🌳 3 Carbon credits tokens that you can buy, HODL, or offset.
🌳 3 Carbon credits tokens that you can buy, HODL, or offset.
5 min read
Introduction
In the last couple of years, after munching on random podcasts and a failed attempt to learn ukulele during lockdown time, I started falling into the crypto rabbit hole. Though still in the baby steps, main takeaway is that there is always a new technology to solve an old problem, no matter how weird it first sounded.
These magic internet money, like it or not, are decentralizing the financial industry, digitalizing art ownership, and automatizing organization. Thankfully, I also learned that blockchain and digital encryption technology can also contribute to solving climate change, by tokenizing and democratizing carbon credits (read my previous article on carbon credit).
Carbon credits are currently selling like hotcakes, wanted by lots of companies to offset emissions and achieve climate neutrality. However, the legacy carbon markets are very fragmented, available only through retailers or middlemen in the network. By tokenizing carbon credits, we can open the distribution and make it accessible for anyone with an internet connection.
By owning a carbon token, we can be both a climate activist and investor, imagine being Greta Thurnberg and Larry Fink (of Black Rock) at the same time. Tokenizing verified carbon credits in smart contracts not only made it accessible, but it also adds a compostability feature, making it programmable for limitless new use cases, like a green lego block 🧱.
To give you some examples, here are 3 carbon tokens that are hot in the investment climate right now (pun intended):
*Disclaimer: this is not financial advice, DYOR (Do your own research).
1. UPCO2 - crypto saves the rainforest
UPCO2 is a carbon credit token issued by the Universal Protocol Alliance, a group of crypto companies with a mission to digitize and tokenize every asset class. Every token is backed by a certified carbon credit which represent 1 tonne of CO2 equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere.
UPCO2 focuses on credits from REDD+ projects which aims to preserve rainforests around the world. UPCO2 can be bought and hodl for long term investment, or burned and retired to offset our carbon emission. It is now available for sale in Uphold or Bittrex.
Before rolling up your sleeves trying to save the rainforest (and maybe the orangutans too 🐵), read more about UPCO2 here.
2. MCO2 by MOSS
Another up-and-coming token in this space is MCO2. This carbon credit token is issued by MOSS, a Brazil-based climate tech company that aims to preserve the environment through blockchain technology, which also created an Amazon forest NFT 🖼️. 1 MCO2 is backed by 1 carbon credit that is stored in a public ledger, making it open and transparent for anyone to view in Etherscan.
MCO2 also deflects the critics of high carbon emission tied to the mining of crypto assets, as every MCO2 token minted was ofsseted with an equal amount of carbon credits, making it carbon neutral. The supply of MCO2 tokens is capped based on the carbon credits stored in the protocol, and the real-time value of the circulating and retired MCO2 tokens can also be seen in a coin explorer.
MCO2 is now available for sale in major exchanges such as Coinbase or Gemini. Before hitting that buy button, read their white paper here 📰.
3. Toucan protocol -Regenerative finance
Toucan, a community-based project, not just tokenized carbon credits, but also built a carbon pool called the Base Carbon Tonne (BCT). User can deposit their Toucan carbon tokens into a liquidity pool that can be used for other purposes such as DeFi, DAOs (already used by Klima Dao), NFTs, and even the metaverse 💻.
Although BCT was only launched at the end of 2021, it is already trading at more than $2 Billion dollars (2x than the traditional carbon markets). Since it is built on the Polygon network, BCT has much lower emissions than the Bitcoin/ Ethereum network thanks to its Proof of Stake concept (less than 0.001% of Bitcoin energy usage)⚡.
Toucan is just getting started, it has a long-term vision to create the infrastructure or money legos for regenerative finance (ReFI), a new way to solve the climate challenges.
Find out more from their mirror article here (The article is already valued at around 11 ETH or $33,000 at the time this post was written 💸).
Conclusion: HODL on for the climate
These are just a few examples. There are also other interesting carbon token projects to follow such as the Carbon Utility Token (CUT) and Single earth, or the Bitcoin Zero which is a derivative of Bitcoin that is retired carbon credits in the minting process making it a carbon-neutral Bitcoin.
In conclusion, I hope ownership changes our behavior. As the theory of the tragedy of the commons suggests, most of the time our self-interests are larger than the common good. Logically you will not want to trash your own garden, so if you own a piece of the climate, you also don’t want to mess with it either.
Token economics could be a new solution, using ownership written in code to nudge people to act responsibly for the long-term sustainability of our planet. No matter in what shape or form, we now have a new hope to finance various projects to solve the climate challenge ☀️.
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