How’s your green finance IQ? Are you up with crypto, down with green bonds? What’s the difference between sustainable finance, ESG investing and impact investing? And how is your Web3, blockchain and AI savvy?
Pass the above tests? Then what about DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, khaki bonds, double materiality, green shorting, impact insurance, stablecoins and smart contracts?
You can look up the definitions of these and other terms making up the lingo of green finance — and you had better do so quickly, if you haven’t already. As I heard more than once at GreenBiz’s recent GreenFin 22 conference, this lexicon refers to practices, products and strategies that are in play today — “FutureFi” is happening right now, not at some far-off date.
The main driver is cryptocurrency, digital currency that uses cryptography such as blockchain to manage transactions. “Crypto is money built for the internet,” was the speakers’ mantra at “The Future of Finance” panel I attended. “It’s the new baseline for the transformation of value,” asserted moderator David Bennell, chief sustainability officer of Hyphen Global AG. This is the next generation of value to manage assets, whether stored or transferred: a digital token economy.
The premise is that digitalization makes investment more efficient — more available to more people, with more transparency via blockchain accounting. Just as the rewiring of the internet, a transformation called Web3, is aimed at decentralizing monopoly…
