> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.spirals.so/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# 🌀 Spirals: What, Why, How?

<img src="https://mintcdn.com/spirals/icKBCxI9UzuhkEEY/images/trees-banner.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=icKBCxI9UzuhkEEY&q=85&s=7b9c7cbb8d99ca915067d792fdfd7f3a" alt="forest" width="1858" height="466" data-path="images/trees-banner.png" />

**What?** A community-funded, expertly advised ecosystem funding high impact
climate projects.

**Why?** Climate disaster is driven by broken incentives; we can do better.

**How?** Spirals building green money legos for infrastructure players to bake
this into the rails.

<Tip>
  Joining Spirals means opting in to a new economic paradigm that values natural
  capital. Choosing a world with positive externalities where economic and
  ecological incentives are aligned.
</Tip>

### What is Spirals?

Spirals finances climate impact through yield earned on tokens like ETH & USDC.
When users & protocols deposit into our token vaults, they get issued an
equivalent amount of green tokens (gTokens). These gTokens represent the
original deposited asset earning passively for funding climate projects, and
shares of your certified on-chain climate impact through Spirals.

TODO: link to green tokens

Defining climate impact is something we take very seriously, looking far beyond
carbon markets and beyond carbon. More on that
[here.](https://medium.com/spirals-protocol/our-approach-to-climate-impact-focus-on-causes-not-symptoms-e402582cae3a)

*Read more on our blog:*

<Card title="Introducing Spirals" icon="medium" color="black" href="https://medium.com/spirals-protocol/introducing-spirals-b1b619824167">
  Medium
</Card>

### Why do we need better incentives?

Currently, being climate-positive is at odds with financial success. This just
scratches the surface. We've been diving into incentives driving the climate
crisis and outline the most acute ones in the next section.

**Broken Incentives cause systemic climate problems**

<Card title="Maximizing Climate Impact" icon="cactus" color="" href="/climate-impact/maximizing-climate-impact" />

### How does Spirals build better incentives?

At a high level, Spirals aligns financial and ecological outcomes by tapping
into the returns generated by natural capital as an asset class.

People will opt for earth-positive actions only once they are easier, cheaper
and tastier. To get there, we believe we need a major recalibration of
incentives. The blockchain is a set of tools we can use to experiment with
incentives.

If this sounds interesting, we hope you join us in a journey through these docs
as we break down how we make this possible.

#### Spirals Ecosystem

The Spirals ecosystem has several key stakeholders:

* **Projects** are financed proportional to member allocation preferences. In
  return for capital, these projects return tokenized natural assets.

* **Backers** deposit tokens and receive back a green version of the token. This
  green derivative, or Impact Token, can (1) always be redeemed or (2)
  transferred & used like any other token.

* **Experts** in climate can join our
  [Climate Council](/climate-impact/climate-council). They have authority to
  verify (or remove) climate projects.

* **Buyers** purchase and retire carbon credits to claim offsets.

The ecosystem creates a regenerative flywheel. We'll go deep in later sections.

<Note>🎉 Jump to [Green Tokens](/green-tokens/supported-tokens)</Note>