# DRAFT - Impact NFTs and verifiable impact claims

Inspired by the work of Grassroots Economics and Curve Labs, and thinking about “certifications (NFT’s) that can can be attested by organizations and individuals in the community” and creating “a generalized framework with which we can do the measurements” …

Impact NFTs represent verifiable impact claims made by individuals and groups.

## Impact claims

Ultimately impact claims can be about anything an individual perceives as “impact”. Interested to explore both physical and conceptual forms of impact …

To start, consider physical impact. Suppose a team were maintaining a hiking trail, to keep a passable route and mitigate erosion and other forms of damage to the local area.

The team goes out and works on a certain segment of trail. When they have finished the work and believe the trail to be appropriately maintained, they can then create these impact claims through a mobile application.

To create an impact claim and optionally mint an Impact NFT, information is provided about the impact made and the process of creating it. This could be written words, form inputs, numerical information or any sensor readings, including photo, video and audio.

These pieces of evidence are attached to the claim and written to the IPFS. The claim is made when the individual signs the root CID or hash of the impact claim document. These claims can be kept private or published to a readable smart contract.

(I believe ixo has given this a lot of thought - I'm not very familiar with their approach. Also Regen Network is already doing something similar, though again I don't know details.)

## Impact NFTs

Impact claims in and of themselves may prove an interesting primitive.

If an impact claim is published to a smart contract, an Impact NFT could be minted for the individual making the claim. Think of this as a tokenized DID (decentralized identifier), which resolves to a DID document containing information about the impact claim, including evidence, metadata and identities of the individuals involved.

What could be done with this Impact NFT? (This is also possible with private impact claims, using a peerwise DID method.)

### Impact verification claims

Impact verifiers can examine the impact claim’s evidence (like [IBISA Network](https://ibisa.network/)'s "[Watchers](https://ibisa.network/become-watcher/)"). If they believe the evidence does demonstrate the intended impact, they can issue a verifiable credential for the impact claim, an “impact VC”.

By submitting these verification claims to the Impact NFT smart contract, the impact claim will publicly accrue value in the form of social recognition and acceptance. This recognition and the evidence it is derived from is all verifiable.

At what point is the Impact NFT considered “verified”, enabling the impact claimants to claim a bounty? This depends on the situation. Unsolicited impact claims - that were not created in response to a posted bounty - could receive donations after the impact was created at anyone's discretion. Alternatively, bounties could incentivize system participants to work to make impact, likely defined by the supplier of bounty capital (or some representative).

The opportunity space here is quite broad - once an individual or group posts a bounty to create and document some impact, there are possibly an infinite number of permutations that can be created.

To make an impact verification claim (confusingly represented as impact VCs - verifiable credentials), an impact claim’s evidence needs to be assessed.

Both sensor and semantic data provided by the creator of the impact claim would be analyzed by human and software agents trained to assess levels of impact. An indication of their assessment of the impact claim would be included in the impact VC they issue (with their digital signature). In simple cases, this would be a boolean approval or rejection, or some normalized continuous variable - rating 1 to 10.

These verification agents might include algorithms (including machine learning) to detect forest or reef health, or stored carbon or greenhouse gas levels, and so on.

Verification claims may also represent human assessment of a photo or video recording, or of a written or spoken description of the work and outcome. In rare, high value cases, people (or drones) could even travel to the site to inspect the work firsthand. It seems simplest for humans and software agents to remotely provide attestations of local impact as documented in the evidence - especially early on, as the technology and our understanding of it develop in tandem.

It seems that the more genuine ways an impact claim is assessed (and therefore the more impact verification VCs issued on a claim), the better. In many cases, making these impact assessments would be an entirely automated, others entirely based on human inputs, and even others a blend. Regardless, often these impact targets and how they should be measured would be defined beforehand - likely by the participants posting the bounty.

As impact bounties increase in value, more sophisticated & reliable ways of measuring impact will help to ensure the safety of these cryptoeconomic systems.

### Applications

A simple Impact NFT would require a single approval from some account (externally owned or contract, including DAOs). This boolean value could permit the impact creator to transfer the bounty from the contract to their address.

More sophisticated Impact NFTs are even more exciting.

Bounty contributions could earn yield while waiting to be earned and claimed. Large capital pools might form, governed by a DAO oriented towards achieve some broad impact. Bounties could be posted in response to real time needs by experts, decoupled from funders. Yield generated could help fund a universal basic income (or sustainability-linked UBI), among other things.

Capital could be released before impact claims are made to fund project work. This could be permissioned or permissionless, but probably would usually require approval after some communication between the individuals wanting to accept a bounty and the funders. Impact workers could then use the funding to procure tools and materials, and possibly human support.

When they submit an impact claim, individuals could receive some proportion of reward on submission, and additional parts of the bounty could be transferred or streamed based on milestone impact verifications.

This includes time-bound verifications - some projects are meant to achieve some “permanence”, which can only be measured in the future. This means that impact claimants might receive dividends from their impact claims long after they created the impact.

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These Impact NFTs could serve as a tool to support our transition to sustainability. Of course, the ethics and cryptoeconomics of this type of protocol are very delicate, and should be considered deeply before this concept is deployed at any scale.

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