Algorand Foundation Announces Grant to SEA

SEA is a Scottish nonprofit organisation using blockchain to provide solutions to the deepening environmental crisis – the startup is building what it calls the “SEA Nexus” – a global network for environmental data, which decentralises and widens access to the way we understand and measure the planet.

The Algorand Foundation – the body responsible for driving innovation and development in the Algorand ecosystem – announced today that it has made a grant towards the development of the SEA Nexus, a new blockchain project aiming to decentralise environmental data.

James Birchall, founder of SEA, said:

“It’s a huge step forward. The grant means we can be ambitious with the scope of the data we want to gather, we can build faster, and we can reach more people to get them involved in using the apps. It’s basically the biggest citizen science project in history”.

Android and iOS apps, a web app, and a complex chain of AIs will allow people around the globe to submit observations about their environment. In addition, an API will allow research organisations, universities and other institutions to plug their existing data streams into the Nexus. “We’re partnered with some of the largest ocean protection organisations in the world, people like Sea Shepherd, Coral Reef Alliance, Gili Eco Trust, PADI Aware Foundation, and Stellenbosch University – by the end of 2022 we aim to be processing over two million data submissions per day”.

The Nexus will monitor climate, deforestation, species presence/absence, pollution, land use, wildfires and more, searching for early signs of emerging environmental crises. “We’re seeing an increase in environmental feedback loops, individual phenomena which combine to form spirals of ecosystem degradation. For example – carbon emissions raise temperatures, ice melts, methane is released, methane increases temperatures, more ice melts, more methane, and so on. If we could take a wide view, see all the factors at play, and extract potential  patterns, we might have a chance at spotting these loops before they get out of control.”

The project is nonprofit, and fully open source, meaning that developers and climate tech startups can build on top of the SEA Nexus, using its publicly accessible data and open source code to build new tools and solutions in the fight against climate crisis. “We’re providing the building blocks for global warning systems, data visualisations, newswires, prediction mechanisms, lobbying tools, fact-checkers, trend analysis tools, and thousands of other innovations”, explains Birchall.

Prior to their new relationship with Algorand, SEA launched in early 2021 on BSC, focusing on decentralizing ocean research via their environmental kickstart platform SEAstarter and raising financial resources for its partners Sea Shepherd, Coral Reef Alliance, Oceanic Preservation Society, Gili Eco Trust, PADI Aware Foundation, FishAct, Greenwave and 5 Gyres. The organisation is not-for-profit, and the code and data of the SEA Nexus will be 100% open source, allowing for the future development of an array of tools and resources drawing from a unified, global network of ecosystem measurement.