A real-factor emissions engine for private portfolios. A voluntary and compliance SREC valuation layer. And the on-chain infrastructure to turn every ton of avoided carbon into a cryptographically-provable, tradeable, retireable digital asset.
Prices via CoinGecko. On-chain carbon tokens trade on Uniswap (Ethereum, Polygon), SushiSwap, and Raydium (Solana). Any wallet can hold. Any wallet can retire.
Emission factors come from EPA eGRID 2023 (electricity, by subregion), the EPA GHG Emission Factors Hub (fuel + gas), DEFRA 2024 (aviation), and the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index. Offset price bands come from Ecosystem Marketplace's State of the VCM 2025, Trove Research, and MSCI Carbon Markets. SREC prices come from SRECTrade, Karbone, and PJM-GATS. Every constant has a source. Nothing is estimated in-code.
Compute Scope 1 (direct fuel + process), Scope 2 (grid electricity + cloud compute proxied through grid factor), and Scope 3 (business travel + hotel + headcount overhead) for any entity.
Every MWh of renewable generation becomes a REC. State-by-state price tables let you size the delta between voluntary markets ($4–$8) and compliance markets ($42–$335) — the actual monetization opportunity.
Given a net emissions gap, recommend an offset portfolio using the current voluntary-market price bands per credit category. Default weighting favors durable removals; every mix is editable.
Real portfolio data stays local (gitignored). A parallel *.example.json lineage powers the public dashboard so the engine can be demonstrated without leaking real utility bills or entity names.
Roll every entity into a single balance sheet: gross emissions, SREC-avoided, net offset gap, cost bands, monetization value. Group by SPV, jurisdiction, or asset class. Export as JSON for LP reports.
Five commands. No cloud dependency. Runs on any machine with Node 20+.
On-chain carbon tokens (BCT, NCT, KLIMA, MCO2, REGEN) trade 24/7 on Uniswap and equivalent DEXs — anyone with a wallet has a live order book. Fiat-cleared voluntary and compliance carbon still flows through gated institutional venues. Here is the complete map of where price discovery happens today.
A single solar array or battery can earn revenue from six or seven different markets simultaneously. The optimization problem — which market to bid into at any given hour — is where energy asset owners leave the most money on the table. Here is the complete map.
Locational Marginal Prices in the seven US ISOs (PJM, CAISO, ERCOT, NYISO, ISO-NE, MISO, SPP) plus ENTSO-E in Europe. Energy sold at 5-minute or hourly clearing prices, node-specific.
Payments to guarantee an asset will be available during peak load. PJM RPM, ISO-NE FCM, NYISO ICAP, CAISO Resource Adequacy. $50-$400/MW-day depending on zone.
Frequency regulation, spinning reserves, synchronous condensers, black start. Sub-second response = highest $/MW. Batteries dominate frequency reg — 40x the revenue of energy arbitrage in some ISOs.
Paid to reduce load on request. Emergency DR, economic DR, and interruptible tariffs. PJM's Emergency Load Response pays $60-$110/MWh during events.
Aggregated distributed batteries + solar + smart thermostats bidding into wholesale markets as one virtual asset. Tesla Autobidder, Sunrun ConnectedSolutions, Voltus, CPower, Enel X.
Renewable Energy Certificates track the environmental attributes of clean generation. Voluntary REC = $1-$8. State compliance SREC = $22-$335 depending on state RPS. European GOs = €5-€20.
ITC = 30% investment tax credit on eligible energy assets (Section 48). PTC = production tax credit per-kWh generated (Section 45). Post-IRA transferability lets a project sell tax credits to a corporate buyer for cash — new $10B+ market.
Post-IRA production tax credits. 45V = up to $3/kg for clean hydrogen. 45Q = up to $180/tCO2 for carbon capture. 45X = advanced manufacturing credits for solar cells, wafers, batteries, wind components.
Companies buy credits voluntarily to make claims. $2.7B cleared in 2024 across Verra, Gold Standard, Puro.earth, ACR, CAR. Nature-based ($5-$18), soil ($12-$30), biochar ($130-$240), DAC ($400-$1000).
Regulated cap-and-trade. EU-ETS ($60-$100/tCO2), UK ETS, California C&T ($30-$40), RGGI (~$20), Chinese pilots, WCI. This is where the volume trades — $900B+ cleared in 2024.
Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. Airlines must retire CORSIA-eligible credits against their post-2019 emissions growth. Only Verra, Gold Standard, ACR, and CAR credits with specific vintage rules qualify.
Retail-rate export credits for behind-the-meter solar. State-by-state rules — CA's NEM 3.0 dropped export value 75% in 2023. Behind-the-meter rooftop still the economics floor for most sites.
