Thallo recently announced both Ripple and Celo as Thallo Founding Partners, and chose Polygon as the blockchain where we will deploy the world’s first two-way carbon bridge.
So how did we decide on these blockchains? What does it mean to be multi-chain from the start? And what lessons could this hold for your own blockchain project?
With a combined 50+ years of blockchain expertise, the Thallo team saw choosing the right blockchain as a central question for our project. After weighing the options and potential trade-offs, we decided to deploy initially onto Polygon, XRPL, and Celo.
Read on for some of the questions and key considerations we asked ourselves to get to this choice.
1. Do the values of the blockchain match those of your project?
As a highly values-driven project, it was important for us to select blockchain(s) that match our values.
For us, there were a few key parameters that any blockchain needed to satisfy:
- ReFi-friendly community
- Committed to climate action
- Low carbon footprint
One of the most obvious choices for us at Thallo was deploying onto Celo, since it has become an early home for ReFi initiatives. Working with Celo has allowed us to grow our network exceptionally quickly with like-minded people and projects. Celo has also committed to 40% of their reserves coming from natural assets, and has been a carbon negative blockchain from the start.
We are obsessed with the collaboration and sense of community and support that web3 gives us, and Celo has an incredible support system! Initiatives such as the Climate Collective enable the expanding nexus of web3 and climate action through grants, technical assistance and advisory support, and we’ve already found collaboration with others in the Celo ecosystem, like our regenerative staking partnership through Spirals Protocol.
Ripple is also tightly mission-aligned with Thallo. Ripple has committed a market-leading $100 million to scale and strengthen carbon markets with an aim to be carbon neutral by 2030. XRPL is also already incredibly energy efficient: consuming around 57,000 times less energy than Bitcoin, due to its Federated Consensus algorithm. [Read more about Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake here.]
Further, with a slant towards capital markets, Ripple support’s Thallo’s vision of deploying incentives to ensure that carbon secondary markets enable project developers and local communities rather than extract from them – more on that incentive design here.
Polygon is also moving towards being a home for ReFi, and has even hosted Thallo’s own CEO Ryan Gledhill, on one of its Twitter spaces. Polygon also hosted a Green Blockchain Summit this year.
Earlier this year Polygon also released The Green Manifesto – A smart contract with Planet Earth, and as a result have been collaborating to analyze and offset its carbon footprint. It’s essential for Thallo to not only be a project that does good in the world, but also to be a big part of a network that is dedicated to the same goals.
2. Do your customers / target community use this blockchain?
We aim to democratize and scale the carbon markets.
To the first point, we at Thallo have always been champions of accessibility for all. Under 50% of the world’s population has access to a computer, whereas an estimated 84% has access to a smartphone. As a mobile first ecosystem, Celo allows anyone with a smartphone to participate in the network, enabling democratization of access.
In terms of scaling the carbon markets, today more than 95% of all carbon credit purchases are done by corporations. Since the current market for carbon credits is largely B2B, Ripple’s enterprise-driven customer base provides a clear synergy to our primary customers.
Further, with customers utilizing Thallo’s marketplace from all over the world, Ripple’s Cross-Border Payments also ensure that earnings are available to project developers with settlement times that are unrivaled in traditional banking rails.
Meanwhile, however, we believe that reaching the widest audience is critical to facilitating the most positive climate actions. Since Polygon is the most widely adopted layer two on Ethereum and has the biggest ecosystem, it’s an obvious place to initially deploy our two-way bridge.
3. What does the longevity of the network look like, and how does that fit with your future plans?
At Thallo, we’re building for the long term. That means we want to work with partners that have a similar long-term vision and proven staying power.
Ripple was founded in 2012 – making it a dinosaur in web3 terms. It offers an incredible suite of products. Solutions such as On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) can offer enterprise-level liquidity and asset management from the earliest days of the marketplace launch.
Ripple has also amassed an incredibly large and loyal community, whose enthusiasm we can tap into on the journey to save the planet.
Celo was founded in 2017 and is quickly becoming a network with one of the widest user bases. We believe this is because Celo is so easy to take part in. We agree that you shouldn’t need a degree in computer science or a powerful laptop to be able to participate in a regenerative monetary network. At Thallo we are excited to be on the leading edge of a network designed for user ease and global participation.
Polygon has dominated the layer 2 wars so far, and has been a huge driver in mainstream adoption and the crossover of web2 and web3.
Polygon recently announced partnerships with some of the biggest companies in the world including major brands like Starbucks, Mercedes, Meta, Behance, Stripe, Twitter, Draftkings, and Wyre.
These are the questions we asked ourselves that led us to our multi-chain deployment strategy. Ultimately, each project is different, and the choice of chain may come down to different factors than what we laid out here.
For Thallo, our approach is designed to maximize our mission: to generate as much impactful climate action as possible!
