Hi all!

Sequester is a toolkit that will allow any chain in the Polkadot ecosystem to easily use their transaction fees to buy carbon-backed assets and retire associated carbon credits in less than 1 day of development time.

Since Polkadot-based chains are fee-optional, transaction fees currently being used as an anti-spam mechanism can be leveraged to make every transaction on Polkadot carbon negative, without requiring any changes to the user experience. We propose a common good parathread on Polkadot, named Sequester, that provides the functionality of aggregating transaction fees, exchanging them into carbon-backed tokens, and retiring underlying carbon offsets that meet the community’s specifications.

The Bitgreen team will be our initial ecosystem partner and will be responsible for bridging Carbon Credits on-chain in a sustainable manner. As Sequester is Common Good functionality, it is important to note that it will be fully un-opinionated about where funds donated through the Sequester chain go. Specifically, once additional ESG tokens are onboarded to Sequester, teams will be able to configure the allocation of their funds with a single XCM to the Sequester Common Good chain.

We completed our first [W3F grant](https://github.com/w3f/Grant-Milestone-Delivery/pull/469#issuecomment-1181534057) earlier this summer and have joined the Substrate Builders Program. The development in this grant will fund our 1st SBP Milestone. For more context on our work, check out our [White Paper](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15L7bO8dnx1XvWpS6ZRi4wEmSTV5yEnON_wEhaGJnHpQ/edit#heading=h.bxwnnfsbak5p) and [Polkadot Decoded Announcement with Bitgreen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyPPVUK3wlI).

This grant will fund the creation of a common good chain that receives tokens from other chains' treasuries, swaps them via a DEX into carbon backed assets, and retires the underlying assets on chain. This will be tested on Rococo, with our partners from W3F, Acala, and Bitgreen.

Please see our [Treasury Proposal Document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hfmXwe6Gli92YKr5J6BCffGWU9EmKUF-FkSbLs2w-OQ/edit#) for details:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hfmXwe6Gli92YKr5J6BCffGWU9EmKUF-FkSbLs2w-OQ/edit#

Thanks,
The Sequester Team (Brendan, Ethan, and Daniel)



- Sequester is a toolkit that helps Polkadot chains use transaction fees to buy carbon-backed assets and retire carbon credits.
- The Bitgreen team will be the initial partner for Sequester and will help bring Carbon Credits on-chain.
- Sequester is a common good functionality and does not decide where the funds go.
- The team has received a grant and joined the Substrate Builders Program.
- The grant will fund the creation of a chain that swaps tokens for carbon-backed assets and retires them on-chain.

#1279 Sequester Common Good Chain - Milestone 1