Climate & Carbon Markets
The Registry of Registries for global carbon markets
How the World Bank, IETA, the Government of Singapore, and Chia Network built a unified, cross-checkable source of truth for the global voluntary carbon market.
The problem
Carbon registries operate in silos, making cross-registry checks impossible. Unscrupulous developers could double-register the same project across multiple standards bodies and collect a credit from each.
What we built
Chia DataLayer commits each registry's data to an on-chain fingerprint that registries can independently recompute and verify without centralized reliance. Verified credits mint as tradable tokens.
Current status
Live with Verra, Gold Standard, the UNFCCC Clean Development Mechanism, and the Kingdom of Bhutan connected. A formal ISO standard for the data model is under final review.
Read the full case study
Situation
After the Paris Agreement opened the door to voluntary carbon credit trading, demand and supply both grew, but no shared way to check any of it followed. A registry can vouch for its own ledger but has no visibility into anyone else's, so a project developer could in principle register the same hectare of forest with two or three standards bodies. Buyers were left doing their own diligence, reading hundreds of pages of documentation per deal, settling through escrow agents who added days to every trade, and trusting a registry's manual paper stamp for retirement. The World Bank's read: the industry didn't need another registry, it needed a way to check the ones that already existed against each other.
What we built
A shared database or a private blockchain both meant one party controlling the reference point for a global market. That left a public, decentralized ledger, which is immutable and produces a transparent audit trail, but is deliberately bad at storing large amounts of data. Chia Network built DataLayer to solve that: each registry keeps its own data, and when it's ready to publish an update, it reduces that data to a single fingerprint and writes that fingerprint on-chain. Other registries can independently recompute the same fingerprint from their own copy of the data and compare it to what was posted. If the two match, the update is verifiably authentic, without either registry having to take the other's word for it.
The Climate Tokenization Engine closes the last gap by optionally turning each verified project's credits into a tradable token, so a credit trades directly between buyer and seller, no escrow agent required. Retiring a credit permanently removes that token from circulation, an event that's recorded and timestamped for good. Since the ledger itself couldn't be part of the emissions problem it was solving, the Chia blockchain implements the Proof of Space and Time consensus, consuming a fraction of the energy required by legacy proof-of-work blockchains.
Impact
Before
- Buyer vets a seller alone, continent away
- Hundreds of documentation pages per deal
- Paper certificate, single registry's word
- Escrow agent required, days to settle
- No way to check other registries
With CAD Trust
- Status checkable against every connected registry
- Metadata standardized & queryable via API
- Credits are auditable as on-chain tokens
- Peer-to-peer trade via Chia Offers, no escrow
- Cross-registry double counting becomes visible
Once enough registries are connected, the absence of a project from CAD Trust becomes informative in its own right, either it's not yet onboarded, or it has something to hide.