Scamtastic Guy Behind Bankrupt WeWork Returns With Plans To Save The Climate W. New Cryptocurrency

[hatrack]

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These investors – including the all-star A16Z, formerly Andreessen Horowitz – have firmly established that they back cryptos based on whether they can make money and get out, not on whether the company they're investing in is offering a sound, sustainable product. For A16Z, bets on wildly unstable "stablecoins" or imploding, wildly un-fun "games" like Axie Infinity are sound investments – not because these firms have any future, but because coin offerings are unregulated securities that let investors cash out before the companies collapse. Even amid this pump-and-dump ethos, one of A16Z's investment stands out as especially cynical. The firm led a $70m Series A investment in Flowcarbon, a "voluntary carbon market" (VCM) cryptocurrency led by Adam Neumann, the notorious Wework founder whose unethical conduct and misleading statements scuttled a $47b IPO.

https://protos.com/flowcarbon-funding-round-proves-reputation-means-nothing-in-crypto/

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Despite Neumann's manifest untrustworthiness and his history of capital-destroying financial shenanigans, A16Z has helped him raise $70m. Remember: if you don't understand crypto products, and you don't know much about businesspeople, you are forced to rely on the judgments of celebrity investors like A16Z to guide your financial decisions. Neumann's new venture, Flowcarbon, will only be profitable if naive, retail investors also buy into it. Flowcarbon's main product is a speculative crypto asset called the Goddess Nature Token (GNT). What is a GNT? It is meant to represent "non-binding, self-created carbon offsets for excess pollution."

Basically, a carbon offset. Now, carbon offsets are already incredibly scammy. Large firms deal in tens of millions of dollars' worth of carbon credits that represent – for example – forests whose owners have pledged not to log them. But in many cases, these are forest that would never be logged (because they're owned by a wilderness trust, say). In other cases, the forests have burned down but the credits for not logging them are still being traded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Flowcarbon's goal is to take this market for lemons and make it bigger and faster, to facilitate "price transparency, liquidity and accessibility." The target customers are DAOs and defi projects, especially ones using planet-destroying proof-of-work systems like Ethereum and Bitcoin. These projects will be able to buy carbon credits based on even shakier promises of carbon offsetting and claim that they are carbon neutral. As Protos points out, the traditional finance markets for these voluntary offsets have failed spectacularly. Companies like the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) tanked and took their investors' capital with them. The major distinction between Flowcarbon and CCX is being "web3, bro" and being helmed by a man whose funny accounting and self-dealing cost his investors $47b.

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https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

[keithbvadu2]

1. Great wordsmithing and optimism.