IMPT’s delusional theory of change: Keep shopping. Buy offsets
IMPT is a crypto company that aims to save the world through blockchain, tokens, and carbon credits.
Denis Creighton, CEO of IMPT, and Mike English, CTO of IMPT, recently spoke at the World Blockchain Summit in Dubai. During the presentation, Creighton explained that,
“I think the important thing as well is we’re not looking for people to make a significant change in how they go about their day-to-day shopping. Basically, we just wanted them to be socially conscious, that by going through our application and our platform they can actually earn IMPT Tokens which are converted into carbon credits and they immediately start to make an impact into reducing carbon emissions across the world.”
Clearly, this is delusional. Capitalism and over-consumption is driving us to disaster. We urgently need to look at a new economic system, such as Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, or Jason Hickel’s degrowth.
The problem with shopping as usual in the rich countries - and let’s face that is IMPT’s audience - is that with a growth rate of just 3%, the world economy doubles every 24 years. That involves a vast amount of waste, pollution, and environmental destruction. The idea that we can shop our way out of the climate crisis is insane.
And, of course, carbon credits do not actually reduce carbon emissions. In the best case scenario emissions are reduced in one part of the world while emissions continue in another part of the world. The one cancels out the other. It’s a zero sum game.
This best case scenario is a largely theoretical position because there is simply no way of knowing whether a carbon project has really reduced emissions or not - it’s based on a counterfactual baseline about what would have happened if the project had not gone ahead.
There is simply no room for offsets if we are to stand any chance of keeping global heating below 1.5°C.
REDD-Monitor wrote about IMPT in March 2023:
Denis Creighton has been director of 16 companies registered in Ireland. Seven of them are now closed. He is currently director of five companies in Ireland: Green Fusion Limited; Tirmoghan Owners Management Company Limited by Guarantee; AI Tokenomics Limited; Creland Telecoms Limited; and Creighton Advisory Services Limited.
AI Tokenomics Limited is the only shareholder in IMPT Shopping Limited - which is the UK registered company behind the IMPT Token.
Here’s a transcript of the most interesting parts of the presentation in Dubai. I’ve commented on the most egregious statements that English and Creighton make. I think it might be worth preserving this presentation to see how it ages.
Mike English starts IMPT’s presentation:
“Today we’re talking to you guys and thank you for sitting here. We’re also talking to our community, who spend a lot of time browsing over these videos.”
There’s a reason for that. The “community” includes the people who bought IMPT Tokens and are looking for any sign that the IMPT Token is not completely worthless - it’s currently worth US$0.0085:
Marketing and exchanges
English hands over to Creighton to talk about CEXs - centralised exchanges where cryptocurrencies can be bought and sold:
“Yeah erm, I mean we’re already out there on four and we’re talking to the top ten CEXs at the moment as well and the whole idea is, where we want to go and what we want to do, we want to make sure that we’re doing what’s right for our community, but more importantly that it’s right for IMPT and what IMPT is about.”
English explains that there are about 21,000 people in the IMPT community.
“We have a tokenomics of about three billion tokens, one billion of them in issue. And we’re currently going through a growth phase in terms of tech. So for the last two months we haven’t been marketing our concept and, er, that’s all around building out our use case 1, use case 1.5, and use case 2.”
Creighton gives a quick update on marketing:
“Yeah, so we’re very fortunate recently to have hired a new marketing lead and she has come from Binance, and prior to that she was at Genesis. So she understands the world of blockchain and how best to push that.”
On 27 March 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced a lawsuit against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. CFTC accuses Binance of operating illegally in the USA. In a statement, CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam, said, “For years, Binance knew they were violating CFTC rules, working actively to both keep the money flowing and avoid compliance.”
Obviously, René Ackermann, IMPT’s new marketing lead, is not named in the lawsuit, but perhaps her two years working at Binance doesn’t look terribly good on her CV any more.
Creighton continues,
“As Mike said we’ve been holding back a little bit on our marketing and advertising because you can only market a concept for so long. Our use case 2 goes fully live on the 2nd of April and that is the all singing all dancing app from the point of view of being able to enable online shopping and ability to actually get carbon credits as part of that process.”
English tells the audience that there are a lot of positions available with IMPT at the moment. “We’re signing our third or fourth franchise deal here in Dubai this week. So come and talk to us.”
“Trying to resolve an issue like climate change is difficult. We’ve a couple of hundred people in our company, but we need a large community to work with us locally to make this happen.”