The voluntary carbon market cleared roughly $2.7B in transactions in 2024. Compliance markets on top of that added another $900B in traded value across EU-ETS, California C&T, RGGI, and Chinese pilots. But the settlement rails underneath — how a credit is registered, sold, transferred, and retired — still run on siloed PDF-and-spreadsheet infrastructure. That is why every step below is a real bottleneck, not a hypothetical one.
A forestry, biochar, or DAC operator submits a project design document to a registry (Verra, Gold Standard, Puro.earth, CAR). Third-party verifiers audit. Registry issues credits with a serial number and vintage year. Turnaround: 6-24 months per issuance.
Buyer works with a broker (Xpansiv, ClearBlue, South Pole, Anew) to source. Every credit is priced per-project, per-vintage, per-methodology. There's no single order book. Bid/ask spreads on the same underlying can differ 3-5x across brokers.
Verra and Gold Standard hold the credit in a private account. Ownership transfer means the registry re-assigns the serial to a new account. No wallet. No native transfer. Cross-registry moves usually cost the credit its provenance chain.
To claim the offset, buyer's registry account marks the serial "retired" with a reason string. That string ends up in an ESG report as a PDF attachment. There is no independent, machine-verifiable receipt.
Same reduction claimed by the host country's NDC and separately sold as a voluntary credit. Or the same MWh of clean generation claimed both as an SREC and as a Scope 2 reduction. Corresponding Adjustment rules exist on paper. Enforcement is a mailing list.
Which projects are additional? Which forestry pool burned in a wildfire and quietly stopped delivering avoided emissions? Buyers rely on secondary raters (Sylvera, BeZero, Renoster). None have on-chain records. Ratings can revise years after purchase, silently.
The people trying to solve this today — Toucan, KlimaDAO, Moss, Flowcarbon, Regen, Nori — have each shown that at least one of these steps yields to a public ledger. None have yet knit them together into an end-to-end market with the compliance layer required for institutional capital. That is the opening.
There is no one company building the full end-to-end market. There are ~40 companies each holding one or two pieces of the puzzle. The map below is the actual landscape by category — what each one actually ships, not what their landing page claims.
The original Verra bridge. Wraps VCUs into ERC-20s. Verra suspended new bridging in 2023 but existing tokens remain retireable via on-chain retirement.
Buys and retires on-chain credits. Treasury-backed KLIMA token. Klima Infinity is a permissionless retirement API used by Chipper Cash, Ripio, Neutral, others.
Brazilian carbon-native protocol. MCO2 = 1 tokenized Verra VCU sourced from Amazon-basin projects. Retirement burns the token permanently.
Purpose-built Cosmos chain for ecological credits. Methodology-native token issuance. Strong ties to regen-ag and soil-carbon MRV projects.
Direct-to-farmer soil carbon marketplace. NORI token. First to build a native on-chain credit type (NRT) rather than bridging existing off-chain issuance.
Forward contracts, tokenized offtake, price-stabilization pools on top of tokenized voluntary carbon. Serves project developers and hedgers.
Nature Based Offset and Universal Basic Offset pool tokens. Aggregates bridged Verra credits into liquidity pools with published methodology filters.
Consumer and SME marketplace built on Toucan liquidity. UI-first — hides the wallet complexity. First mover on subscription-style monthly retirement.
Independent ratings for forestry, ARR, and REDD+ credits. Combines LiDAR + satellite + on-ground plots. Series B, $57M raised. Institutional buyers subscribe to their scoring platform.
AAA-D letter ratings across the entire voluntary market. $50M Series B. Rating methodology is public. Widely used by traders and institutional funds.
Emphasis on additionality math and permanence risk. Publishes methodology critiques. Adopted by buyers who want defensible-in-audit ratings.
Founded by former Verra staff. Deep-dive project-level assessments. Used by insurance and reinsurance underwriters pricing carbon-project risk.
Turns satellite radar data into biomass and carbon-stock estimates at 30m resolution. Used by both project developers and rating agencies for above-ground carbon math.
Satellite + AI monitoring of forestry projects with an integrated buyer marketplace. Corporate buyers include Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify.
Registry designed specifically for durable removals (biochar, enhanced weathering, DAC, ocean alkalinity). Open scientific-review model. High-integrity end of the market.
Largest enterprise footprint platform. Customers include Airbnb, Meta, Stripe, Walmart. Full CSRD/CDP reporting. Series C at $1B valuation.
Positioned as "climate management & accounting platform" — SOC 2, audit-ready, PCAF-certified. Focus on financial-institution GHG reporting.
