With the voluntary carbon market struggling to find its footing, a new wave of projects is testing how credits, data, and custody work on public ledgers. The common element: tighter links between real-world measurement and programmable assets, with banks, registries, and open-source teams all taking different routes. Here are seven efforts worth a web3 reader’s time right now.
1) JPMorgan’s Kinexys tests tokenization at the registry layer
JPMorgan’s digital assets unit, Kinexys, is piloting carbon-credit tokenization with S&P Global Commodity Insights, EcoRegistry, and the International Carbon Registry. The pitch: if credits become natively digital at the registry level (rather than bridged later), settlement and provenance should get cleaner. Early days, but a blue-chip signal that enterprise rails are being laid.
2) Open Forest Protocol × Kanop bring “dynamic baselines” on-chain
Open Forest Protocol, an open MRV network, and Kanop, a remote-sensing firm, are pairing satellite analytics and AI with blockchain attestation to replace static baselines in forest projects, one of the hot spots in MRV debates. If dynamic baselining hardens, you get fewer arguments about “what would have happened anyway” and more confidence in credits tied to observed change.
3) Fedrok pilots tokenized CO₂ credits and green payments
Fedrok, an EVM-based L1 positioned around Proof-of-Green and auditor-verified impact, has signed MoUs for early pilots across three tracks: with TechXEarthSpace in India to explore tokenizing credits from engineered CO₂ removal and subsurface storage; with Howarig Traders/T4G Pay in Papua New Guinea on a green-payments stack (including USSD and stablecoin rails); and with FarmRight in Ghana on supply-chain compliance records for environmental and child labor checks. The throughline is third-party verification with on-chain transparency. The project is pre-launch; the near-term signal to watch is a public testnet and the first verifiable transactions from these pilots.
4) Hong Kong’s Project Ensemble runs a cross-border sandbox
Project Ensemble is the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s regulated sandbox for tokenized carbon-credit trading, custody, and settlement. It’s testing infrastructure with institutional players; Northern Trust joined to explore custody and settlement flows. The approach: prove plumbing for overseas investors and see what sticks, rather than going full production on day one.
5) Toucan goes open source and spins out Cedar
Toucan, one of the earliest crypto-climate teams, has open-sourced its stack and introduced Cedar, a market-infrastructure spinoff. For builders, that means more code to fork and audit, and a clearer split between protocol and new tooling as the space matures beyond “bridge-and-basket” experiments.
6) Nori × Bayer scale soil-carbon issuance
Nori, a carbon-removal marketplace, reports its largest programmatic soil-carbon issuance to date in partnership with Bayer. The total, 125,000 regenerative tonnes from Bayer’s U.S. program, highlights how agriculture credits are moving from pilot to production. Not everyone agrees on accounting, but the throughput shows tokenized or marketplace-native issuance can meet enterprise volumes when MRV pipelines are in place.
7) KlimaDAO 2.0 retools the on-chain carbon AMM
Klima’s “2.0” reboot (whitepaper published this spring) reframes the project as a liquidity venue for carbon assets, with new token mechanics and an automated market maker targeted at credit markets. The point isn’t to pick winners on assets, it’s to grease pricing and retirement flows if/when higher-integrity credits show up on-chain.
Proof over narratives
Taken together, these efforts pull carbon markets closer to sources of truth: registries, satellites, auditors, custodians, instead of pure DeFi abstractions. And they add the boring pipes markets have lacked: custody that works, attestations you can verify, and baselines that update.
If the next few quarters deliver real issuance, cleaner retirements, and public testnets with verifiable data, this cycle won’t be about narratives. It’ll be about proof. If 2024 was the reset, 2025 is the rewiring. Less hype, more evidence. The projects that matter this year won’t just mint tokens, they’ll mint trust.
