Yale’s incubator for disruptive new technology, Yale Openlab, has received a $150,000 grant from Social Alpha Foundation (SAF), to develop its blockchain education system and work on a decentralized framework to tackle carbon emissions.

Yale Openlab is the Ivy League university’s open innovation lab that incubates open source and disruptive projects to address global pressing issues. The lab is a relatively recent joint venture between two of the university’s branches: the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, and the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.

SAF is a non-profit outfit founded in 2017 that specializes in eliciting donations from cryptocurrency holders, then turning the crypto into grants for organizations that work on blockchain education and social impact projects, such as public health, education, and the environment.

SAF’s grant is to support two of Yale Openlab’s priorities – building blockchain-based skill development education programs, and developing the “Open Earth Challenge” which aims to use a blockchain-based framework to build decentralized consensus on the Earth’s carbon budget.

Experts at Yale see that present methods of climate change mitigation are insufficient to tackle the rate of deterioration, which is where decentralized technology can help because of its ability to speedily optimize processes.

Dr. Martin Wainstein, founder of Yale Openlab and Innovator-in-Residence at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, said, “At present, if emissions continue to be left unchecked, our limited carbon budget could be consumed in as little as 15 years. This challenge requires people and organizations to collaborate at an unprecedented scale, and reimagine traditional business models and paradigms.”

Nydia Zhang, co-founder, and Chairman of Social Alpha Foundation said, “Yale Openlab’s unparalleled expertise in climate change research, longstanding credibility at the governmental level, and its open innovation framework means new ideas, products, and services will be conceived in a transparent and shareable, rather than proprietary, format. We look forward to seeing how Martin and the Yale Openlab team will leverage blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to enable collaborative projects which are part of this emerging third wave of the internet, and how this will positively impact the environment.”