Impact Oracle is a price oracle designed to incentivize companies to be more sustainable by creating an opportunity for growing their bottom line, market appeal, and/or market share. By compensating positive impact and offsetting negative externalities a new metric is introduced for businesses to become more efficient and sustainable.

IO itself is a value gateway (oracle) on the blockchain. IO aggregates live data from existing blockchains, markets, and a DAO. One can simply look at the IO as a directory of definitions and prices of different impacts that is constantly updated like a stock price dashboard. But better yet, IO is applicable to businesses as it connects with existing enterprise data and software.

IO is meant for anyone looking to sell their product, with impact accounted for, but also for companies looking to streamline their impact accounting and offsetting while growing their bottom line.

Oracle Services

Just as any exchange aggregates price data from multiple validators across the system, IO will work as an oracle for impact data and pricing. This is different to a regular price oracle as IO will track both pricing from existing projects and create pricing for yet to be made projects.

Carbon credits, green bonds and other financial products will be tracked and connected with IO. Especially financial products that are on-chain. Many ReFi initiatives are creating tokens that compensate impact and creating a de facto pricing for impact. Collecting this information, analyzing it and using it to price future impact and connect it with markets is imperative to grow the impact space.

Some externalities might have different prices depending on the intensity of the industry (farming emitting CO2 as opposed to coal plants). These can be adjusted by the DAO deciding to give different offsetting pricing or positive externality price according to location, timing, etc.

IO can also be used to avoid double counting and verification of many impact assets that are currently disconnected from each other. This creates greater reliability, transparency and credibility to impact-oriented systems. This will depend on validators that confrim and track impact-oriented transactions and initiatives.

Validation will work similarly to Chainlink systems where information committed is reliable, transparent and verified by multiple source. If information committed to the IO is found to be unreliable or corrupt, it can be disputed and harms the reputation and wallet of the validators.

Connecting with the Impact Oracle

Connecting to the IO requires a unique ID associated with a user. This ID can be associated with a wallet or identity. The unique ID must be KYC verified and allows the user to keep an account of their previous transactions, preferences, connected legacy systems, etc. The ID houses a track record (e.g., what transactions they have completed), authority (e.g., licensing, certifications, etc.), and reputation (e.g., star rating system, user feedback and comments).

Any company that offers a good or service (Farms, transportation services, manufacturers, etc.) has the option to either connect their legacy systems or fill out an impact questionnaire. Each question will increasingly require a higher resolution of data, and in turn, make the product more transparent. The better the transparency, the more accurate the pricing and score. The better the score, the larger the potential profit.

This does not necessarily mean that a very transparent product is very sustainable. For example, if the product is a vegetable, and the farmer uses a harmful pesticide, that product will be scored lower than a product with an organic, sustainable pesticide. But still, transparency will be scored higher than not answering the question at all (more about scoring and calculation).

The unique ID is associated with a record of products and correlates ongoingly with prices on the IO. That record can be kept and updated as the company likes, and the price can vary depending on the product, service, or industry standard. The IO will partner with blockchain companies, data aggregators, and standard setters to create a better flow of data and connections between existing blockchains and the IO.