product – hazel™

The World Needs a Climate-Focused Web3 Solution

I’m excited to announce our newest project: The Hazelverse!

We’ve been working on this project since late last year, but now I get to reveal publicly some additional details around it. The Hazelverse is our climate-focused segment of the metaverse. In time, it will be an open-world explorer experience, where you’ll work with the local animals who live in the Hazelverse to fight a cabal of evil scientists who are intent on bringing climate change from our world to the digital world.

Our first step in this exciting journey is happening now. We’re completing the prototype for a casual, mobile clicker game that will be your first introduction into the Hazelverse world. It’s a web3 experience, meaning that as you earn and unlock specific awards in the game, those digital assets will be NFTs that you’ll own. What this means is that, unlike mobile games we all play now, you’ll own the digital assets that you win and will be able to trade, sell and buy them among other players–and they’ll be fully usable in our future experiences (and potential other metaverse experiences as well!)

To see samples of our artwork, gameplay demos and other up-to-the-minute information about the Hazelverse, follow us on Twitter. We’ll be running contests, giveaways, and making other announcements in the coming weeks on our Twitter feed, and you don’t want to miss out!

Critically, we’re building our experience on a next-generation, climate-friendly blockchain to avoid the negative impacts of other web3 projects. More on that below.

But that still leaves a critical question: Why are we doing a web3 project at all?

We’re launching our work on the Hazelverse for three main reasons:

First, our team strongly believes that crypto needs to be climate-friendly as early as possible, and we hope that we can demonstrate the demand for climate-friendly projects. Web3 shouldn’t be all about sketchy financial schemes, mutant animals and shadowy transactions–we think the technology can be used for the good of society and the planet. We hope to demonstrate one way to be climate positive, and by doing so, we hope to inspire future rounds of new projects and products that incorporate climate impact into their product from the start.

Second, we knew we wanted to create a collection-based experience as part of our product. One of the core challenges that prevents consumers from funding carbon-removal work is the sense that you ‘don’t get anything’ from your purchase–and historically, this has been true! Other than feeling good about helping the climate, you don’t normally get anything in return for your purchase.

We knew that we wanted to change this by enabling users to build collections of digital goods from their purchases–and by incorporating web3 into our project, we’re able to dial this collection experience up to 11 out of 10.

Now, when you earn a digital good through Hazel for your efforts, what you’re earning is actually an NFT – you own it outright. You can collect it, use it in our experience, or sell it – it’s yours to do with as you please. We think this just amplifies the fun of filling out your collection and playing with our experience.

Finally, we’re launching a web3 project because we wanted to appeal to the masses of users. As a consumer-focused business, we knew that if we were going to have an impact on a challenge as huge as climate change we needed millions of users–or more.. And while there certainly are altruistic users who are funding carbon removal through Hazel today, we know there’s a lot more users out there who are motivated by the desire to play a game, or be entertained, or by greed—and that’s OK! We’re intentionally building a solution that enables anyone–even if you don’t even believe in climate change–to have a positive impact on the climate by using our app.

Best of all, you can have a climate impact *without ever spending a penny on our app*. Web3 technology lets us create a totally free experience for our users that has a climate impact. So whether you get hooked on our product and accelerate your experience by funding carbon removal or never pay anything and just play, you’ll have a positive climate impact through our platform either way!

Our core model is: Play – Earn – Impact. We’ll be launching our platform into beta in a few months. Follow us and learn how you can be one of the first to make a climate impact with us!

Get involved in our project!

Learn more about the Hazelverse here

An Aside About Climate + Crypto:

“Wait,” I hear from a lot of people, “I read somewhere that Bitcoin uses more electricity than the entire country of Argentina/Switzerland/Brazil/Korea (the country changes each time). Isn’t a crypto project the *worst* thing you can do for the climate?”

Thing is, they’re exactly right.

