Startup Series: Toucan

Today's guests are Raphaël Haupt, Co-Founder & CEO, and James Farrell, Co-Founder & CTO, of Toucan Protocol. Toucan aims to build a regenerative financial system — one that nurtures the beauty of the Earth rather than exploiting it. They are leading the way in discovering how the open internet can help tackle climate change. Earlier this year, Raphaël and James rebranded and launched Toucan Protocol, public infrastructure for carbon markets running on open blockchains. While the co-creators plan to start with carbon markets, their vision is much bigger: they intend to kickstart a regenerative finance ecosystem based on Web3 technologies and values to make DeFi work for the planet (DeFi stands for “decentralized finance”, it’s a new global financial ecosystem running on public blockchains like Ethereum). In February 2020, Raphaël and James hacked together CO2ken, a prototype carbon offsetting system for Ethereum. Since then they joined the Blockchain For Social Impact incubator and were awarded a grant by Polygon to deploy the Toucan Protocol on the network. In the episode, Raphaël and James explain what ReFi is, the origination of Toucan, and a brief overview of Web3. We also dive into why they are applying ReFi's key principles to carbon markets, the existing carbon market and the problems associated with it, and the role Toucan plays in addressing the climate crisis. Raphaël and James are excellent guests with a wealth of knowledge about Web3 and ReFi. Enjoy the show! You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at [email protected], where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests. Episode recorded December 1st, 2021