from Hacker News

WeWork Adam Neumann’s new crypto project sounds like a scam within a scam

by monsieurpng on 5/31/22, 3:27 AM with 7 comments

  • by josephd79 on 5/31/22, 1:05 PM

    Note to self, To become an VC you just need to raise a bunch of money from other people and literally throw it at everything and see what sticks. Sounds pretty simple.

  • by Traster on 5/31/22, 10:19 AM

    This sounds like a project to almost do the exact opposite of what is required in the market. The real need in the market today is a way of auditing the process by which someone creates a carbon credit. You need to be able to trust that this credit you bought it from someone else doing something genuinely carbon negative vs just either claiming credits for something they were going to do anyway or claiming credits for not doing something they were going to do anyway.

    The worst way of doing that is creating a market place of tokens that make these heterogenous carbon sinks into fungible assets.

    If you look into the announcement there's also some really funny stuff going on:

    > including its revolutionary collaboration with the Centrifuge protocol, which will unlock the debt markets for carbon project developers,

    The business model of Centrifuge is... well... loan sharks.

    > its collaboration with the Layer 1 blockchain Celo, to provide $10 million of GNT to offset Celo’s emissions.

    Nice that we got to the self-dealing portion of the business so quickly. So Celo will buy $10m of GNT to offset carbon, and in return GNT will launch on Celo, thus driving Celo up to cover the cost of buying the carbon credits. Someone, somewhere is going to be the bag holder for these tokens.

  • by quantified on 5/31/22, 3:52 AM

    Carbon credits on the blockchain sounds like social dogfood sharing, 22 years later. It's buzzword soup.

  • by alephnan on 5/31/22, 6:32 AM

    > $70 million from the crypto arm of the venture capital firm a16z

    Apparently half of this is from VC funding and the other half is from token sales. I'm wondering who is buying these tokens.

    In other news, Martin Shkreli is out of prison and Billy McFarland just got transferred to a halfway house.

  • by beardyw on 5/31/22, 8:47 AM

    In order to "To learn more or opt-out" I must accept cookies (on my phone). Ridiculous. If they do that why not have the guts to just ignore the whole thing.

  • by ckastner on 5/31/22, 8:38 AM

    Sounds similar to the KlimaDAO scam. That one already collapsed, though.