  We construct a functor, from the category of schemes to the category of
graded rings, that is an initial object for having a theory of Chern classes
with an additive first Chern class. For any scheme $X$, the graded ring that
our functor associates to $X$ is related to the associated graded ring of the
$\gamma$-filtration on the Grothendieck ring of finite rank locally free
sheaves on $X$ via a Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch type theorem.
