Sustainable Building Blocks Pt. III: Addressing Liquidity in Carbon Markets

Hedera and The HBAR Foundation are fostering a community of research and development, enabling the transformation of sustainable value energy markets, such as Renewable Energy Credit (REC) and Carbon offset/removal Credit (CORC), and their integrity.

‍
In Part I of the Sustainable Building Blocks series, we outlined our work in developing new standards, transparent reporting and verification for digital environmental assets and identified research and development partners.

In Part II, we illustrated our goals and discussed how these standards will enable rapid ecosystem growth and heard from several partners on the exciting opportunities this brings.

In Part III, we outline the latest research and development with our partners BlockScience, Object Computing and Tolam of Automated Regression Markets (ARMS) and Automated Regression Market Makers (ARMMs) - a pioneering open-source mechanism that could revolutionize the $851 billion carbon markets and $2 billion Voluntary Carbon Markets by accelerating carbon credit transaction clearing.

It’s been a little more than one year since our last sustainable building blocks post in Pt. II, and also the one year anniversary of open sourcing the Guardian.  It has been an incredibly productive and fruitful year, where the Hedera ecosystem has been able to scale several research and development projects as well as build applications across the Regenerative Finance ecosystem. As we have passed the year mark for the HBAR Foundation Sustainable Impact Fund (SIF), we wanted to talk about what the next sustainable building blocks look like on Hedera as well as how they relate. Let’s start with a recap of some of our work in standards, events, and grants announced.

In the initial sustainable building blocks blog we highlighted a few key standards and partners adopting them including the IWA Voluntary Ecological Markets. Since then we’ve supported Version 2 of the white paper with Dovu as a highlighted use case touching on their open source policies that leverage the Guardian. We have also become the co-chair of the IWA Carbon Emissions Taskforce, along with Ernst & Young, which has key members of our ecosystem participating, including Reardon Digital who are focused on the pending SEC reporting requirements for Carbon Emission Tracking. We have also participated in the Gold Standard dMRV and the Tokenized Assets Working Group’s respectively with members of the Hedera ecosystem such as Nova Institute participating in the Open APIs working group. Beyond this, we’re active participants in the Blockchain Infrastructure for Carbon Offsets Working Group (BICOWG) as well as the Finance for Biodiversity Taskforce for Nature Markets. Needless to say, standards are important to us and what our ecosystem relies upon to enable applications to communicate to each other, as well as people, to drive the impact that our world needs.

In driving these standards as a fund, we’ve also supported their real world implementations through a series of grants including Dovu, Tymlez, Meeco, CivicLedger, Tamuwa, Cynk.io, Object Computing, BlockScience, and the open source ARMM, along with Porini Foundation’s Nature Collectibles to name some of our announced grantees. This has led to many live use cases that have generated new open source methodologies, adhering to various standards, that anyone can use.

Through our work with standards bodies and partners, we have attended many events including World Economic Forum, Australia Blockchain Week, ReFi NYC, African Protected Area Congress, Sustainable Blockchain Summit, the UN General Assembly in partnership with the GBBC, the Climate Week Blockchain Summit, BICOWG Greenhouse Retreat, Digital Environmental Assets Summit, along with COP27 hosted by the UNFCCC.

Throughout all of our activities the SIF has focused on real world outcomes and leveraging the sustainable building blocks required to bring the balance sheet of the planet to the public ledger with principles of auditability, data discoverability, and liquidity – in that order. 

In this Building Blocks Part III, we’ll focus on liquidity in the carbon markets and groundbreaking research by our partners at BlockScience exploring a novel price discovery and automated trading mechanism   and what Hedera and partners are doing to bring it into reality.

You can learn all about our research with BlockScience on ARMMs here.