Especially strong on supply-chain (Scope 3) engagement — invites vendors into the platform to report upstream. Series B, $73M.
Berlin-based, SME market. CSRD-ready for German mittelstand. Automated data ingestion via bank feeds and utility integrations.
Automates the ugly Scope 3 spend-based estimate step. Especially good on hard-to-measure categories (purchased goods, capex).
Purpose-built for commodities and heavy industry (steel, aluminum, cement, oil & gas). Where the emissions actually are and where the reporting is hardest.
Product-level LCA at scale. Uses machine-learning models to infer emissions where primary data is missing. Series A.
The default add-on for anyone already on Salesforce. Loses on depth but wins on distribution. Microsoft Sustainability Manager is the equivalent for the Microsoft stack.
Single API — retire any credit type, get a receipt, expose to your users. Powers offset flows in Stripe Climate, checkout SDKs, travel apps.
Similar API-first model. Focus on transactional flows (each shipment / flight / order triggers a retirement). Now owned by First Climate.
One of the oldest retail offset providers. Landfill methane and forestry-heavy portfolio. Consumer-facing, subscription retirement.
Curated portfolios of durable removals — biochar, DAC, mineralization. Positioned for corporate buyers who want quality-first over cost-first.
Advance market commitment for early-stage removal tech (DAC, mineralization, ocean alkalinity). Runs the $1B Frontier fund with Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, McKinsey.
Buyer purchases directly from a specific farm. Fixed-price ($15/tCO2e USDC-denominated). Fully on-chain retirement. Native to the buyer relationship.
Issues the Verified Carbon Unit (VCU). Roughly 70% of the voluntary market by volume. Serial-numbered credits in a private registry. Suspended new Toucan bridging in 2023.
WWF-founded registry emphasizing sustainable-development co-benefits. Higher price point per credit. Preferred by buyers with reputational sensitivity.
Registry for engineered removals: biochar, geologically stored CO2, wooden building elements, ocean alkalinity. Owned by Nasdaq. Highest quality tier of the market.
Winrock International-run registry. Strong presence in US grasslands, working forests, and improved forest management. CORSIA-eligible for aviation.
Registry behind California's early compliance offset methodologies. US-domestic focus. Widely used by CA-linked buyers.
The most liquid live voluntary spot market. Trades Verra VCUs, Gold Standard credits, and standardized benchmark contracts (GEO, N-GEO, C-GEO). Owned by Xpansiv Ltd.
The venue for EUA, CCA, RGGI, and voluntary carbon futures. Where price discovery for compliance carbon happens globally. Owned by Intercontinental Exchange.
Consortium settlement infrastructure owned by BNP Paribas, CIBC, Itaú, NatWest, NAB, Standard Chartered, SMBC, UBS. The banks' answer to on-chain settlement.
Largest US wholesale power market. RPM capacity auctions. Runs GATS for REC and SREC tracking across 13 states + DC. Real-time LMP down to 5-minute intervals.
California ISO. Runs the Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) across 10+ balancing authorities. Highest solar penetration in US wholesale markets.
Texas grid. Energy-only market (no capacity payments — scarcity pricing does the job). Voluntary REC market only. Highest wind + solar buildout in the US.
Forward Capacity Market. NEPOOL-GIS is the REC tracker. Highest-priced SRECs in the US ($285-$335) due to aggressive state RPS mandates.
ICAP capacity market by zone. NYSERDA's REC procurement is separate from NYISO. NYSERDA also runs the largest state-run offshore wind procurement.
Federation of European Transmission System Operators. Runs the Transparency Platform (near-real-time data across 39 countries) and coordinates cross-border energy flows.
US Energy Information Administration free API. Real-time hourly grid data, generation mix, emissions intensity by balancing authority. The single best free source for US energy analytics.
The engine ships with EPA and DEFRA constants because those are open, government-published, and citable. The open standards below are what serious counterparties (auditors, LP CFOs, CMBS lenders, insurance underwriters) expect a carbon disclosure to be built on. This is the reference set — every one of them is free to read, and most are free to integrate.
The Scope 1 / 2 / 3 accounting framework every other standard cites. Corporate Standard + Scope 3 Standard + Product Standard. What "Scope 2" actually means, in law.
Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials — the standard for how banks and asset managers report financed emissions across loans, mortgages, project finance, and equity portfolios.
Science Based Targets initiative. The methodology behind every "net-zero by 20XX" corporate pledge. Sets what a credible transition pathway looks like per sector.
Formerly Carbon Disclosure Project. 23,000+ companies file annual environmental disclosures. Institutional-investor-driven — required by many LP mandates.
