The client's idea was to build a product that would allow reforestation and afforestation
projects, conservation organizations, and forest managers to easily measure, report, and
verify (MRV) environmental data from their land. The current MRV landscape is expensive and
inaccessible, inhibiting the establishment of a global carbon economy.
Open Forest Protocol has built a system for accessible and transparent forest MRV data,
laying the foundation for an accelerated response to humanity's greatest existential threat.
The INC4 Team was offered an exceptional opportunity to take up the technical development of blockchain smart contracts and all related products that form the OFP infrastructure, enabling the protocol’s users to perform their dedicated activities. INC4’s responsibilities regarding OFP development started from the UI/UX design of the protocol’s modules and ended with the final delivery of OFP’s smart contracts and user interfaces to the NEAR Ecosystem Mainnet.
Technical architecture design and structuring of the system of smart contracts that would run the protocol
The most challenging part here was to design a flexible system of technical modules based on blockchain, meaning the data storage and validation would need to be decentralized.
Integration of decentralized storage solutions
Printed records of forestry data are located on the blockchain, ensuring data transparency and public accessibility.
Creation of an indexing service
OFP is intended for processing and storing huge amounts of data; therefore, indexing was also a considerable part of the Protocol’s architecture. The indexing service required quite a sophisticated design and technology integration, handling vast arrays of decentralized data and instantly deliver it to the user interfaces.
Create a fully-functional environment for organizations or individual foresters.
Create records of their forestry and conservation initiatives.
Furnish them with a set of necessary functionalities to start an MRV project.
Report on its progress during the whole lifecycle, which can last up to 70 years.
The Project Module is heavily loaded with functionalities within the Protocol, meaning it required a lot planning and subsequent testing.
GEO-locate the necessary plot of land.
Input measurements data.
Take pictures of the trees.
Instantly send the array to the Project Dashboard.
Collect data into a consolidated report.
Send all data to decentralized storage with metadata hashed to the blockchain.
The challenging part of developing the Forester app was the GEO-location precision algorithm. We had to carefully impose limitations on the app so that foresters couldn't take a picture of any tree which is outside the plot of land being reported.
The validation process is complex and comprises several stages:
Voting works through validators, who stake a certain amount of OPN (NEP-141 NEAR standard fungible token) to either affirm the reported data or deny it, based on the results of his/her own check.
The larger total voting stake pool in favour of the verdict decides the validation result.
Validators are provided with the necessary set of interfaces to check the reporting data and compare it to the previous periods’ reports.
The algorithms that underly the voting module, processing of results, and distribution of validator rewards is the most complicated in terms of technical development.
Today, we have the fully-operational first version of the Open Forest Protocol on NEAR.
Full technical development cycle
Technologies
By working on complex projects such as this, our team has to show flexibility, a willingness to learn new things, strong fundamental knowledge, and problem solving skills. From architecture design and solving complexities to final production, each stage of production demonstrates how we act as a professional technical team, working step-by-step to produce the optimal application according to the client’s specific requirements.
