The first capability we built at Earthchain was the ability to tokenise Gold Standard Voluntary Emissions Reduction certificates onto our Carbon Ledger. This gives us the means to provide easily accessible sub-tonne “fractional” carbon offsets while retaining full provenance tracking of every single gram.
Any business serious about using carbon offsets to compensate for their residual emissions needs to ensure they are funding projects of a sufficiently high quality. Due diligence is strongly advised to prevent any reputation damage associated with poor quality carbon offsets and to ensure that their investment is genuinely making the claimed positive difference to both GHG emissions and the communities concerned.
Buying carbon offsets from intermediaries can lead to other risks – such as double counting – where there is no auditable record that “your” carbon offset isn’t also being claimed by another party.
At Earthchain we work with Gold Standard as our partner to ensure every emissions reduction project we provide to our customers is both certified and documented. This gives us confidence that the carbon offsets we provide are definitively “high quality”.
Every carbon offset transaction we process is tracked on our Carbon Ledger – powered by the low-energy Stellar blockchain. When we buy carbon offsets by the tonne from Gold Standard, we record the tokenisation into 1 gram units as a ledger entry. Blockchain records are public, transparent and immutable – unlike a private database, every transaction we make can be viewed on the blockchain and can be audited and scrutinised.
This allows every Earthchain customer to prove any claim they make with regard to emissions they have offset. Each offset we provide is delivered with a serial number which represents the transaction hash on the blockchain. From there, the transparent records enable an auditor to track the provenance of the offset all the way back to Gold Standard‘s registry and to the certification documentation provided during implementation and monitoring of the project and managed by Sustaincert.
We retire every of a carbon offset we provide by de-authorising it in the end user’s Stellar account. This prevents the offset being re-sold or transferred or otherwise traded any further than the end user – closing any risk of double-counting downstream from Earthchain.
Have a look at our Carbon Ledger by examining a record for yourself. The data presented is driven by our blockchain records, and enhanced through tracing back to Gold Standard and Sustaincert to give the full picture of the provenance. You can click through the ledger and account links to see the original blockchain records.
You can view a record for yourself here:
https://portal.earthchain.ch/ledger/0946f8b5043d348c18ce5e2a6e56f014a65172c48c8e8c8f2cf2916f734f8cc7
