About Gaja

Gaja aims to be a robust, highly scalable, global emissions trading market.

There is no global market for climate accounting and emissions trading. We need such a market to properly incentivize a transition to a safe climate, as part of a more happy, peaceful and prosperous world.

Gaja is also a Sanskrit word for elephant. Climate change is “the elephant in the room”; it is one of the most important crises of our time. While some progress has been made with reducing emissions, as of May 2020, the global carbon budget to limit average global warming to 1.5°C is forecast to run out in only 8 years. Climate science and international consensus from the Paris agreement state that we should try to keep our emissions within this budget, and get back greenhouse gas levels to 350 parts-per-million (ppm), carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e). The less we do now to reverse climate change, the more we will have to adapt and suffer.

Gaja is planned to be developed as a Holochain app. Through Holochain, Gaja aims to develop a distributed, highly scalable, global emissions trading market, with rewards for emissions removal and abatement. Thus, emissions removers and abaters (like clean energy producers and energy efficient device owners) get rewards, and can then reduce prices for consumers, or increase investment into the growth of their business, or both. Or, solar system owners get additional income, which they can spend on other things (like a holiday), or re-invest the income. Emissions removers gain access to another way to earn money. Governments could integrate their emissions trading market with Gaja, to help meet their emissions reduction targets.

Gaja plans to use an asset-backed mutual credit cryptocurrency, Gapture (short for Gaja capture — Gaja economically supports the capture of emissions). Gaptures would be backed by the assets that remove and avoid emissions, and the cryptocurrency plans to have a Holofuel-like economic design, in order to stabilize the value of rewards provided by emissions removal and avoidance. Currently Gaptures exist as an ERC20 token, GAPT, and this will be 1:1 exchangeable for up to a year from when a Gaja main net app is released.

You can fund Gaja development via this Stakes Social pool. Buy DEV tokens, stake them in this pool, and get staking rewards. See what the current staking rewards are via Stakes Social. It’s a win-win! You support the development of an open-source, distributed, global emissions trading market that is economically robust and scalable, and you get rewarded for doing so! Additionally, Dev tokens have surged in value over the past year, as seen here in this archived screenshot (~25,000% gain over a year — a testament to the demand for open source projects and the success of Stakes Social’s way of supporting them), or see here for current performance.

It is intended to add at least one liquidity pool for GAPT, paired with HOT tokens, and probably also another paired with ETH, through Uniswap, and also through Balancer. And maybe also another pool paired with USDT.

Additionally, Gaja intends to integrate with Decentr, once an API for it becomes available. Through this integration, the data from emissions, as well as data from emissions abatement activities (those activities which displace emissions, such as clean energy and energy efficiency), and data from emissions removing activities — all of this data can affect the payable data value — a personal exchange rate of individuals and other entities. The more activities produce a positive impact, the more the shared data (via Decentr) from these activities can reduce the cost of economic activities for entities engaging in those activities. Conversely, the more entities cause negative impacts, such as through greenhouse gas emitting activities, then the more this can decrease their payable data value and increase the cost of transactions for those entities, and make it more difficult for them to continue those activities, potentially putting them out of business, or impelling them to change and innovate to reduce emissions. Connecting with Decentr should help to act as a scalable bridge between fiat and blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, and thus help to increase the scalability of the economics of the emissions trading market.

Learn more on Medium. Get updated on key developments on Twitter.

Track the development of the project at github.com/jamesray1/Gaja.

Together, let’s move onwards and upwards towards a brighter, better, happier world!