Creighton tells us that there were “37 billion tons of carbon emissions last year.”
“The highest in the history of records. So something has to be done about that. And as I always say, ‘Politicians create policy but it’s people who create change.’”
Use case 1: Tokenising carbon credits
“The primary objective of IMPT,” English tells us, “is to tokenise carbon credits.”
English then completely mixes up the voluntary carbon market with the compliance carbon market.
“Carbon credits come from the Kyoto Protocol,” he says.
Actually, the Kyoto Protocol created the clean development mechanism, the disaster under which rich countries could buy Certified Emission Reductions generated from carbon projects in the Global South.
The carbon credits that IMPT is tokenising come from the equally disastrous voluntary carbon market. Many of them are registered on the BioCarbon Registry, a company based in Colombia.
English states that, “All our carbon credits are 100% transparent. They’re all verified projects so they’re UN verified.”
This is simply not true. The BioCarbon Registry is part of the voluntary carbon market and is completely outside the UN system.
Having obtained one of IMPT’s tokenised carbon credits, shoppers can trade the carbon credit or retire it. “That is the most fundamentally important thing about our application,” English says. “The more carbon credits get retired, the more value we are to, er, the environment.”
Use case 1.5: Shopping for carbon credits
“This use case is live, trading at the moment,” English tells us.
“Each subjective is to bring shopping, our first module of shopping, er, this includes 10K partner brands, so our affiliate network has been delivered here. You’re able to earn carbon credits from your shopping and ultimately this helps the environment.”
Again, this simply isn’t true. There is no guarantee that carbon credits genuinely remove carbon from the atmosphere. All the problems of additionality, measurement, permanence, leakage, and non-verifiable counterfactual baselines apply to all carbon projects.
Whether the carbon credit is tokenised makes no difference whatsoever to these problems.
The next slide shows some of IMPT’s affiliate network. Creighton tells us that the timing is perfect, with more people buying online since the COVID-19 pandemic.
English tells us that the slide shows,
“A small selection of our brands, you know Visa, Samsung. The airlines are very interested in us, so when you take a flight you immediately retire the carbon that it took to take that flight. All of these deals are true affiliates but they’re all direct relationships from IMPT to the retailer. So each one of these retailers is handled individually through our affiliate networks.”
Some of these affiliates are very large companies. Yet there has been no media coverage of any of these deals.
English continues,
“We add about a thousand retailers a week from our affiliate networks. As you can see, er, um, there’s variant numbers of brands they come from all the different sectors. So you’ll see flights, accommodation, tech, retail, etc. all the different taxonomies of retail.”
Use case 2: App live on 2 April 2023
“So use case 1 and use case 1.5 are live and we’re currently moving now into use case 2,” English says.
“The key objective of use case 2 is our app tech. So over the next week we will launch on Google and Apple stores and you know again you’ll be able to use your carbon credits, buy carbon credits, to be able to shop. We’re introducing our Soulbound token module and we’re also introducing our sell carbon credits module. So you can trade our carbon credit marketplace, we’ll be live in this edition.”
On 4 April 2023, Denis Creighton sent a message to Telegram explaining that the app was approved but Google Play has “a backlog for listing and have said it could be up to 48 hours”.
On 5 April 2023, I asked IMPT whether there was any further news:
“More updates will come as soon as we have,” IMPT replied, almost immediately.
English explains how the app will work:
“We have our carbon credit list, we have the value of those carbon credits and then we trace your value within our ecosystem. So the more carbon credits you retire, the more you buy, the more points you get, the more Soulbound tokens you get.”
A Soulbound token is a non-transferable non-fungible token.
Use case 3: Loyalty and earning platform
Creighton describes use case 3 as follows:
“We want to get to a position where people are comparing the projects they’re involved in so it becomes part of a socially conscious environment. People will want to actually be able to talk about the impact that they’re making as part of their day-to-day lives for the future of our families.”
English says that,
“Use case 3 we’re launching over the next couple of months. Use case 3 is all about bringing, increasing the community of IMPT members around the world. We will introduce platinum, gold, and silver level. These are built both for loyalty and staking.
“So we built our loyalty engine into our staking engine all built in-house and the objective here is to bring our community in to work with us but also to pay them for that time in terms of our staking. So we have three different membership levels our platinum, gold, and silver. As you can see, you need to 300,000 IMPT Tokens for up to 12 months. There is quarterly exits for people who want to exit early.
