Chaz Schmidt

My name is Chaz Schmidt. You may have seen me online as @ChazSchmidt.

I have a knack for seeing the potential in ideas long before they become mainstream. Maybe it's because I was always the computer kid fixing everyone's things but figuring out tech and how to apply it comes naturally to me.

I've spent more than a decade working with Ethereum and crypto. Along the way, I've had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the industry.

My writing became part of how people learned about decentralized finance (DeFi), and projects I helped build have supplied data, definitions and case studies for academic, legal and institutional research, including work published by the Federal Reserve, IMF, OECD and UNDP.

I like working on the bleeding edge of technology, where people are still figuring out what is actually worth building.

I spend a lot of time understanding a technology's strengths, limitations, and trade-offs, and looking at the systems that led to it. Knowing why a technology exists in the first place helps me think through where it might actually be useful.

I've learned from experience what works and doesn't work. The right technical approach and strategy can make a major difference in growing your idea.

DeFi Pulse

I started using Ethereum in its first year and was contributing to DeFi before the community had even settled on the word DeFi. My work at DeFi Pulse helped explain and legitimize an industry most of the world did not take seriously yet.

Archived DeFi Pulse website from May 1, 2020.

Total Value Locked (TVL), a metric popularized by DeFi Pulse, is still one of the standard ways people measure DeFi today. I wrote detailed technical dives, project histories, and thousands of posts documenting the industry as it developed. My work at DeFi Pulse has been cited and used in research by the Federal Reserve, IMF and OECD, as well as academic research and legal scholarship.

Klima

By 2019, I was looking at climate change as an incentive problem and pushing for carbon credits in DeFi. I was experimenting with ways crypto could fund and coordinate environmental projects, which eventually led me to co-found Klima in 2021.

There is a before and after Klima in the carbon market. Putting carbon credits onchain went from a fringe experiment to a serious part of the conversation about how carbon markets should work. A 2023 Springer case study found that Klima's launch pushed major standards bodies including Verra and Gold Standard to move forward with blockchain technology.

Since launch, the Klima ecosystem has grown to more than 100,000 participants and up to $4 billion in historical transaction volume. A 2026 study found that greater decentralization in Klima was associated with more carbon credits being retired, signaling demand for the verified emissions reductions and removals those credits represent, rather than simply more trading.

Klima's original design was built to bootstrap an onchain carbon market. Running it for years gave the community time to understand its strengths, limitations, and trade-offs in the real world. That experience led to Klima 2.0, which launched on February 24, 2026 as a redesign of the protocol for the next stage of onchain carbon markets.

Read more about my work on Klima.