TEMPLE GARDENS
I build companies in DeFi × Climate Finance.
Sometimes I help others navigate it.
Co-founder of Offsetra (2018), KlimaDAO (2021), and Carbonmark (2023).
WHAT I'VE BUILT
Where I cut my teeth. Offsetra traded carbon and built foundational research into the carbon intensity of blockchain infrastructure — the energy and emissions profile of Proof of Work versus Proof of Stake — released as an open-source emissions calculator. The work shaped the early conversation around crypto's environmental footprint and underpinned much of what came after.
Co-founded. Zero to one in a market that didn't yet exist — the kind of disruption where the first one through the door got bloody. KlimaDAO put carbon credits on-chain at meaningful scale and made the voluntary market look hard at tokenization, catalysing a wave of work that followed. I led the strategy and execution to spin its market technology out into a standalone company, freeing the DAO to do what it does best: operate in DeFi.
The spin-out, and the lesson. Klima taught us that tech alone doesn't move a market — the commercial infrastructure has to be there too. Carbonmark exists to build it: $3M seed, scaling demand for on-chain liquidity in climate markets. I provide ongoing financial oversight and strategic support to the executive team.
WHAT I THINK
The standards bodies, the rating agencies, the certification regimes — much of the infrastructure built to give the voluntary carbon market credibility now functions to keep new entrants and new ideas out. Bureaucracy is performing as a substitute for trust, and trust has not improved.
I don't think this is malicious. I think it's the natural drift of any system that conflates caution with rigour. But it is killing the thing it claims to protect. Climate finance needs more experiments, not fewer; more capital allocated to ambitious bets, not less; more tolerance for mistakes made in good faith, not more committees.
Most strategy in this space is incremental — the next quarter, the next round, the next standard. The work worth doing starts at the other end. Play the tape forward to the outcome you actually want — the climate-finance system that works, the company that's worth building, the market that should exist — and backwards-induct from there. Most of what looks ambitious in the present is just the honest first step of a plan that takes itself seriously.
GET IN TOUCH
If you're navigating something genuinely novel in climate finance — a tokenization strategy, a market structure that doesn't yet exist, a DAO that's outgrown itself, a thesis that needs pressure-testing — I'm happy to hear from you.
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