International Sustainability Standards Board. IFRS S1 (general) + S2 (climate-specific). Being adopted by 20+ jurisdictions as the sustainability-reporting equivalent of IFRS accounting.
Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. Physical + transition risk framework. Absorbed into IFRS S2 in 2024 but the four-pillar structure (governance / strategy / risk / metrics) remains standard.
Free, open-source data schema for carbon-credit metadata. Purpose-built for interoperability across registries and rating agencies. What our future registry-bridge should conform to.
The definitive US grid emission factors, per subregion, per year. Powers Scope 2 electricity math for every serious US carbon accounting tool. Free bulk download + CSV.
Government-published fuel combustion, natural gas, and process emissions factors. Updated annually. What our factors.ts is built on.
US Energy Information Administration open API. Hourly grid data by balancing authority, generation mix, storage flows, prices. Best free source for real-time US energy analytics.
Federation of European Transmission System Operators. Near-real-time cross-border energy flows, generation, load, prices for 39 European countries. Free API with registration.
The EU Emissions Trading System registry. Public allocation, verified emissions, and surrender data for every EU-ETS installation. Free bulk download annually.
Al Gore-backed open-source emissions inventory. Uses satellite imagery and AI to estimate emissions at facility level across 352 industry categories. Covers 79,000+ major emitters globally.
Near-real-time forest cover change from satellite. Essential for verifying nature-based carbon credit permanence and additionality. Free API and bulk data.
Open-source aggregation of national, subnational, and city emissions inventories. Reconciles data from UNFCCC, CDP, national statistics agencies, and academic databases.
Curated emissions factor API pulling from 100+ authoritative datasets. Serves as the emissions-factor SDK for many footprint SaaS players. Free tier + commercial plans.
The most widely-used open-source Life Cycle Assessment platform. Supports EPD, product-level carbon footprint, and ecosystem impact modeling. Free desktop app + Java SDK.
Modular Python LCA framework — Brightway2 and now Brightway 2.5. Preferred by researchers doing custom methodology work. Full ecoinvent database support.
Open-source library for simulating electricity systems. Power flow, capacity expansion, storage optimization. Used for energy-transition scenario modeling by academic and NGO teams.
Open specification for measuring software's carbon intensity per functional unit. Reference implementations in Python, .NET, Go. Adopted by cloud carbon dashboards.
Open-source tool that estimates AWS, GCP, Azure carbon footprint from billing exports. Same class of tool as our engine's cloud module but with detailed per-service breakdowns.
Portfolio of open tools from RMI covering steel, aluminum, cement, hydrogen, transport, and buildings. Free for anyone to use. Model calibration and scenario tooling.
The point of putting carbon on-chain is not decentralization for its own sake. It is that every settlement bottleneck above collapses when the credit itself is a token, the registry is a contract, and the retirement is a state transition. Below is the side-by-side, layer by layer.
The technology to compress the entire lifecycle — from generation to retirement — from months to minutes already exists. It's a matter of assembling the components and getting institutional buyers comfortable with a permissioned-DeFi model. Here is the timeline we are building toward.
Every emissions factor, market number, price band, and structural claim on this site traces to one of the references below. If you want to fact-check anything or brief a stakeholder in advance of a call, this is the starting shelf.
UnyKorn LLC operates every product it ships as a non-custodial software gateway. Balance-sheet exposure sits at BitGo Bank & Trust N.A. (OCC-chartered, up to $250M insured), or at partner registries and custodians. That model is why we can carry compliance, custody, and settlement risk without the capital footprint of an actual exchange or bank.
The LPS-1 standard — paragraph-level SHA-256 → Merkle → Polygon 137 + Bitcoin OpenTimestamps — is Kevan's document integrity primitive, deployed in production for capital-markets documents. It's the natural on-chain retirement receipt.
ERC-3643 permissioned securities are already deployed in the LDX capital-markets stack — used for CMBS tranching, refi settlement, and cap-table gating on private debt tokens. Adapting the same compliance layer to carbon credits is a domain adjustment, not a re-build.
BitGo Enterprise webhook sweeps, Anchorage, and Fireblocks integrations are live in the UnyKorn stack. The custody path for a tokenized carbon credit is not a hypothetical — it's the same pipe that handles USDC/USDT vault flows today.
Every UnyKorn client-facing product ships with an AI copilot from day one. Same posture here: Carbon Copilot answers "what's my footprint," "what's my SREC uplift in NJ," "compose me a 1,000-ton offset portfolio under $15K" — using the engine as ground truth.
30-minute call. If your portfolio has any physical assets — hospitality, commercial real estate, energy generation, industrial — we can size your emissions, SREC monetization, and offset gap on the call. No slides.
Email kevan.burns@fthtrading.com →