With his salt & pepper hair, laughs lines, and brown eyes, he doesn’t look like one of the leading blockchain experts in the world. But make no mistake. That’s who he is.

His friends and colleagues call him “Clip” and for the last 15 years, Dr. John Clippinger has worked at both Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab, researching federated identity, the idea that you can be defined by the sum of your data, but that data should not all be stored in the same place. These ideas crystallized sometime in 2008 when the technology known as the blockchain first started to become “a thing”. With David Bollier, Clip edited one of the first books that attempted to explain the potential of the blockchain and self-organizing, distributed systems of governance: “From BitCoin to Burning Man”.

“Our thesis with the book was that centralized entities were failing on a number of fronts. They took to long to get to consensus. Tended to reject the wisdom of crowds and didn’t properly weigh the evidentiary value of experts when coming to decisions.” And most importantly, Clip and his contributing authors, anticipated that due to the failure of centralized systems, trust in government was eroding. The true potential of the Internet was to replace “Big Brother” or a centralized authority with a decentralized authority, one that could do things in an autonomous manner that had previously been reserved for government.

Clip explains. “Today, when you think of the blockchain it is — of course — synonymous with bitcoin, a form of currency that has taken the world by storm. And you also think of very young entrepreneurs, who invested in bitcoin at $.50 or $1.00 and — as a result — have become blockchain millionaires or even billionaires. But what I recognized is that the blockchain was a fundamental technology, one with the potential to change the world in much the same way “the internet” changed everything. Think about bitcoin as like the first browsers. If you were at Netscape in 1994 it was the right place to be at the right time. At the same time, the true applications that could emerge and run on the blockchain have yet to be invented.”

The blockchain enables distributed applications that do not have a single point of failure, that run in an autonomous manner. Also supported is the notion that a smart contract can be set up between two or more parties that don’t know each other, don’t (necessarily) trust each other, to deliver compensation in exchange for proof that a certain piece of work has been accomplished.

John’s fascination with smart contracts, how to define them, how to set them up so they work smoothly and reduce friction with all parties led him to found the Token Commons Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland. The non-profit’s initial focus is on using the blockchain to reduce carbon emissions. This is an (obviously) worthwhile problem. Climate change is an existential threat to our existance as a species.

Clip’s commented:

“One important thing we are doing with the Tokens Commons Foundation is establishing a new protocol we intend to open source. The protocol will first be used by Swytch.io, a project of the Foundation, to award tokens upon proof that renewable energy has been generated and that in so doing C02 emissions are reduced.”

But how would a consumer “know” that the renewable energy they generated — say — actually offset C02 emissions? That’s where Evident Proof comes in. Prosumers (what folks call people who put solar on their roofs or set up a wind farm) need a way to “see” that they’ve done a certain piece of work. That’s where Evident Proof shines in providing an immutable and legally valid proof of evidence — so that it can be integrated into the business and compliance operations of enterprises.

According to Clip, what appeals to him about both companies — Swytch.io and Evident Proof — is that they are elegant solutions to previously intractable problems. For Swytch.io, its about how to get people to come together and work together to solve climate change — on a truly global scale. For Evident Proof, it’s how to enable people to prove they’ve done the work and deserve to be rewarded with a certain number of tokens by a smart contract .

Currently, Clip serves as advisors to Evident Proof, Bancor, and a handful of other companies committed to changing the world.

To learn more about Swytch.io — please go to https://swytch.io. A public token sale is planned for June 12, 2018.

To learn more about Evident Proof — please go to http://evident-proof.com/