“Our platinum membership club will be limited to 1,000 members. That’s filling up quite quickly at the moment from what we hear. That will be live, the staking element of that will be live next month. In terms of gold, very similar, we ask you to stake 150,000 tokens. We limit our numbers to 2,000 and we give it 12% APY. Just on our platinum membership we give 17% APY and then on silver we give 10% APY.”
English explains that the platinum membership was launched this week on the IMPT website.
“Platinum is a significant growth area for us. These shoppers come into our company, they work with us, they spend time within our company, they attend our monthly meetings, they work with us on strategy, they work with us on decision making.”
The next slide shows more of IMPT’s affiliate partners. English explains that,
“IMPT currently has about 20,000 brands, about one billion individual skews that you can buy from. We haven’t counted them by the way but our brands bring in x amount of skews each.”
I’m afraid I don’t know what a “skew” is. But presumably each brand represents, on average, 50,000 “skews”.
UPDATE - 6 April 2023: A “skew” is a SKU, or Stock Keeping Unit - a scannable bar code. Thanks to Kathleen McCroskey for pointing this out.
Use case 4: Master franchisee
By now, we’re into the realms of fantasy. The following is a transcript of Creighton and English’s explanation of use case 4. They don’t mention the names of any of the companies that they are “working with” and “this has only been released” (whatever that means) in the last couple of days.
English explains what use case 4 is all about:
“That was the first phase of the project. The second phase is much more intricate. And that’s why we’ve been calming down on our marketing effort over the last two months. And the next phase as I described earlier is rolling our platform out to individual retail all over the world.
“So for instance here in Dubai, we’re working with a master franchisee who owns a significant number of retail and they will grow our brand to individual segments of the retail industry within Dubai.
“So in theory, what you should be able to do is use your IMPT online to purchase all your online purchases and then offline to purchase within your local pharmacy, your local hotel, your local bar, your local cafe.
“This is very important to us, this is one of the clinchers for us to try and make a difference here, having master franchisees within each of our countries enables us to grow rapidly.”
Creighton explains that,
“So basically what we have here is the B2B element of our use case. I mean prior to this it’s been very much B2C, so with the retail brands it becomes a B2B2C and this as well is very much a B2B and a B2B2C as well. So I hope that didn’t confuse you. But the whole idea here is the more franchisees that we get, the more brands that come on board, the more people that engage, the more impact that we’re actually making on the planet and to the environment.”
English again:
“There is really zero cost to becoming a master franchisee. You just need to hold a number of IMPT Tokens. Once you have those tokens, they are staked, so you continuously earn an income on your tokens during the period of your master franchisee.
“That said, this has only been released in the last couple of days but we’ve had a lot of success in this area and a lot of people coming on board. In terms of our regional master franchisees these guys work in regions outside of cities, so areas where you have a number of towns, a large area so bring regional franchisees in, and then we have city franchisees. All of these work under the master franchisee of the country and they operate within cities.
“So for instance our master franchisee in the UAE has looked to take on the entire UAE with their team so there isn’t an opportunity here necessarily, but in other countries, other regions, or other cities, there’s a significant opportunity.
“Again, these, you do not pay for these franchises this is a staked opportunity so it’s really using the utility of the IMPT Token. And that was the primary objective of us moving to the blockchain. The first problem we solved in the blockchain as this defines was tokenising carbon credits. The reason we had to do that you know from our perspective was there’s a lot of fraud in the carbon credit market. We’ve stopped that in terms of creating an NFT, minting that NFT, making it visible on a ledger on the blockchain.
“But that’s only one usage. The next usages of our token are in terms of getting this out to the world. Our tokens are now used to expose IMPT to countries, cities, regions and allow people to come out and support us.
“Climate change is not something that one company can fix. There needs to be a huge amount of effort, a huge community to make this a reality.
“We’re here for the next few days guys, we’d love to chat to anybody in retail, if you come from a carbon credit market background we’re very interested in signing new deals on carbon credits. We’ve done a €50 million deal this year. We’re the biggest player on the blockchain. Nobody gets near us. Other blockchains work off retired carbon credits, we only work off active web3 carbon credits that are digitised and tokenised.
“So people from a carbon credit background, a retail background, and obviously the master franchisee area we’d love to talk to you.”
This is an extremely long description of a ponzi scheme, pyramid selling.
There is of course no initial value, and no secondary, ongoing value, other than hype and conning increasing numbers of mugs.
BTW, skews = SKUs, products with barcodes, just a transcription error.