The World Bank bets on blockchain to fix the carbon market

Veteran cyberpunk Gene Hoffman was working at encryption specialist PGP Corporation in 1997 when it was acquired by antivirus software company McAfee. As a result, he was faced with two options: continue working at McAfee as a salaried employee or start his own business.

He chose the latter.

Hoffman rode the Silicon Valley wave of startups for two decades. In 1998, he co-founded Emusic.com, which was sold to Vivendi Universal in 2001. Shortly after, he became the chairman and CEO of subscription software company Vincidia, which was acquired by Amdocs in 2016.

But now, he’s finally back in the cryptography business.

Hoffman is president and COO of Chia Network, a blockchain protocol founded by Bram Cohen, the creator of peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent. Both Cohen and Hoffman moved in the same social circles in the late ‘90s but never officially met until 2010, when they were both in the same venture capital portfolio.

“When I heard he [Cohen] had a solution to the proof-of-work problem, I said, ‘Dude, we gotta talk.’ Because it was very clear that it was time for me to come back,” Hoffman tells Tech in Asia at the sidelines of the Singapore Fintech Festival 2022.

The interview room we were in was fairly noisy, but Hoffman managed to explain that Chia has two things going for it.

First, it is the blockchain of choice for a carbon credit registry called Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust), which counts the Singapore government and the World Bank among its founding members.

Second, its consensus mechanism for proof of space-time (PoST) is the latest tech on the block – it retains the security standards of Bitcoin’s proof of work but uses much less energy.

Besides the CAD Trust, Chia is also a founder of the Carbon Opportunities Fund, an investment platform that raises private capital to source, tokenize, and sell high-quality, verified carbon credits. Both are Chia’s most high-profile projects to date.

After the interview, this writer shook hands with Hoffman and prepared to file an update the next week about Chia setting up shop in Singapore. The story seemed simple enough at the time. Singapore is gearing up to be both a crypto and green finance hub, making the city-state an ideal location for climate-crypto businesses like Chia, which launched its mainnet in 2021 after four years of research and development.

But this did not turn out to be one of those straightforward updates.

Indeed, Chia is establishing an office in Singapore. But it will be helmed by its CFO, Misha Graboi, a lone employee navigating an uncertain future, as far as the company’s Asia-Pacific (APAC) business is concerned. Globally, it has 85 employees, most of whom are based in the US, according to LinkedIn.

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