What is Thallo?
Thallo is a Carbon-as-a-Service (CaaS) infrastructure and middleware protocol built to be the pipes of the voluntary carbon market, with the vision that embedding carbon into existing markets is the biggest lever we have for near-term climate impact.
Currently, the voluntary carbon market suffers from a lack of trust, inefficiency, and in some cases, unethical conduct and practices leading to fraud and greenwashing. It’s difficult to aggregate supply across all registries, and it's difficult to aggregate demand due to historical greenwashing, product provenance and specifications, and monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV).
Thallo is addressing these issues by focusing on registry integrations for carbon tokenization, making carbon embeddable as an asset class across all sources of demand in their target markets. Leveraging the immutability and reproducibility of distributed ledger technology (DLTs) to solve for the auditing and double spend problem plaguign carbon markets, it will make trustable carbon offset markets that can pull in both retail and enterprise liquidity. The Thallo token and associated staking mechanisms will be used to modulate market demand and supply.
Every marketplace runs into the problem of bootstrapping supply. Thallo has already secured a substantial 8 figure pipeline in carbon credits from numerous key, trusted market players. This has given them an early lead in supply, without having to battle it out with other web3 companies vying for on-chain carbon.
Why did we invest?
We believe there is already a severe crunch in carbon credit supply in the market. The outlook for the particular mix of supply that Thallo has in their pipeline is great. Biochar offers consistent prices, and nature-based solutions they are bringing on will appreciate in value as demand for NbS grows. What gives us further reason for bullishness in this market is their access to all of Biocarbon Registry’s supply. The timing is right to differentiate the carbon credit market, and the 15 million credits that they have access to right now bodes very well for bootstrapping their marketplace and catching the attention of corporate sustainability managers.
On the demand side, the team has impressive B2B sales experience, and has already secured committed purchases from blockchain-based impact funds. They’ve built a deep partnership base to ensure liquidity for their infrastructure, and importantly, Thallo offers each of these partners portfolio diversity and not just a single pool of e.g. nature based solutions. With these partnerships in hand, they can offer biochar, nature-based solutions, and direct air capture.
The team is solid in every position—Ryan Gledhill, the CEO, has been in the crypto space since 2015, leading the ICO of Funfair for $30m and building the first layer2 on Ethereum. He also worked with MakerDAO to incorporate a $500m DAI pool collateralized by ESG assets. Joining Ryan are Joseph and Adam. Joseph has worked on sustainability projects for Barclays, City of London, and Sotheby’s, securing $50m+ of carbon reducing initiatives with them. Adam has been in the space since 2013 as a Litecoin miner and worked on enterprise blockchain implementations at R3, deeply understanding the needs of enterprise customers when it comes to blockchain.
The combination of this team’s entrepreneurial experience, their ability to market to the demand and supply side of a nascent, difficult, and opaque market, and their amazing ability to bring industrial players together into cooperative partnerships made it easy for us to support the team. We’re excited to see where carbon middleware can go in the runup to 2030 with the Thallo team.
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