First generation crypto (Bitcoin and Ethereum) are horrendously inefficient–by design–and use tremendous amounts of electricity. Since that electricity isn’t all coming from renewable sources, that makes their carbon footprints horrific–they’re helping cause climate change. Anyone who builds on top of these platforms is doing tremendous harm to the planet – and deserves the public ridicule they receive – if they’re doing it in the name of a supposedly climate-friendly endeavor.

But that’s first-generation crypto.

First generation anything is typically pretty bad and inefficient–look how bad solar panels were initially. That’s why we’re not using either of the first generation crypto technologies. We haven’t officially announced which chain we’ll be using yet, but it will be one with an electrical use that’s in-line (or ideally, better) than current web2 technologies.

So if you’re comfortable doing a Google search, or scrolling Instagram, you should be 100% comfortable with the climate impact from our solution.

You know we’ve focused since our inception on providing the highest quality carbon removal offsets, while maximizing the impact you as a user get for every dollar spent on our platform.

Unfortunately, to maintain the same high-quality carbon removal offsets we’ve provided in the past, we’re being forced to pay much higher prices than we were just months ago–in some cases, the costs of the carbon removal offsets we buy have gone up by as much as 50%!

As a result of our higher costs, you’ll see higher prices in Hazel starting today. We anticipate this being the only price increase we’ll need to do for 2022, but that will depend on how the market for the rest of the year evolves.

If you’re on a subscription with us:

Hazel provides the option to select “Monthly Purchase” at checkout to make your purchase a monthly subscription. If you’re on a subscription plan like this, we will not be raising your prices. You made a commitment to support climate action through Hazel, and we want to honor your commitment–even though it means we’ll be losing money on it. (Note that any new subscriptions will be at the new pricing).

Additional details about this change:

First, we didn’t want to deviate from the high-quality carbon removal offsets we’ve been offering. One of the things that makes Hazel unique is that, unlike many sources, we’re 100% focused on supporting projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere. Many carbon offset projects are focused on avoidance–effectively “pay me or I’ll pollute”–and these types of offsets are much cheaper.

While we think there’s a role for those projects, with Hazel we wanted to focus instead on selling offsets that come from actual capture and removal of carbon from the atmosphere, whether by:

Conservation Efforts: Where the preserved ecosystems sequester additional carbon every year;
Reforestation: Where newly planted trees capture and store carbon;
Regenerative Farming: Where a change in farming practices results in fields that capture and store additional carbon;
Technology & Other: Where engineered or other cutting-edge approaches are used to capture carbon.

These projects are in the most demand, however, and are uniformly raising prices, which impacts our business.

In the future, this may mean that our project mix, for users who pick “Support All Projects” in Hazel, may change. Although prices are rising everywhere, not all projects are rising at the same rate or by the same amount. There may be an opportunity to mix lower-priced removal projects with higher priced ones so that the average price remains low–while still supporting multiple projects. Right now, users who pick “Support All Projects” in Hazel get an equal amount of all of our projects–changing this mix may enable us to support pricier solutions in the future. (Obviously if you pick a specific project to support, 100% of your support goes to that project). Stay tuned!

We’re also going to be aggressively shopping for new projects that provide the same level of impact & reporting we require, but at a more competitive price. If you run or know of a project you’d like to see in Hazel, let us know!

In future weeks, we may introduce new Impact product options in Hazel at lower price points. While these will also represent a smaller amount of carbon captured, we want to provide an option for users that cannot afford to fund a larger impact on the climate.

We’ll also be raising the amount of Hazel Coins you receive to reflect our new prices. Why does that matter? It doesn’t… yet. But trust me, you’re going to want as many Hazel Coins as you can get in your account in a few weeks…

Finally…

I know we probably could have raised prices and not said anything, and our new prices would have gone largely unnoticed. That would have been a jerky move though, and we’re committed to being better people, and a better business, than that. We wanted to be as transparent with you as possible because that’s the right thing to do. We know higher prices aren’t something anyone wants to hear, but we hope you’ll understand our need to change our prices. –Ed