Tree or grassland creation and/or maintenance standards

• Determine interoperable and platform agnostic tokenization standard.

• Determine likely legal status of digital custodied carbon asset.

• Determine best practices for digital custody of carbon asset.

Steps:

• Standard automation for IoT tracking of injection and subsurface permanence, based on UIC Class VI well requirements:

  • Depth of reservoir;

  • Porosity;

  • Permeability;

  • Capillary pressure of the injection and confining zones;

  • Site confinement;

  • Groundwater flow in the injection, recharge, and potential discharge zones;

  • Geochemical water chemistry data;

  • Geomechanical and petrophysical information;

  • Injection & confining zone mineralogy, petrology, and lithology;

  • Seismic history, seismic sources, and seismic risk;

  • Surface air and/or soil gas monitoring data;

  • Compatibility of the CO2 with subsurface fluids and minerals.
    
    

• Standard automation for data collection, storage, and processing:

  • Establishing cryptographic trust anchors for IoT data at the measuring device level,

  • Collection and storage of tamper-proof IoT data in a permanent decentralized storage at the desired degree of replication,

  • Allowing for multiple stages of processing and aggregation of raw data while maintaining verifiability of the results,

  • Providing verifiable provenance trail for discretely accounted carbon sequestered volumes.
    
    

• Standard automation for accounting sequestered CO2 as digital assets:

  • Smart-contract based sequestered carbon offsets,

  • Digitally custodied commitments to enable financing of CCS projects,

  • Semi-fungible tokens to ensure verifiability and traceability without loss of liquidity,

  • Accounting layer that provides maximum energy efficiency without compromising automatic auditability and trust,

  • Automatic rebalancing of carbon offsets due to sequestration failure.

Contact: jeremy@dlga.org

Partners: University of Wyoming Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation (CBDI), Distributed Ledger Governance Association.

Purpose: Develop a set of state, provincial and tribal level model legislative language and statutes for enabling and regulating DLT activity

Goals:

• Engage DLT leaders in a variety of jurisdictions with an interest to develop model legislative language and statutes around DLT activities

• Inventory existing DLT industry laws and gather stakeholder input in various jurisdictions

• Develop model legislative language and statutes

• Create and disseminate policy guidelines, adoption guides and strategies

Steps:

• Engage DLT leaders in a variety of jurisdictions with an interest to develop model legislative language around DLT activities

• Inventory existing statutes in various jurisdictions

• Interview stakeholders (business, government, law, academia) to develop areas of concern

• Convene gatherings to develop and improve model legislative language

• Finalize policy guidelines and specific proposed statutes

• Develop adoption/implementation guides

• Develop dissemination strategies and platforms and disseminate the resultsDetermine breadth of focus: Distributed ledger generally, DAOs, Crypto, Tokenization, Etc.

• Develop dissemination strategies and platforms.

• Inventory existing statutes in US and Internationally.

• Interview stakeholders (business, government, law, academia) to develop areas of attention. 

Contact: steven@dlga.org

Partners: University of Wyoming Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation (CBDI), Vermont Law School, Oliver Goodenough Consulting, Distributed Ledger Governance Association.

Purpose: as they become more sophisticated and complex, smart contracts will increasingly need to interact with the legacy legal system.  This interaction can be substantially aided with mixed-format or Ricardian contracts, partly set out in code and partly in natural language.  This project will create a respected, secure, legally compliant, and easy to reference repository of mixed-format contract language for the natural language portion of Ricardian contracts.

Goals:

• Develop an open source approach to creation and use of complex Ricardian smart contracts.

• Work with smart contract users and their advisors such as lawyers and financial experts to solve complexity issues associated with Ricardian Contracts.

• Create a well-functioning and secure repository for natural language legal data in a Ricardian Contract on a variety of platforms and legal jurisdictions.

Steps:

• Use open-source tools to develop a secure repository for the natural language legal data.

• Develop methods to simply call to the database from smart contracts using a standardized reference on a variety of platforms.

• Test methods to allow authenticated contributors to easy post to the lightly curated database.

• Verify that the system is legally compliant in all major jurisdictions.

• Pilot for several smart contracts to verify value to smart contract users.

• Determine situations that benefit from this new approach to Ricardian Contracts.

Contact: john@dgla.org