“Sustainability is important to me and is at the core of the Hedera Network. We want to reduce carbon emissions and make an impact across different commodities and assets.”

Biography:

Wes Geisenberger is an American climate and tech investor and the vice president of sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) at the HBAR Foundation. He’s in charge of deploying grant funding and creating open-source tooling, research and development for the organization. HBAR is the native cryptocurrency of the Hedera network.

Geisenberger went to Georgetown University and George Mason University of Virginia, where he studied government and international politics, economics and history between 2009 and 2013. He spent most of his working life at Oracle, where he started in business development for Nada and Doe and moved to a consultancy role for the public sector to apply emerging technologies to smart cities and citizen experience. 

In 2019, he quit Oracle to move to Hedera Hashgraph in September of the same year, when he became director of business development for the Americas markets. He worked with governing council members, applications and ecosystem partners to scale Hedera’s growing economy and focus on sustainability, transportation and tokenization. He’s been widely involved with the energy and climate markets to promote policies that shape a green and carbon-neutral vision at Finance for Biodiversity Initiative and Global Blockchain Business Council. Since October 2021, he’s been the vice president of sustainability and ESG at the HBAR Foundation, where he leads the Sustainable Impact Fund focused on climate markets, energy and supply chain-related areas.

Geisenberger’s 2022:

The HBAR Foundation was created at the end of 2021 and was soon allocated a fund of over $2 billion to support the adoption and expansion of the Hedera ecosystem. In 2022, Geisenberger solidified his work at the HBAR Foundation, bringing Hedera to the forefront of discussions around the sustainable economy. He believes the Hedera ecosystem should be based on providing financial, technical and marketing incentives to projects built on the platform.

In March, the HBAR Foundation Sustainable Impact Fund announced it would allocate over $100 million to help solve some of the issues linked to the climate crisis, addressing transparency, auditability and efficiency of the industry’s impact on the global environment via the Hedera platform. A $400-billion fund was allocated to incentivize the crypto economy, metaverse projects and the fintech sector, working with the Blockchain Council Members and independent startups to support cryptocurrency adoption and tokenized solutions across these industries. In September 2022, HBAR was added to the list of cryptocurrencies that can be traded on Coinbase.

Geisenberger’s 2023:

In 2023, the HBAR Foundation vice president will continue to focus on expanding the Hedera ecosystem, starting the year by bringing Web3 and carbon-negative conversations to the Davos conference in January. Hedera positions itself as the ecosystem built to help grow a sustainable future based on ReFi, or regenerative finance — a tool to solve systemic problems such as climate change. Davos could be the stepping stone that encourages Hedera’s leverage of innovative peer-to-peer financial tools and services to support regenerative projects, including biodiversity management, ecosystem protection, and carbon and waste removal.

The goal for the year will be to improve the network scale and enable support for theoretically unlimited nonfungible tokens by adopting the Merkle structure. Furthermore, resources and funds will be allocated to natively support use cases from ESG, finance and gaming, which are the pillars of the Web3 ecosystem.