Blockchain firm GuildOne is leveraging the sustainable Cardano Network to pioneer carbon credits backed by Validere’s energy data analytics platform.

CALGARY, Alberta–(BUSINESS WIRE)–GuildOne Inc. (GuildOne) is pleased to announce that the company has issued its first series of voluntary carbon credits on the Cardano network as digital tokens. Each token represents a tonne of carbon saved from emission through underground storage.

Under its sustainability division, ESG1, GuildOne united an ecosystem of technology and energy partners for the issuance, including leading data analytics SaaS provider Validere, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and an energy partner, who generated the credits through a Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) project at a facility in Alberta.

The vision behind ESG1’s initial project was a technological solution to the challenges facing the rapidly growing voluntary carbon credit market, predicted by former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney to reach $100 billion by 2030, including widespread fraudulent and misrepresented credits.

ESG1’s tokens include the carbon’s proof-of-origin, verified measurement and analysis using Validere’s commodity data cloud, and attestations certifying the data. The automated process reduces the high costs of manual data capture and verification, making trusted credits economically viable at scale.

“Achieving meaningful environmental progress requires collaboration amongst multiple stakeholders. This combination of data analytics technology, energy industry expertise, and blockchain to measure and sequester carbon is a great example. We believe coming emissions goals will create increasing demand for solutions that ensure validation and audit trails,” said Zach DeWitt, a Partner at Wing VC and Validere investor.

Carbon credits from CCUS are expected to be a major contributor to global efforts to fund the $90 trillion in sustainable infrastructure required by 2030 to support decarbonization, according to the World Bank, and the credit market is a key priority at November’s COP26 UN Climate Change Conference.

“Tokenized carbon credits, offsets, and renewables may prove to be the pinnacle non-fungible token (NFT) of our lifetime,” said Anoop Nannra, Global Blockchain Leader at AWS. “Seeing partners like GuildOne build great solutions, and customers across the board in energy, capital markets, oil & gas, and elsewhere develop broader awareness of how to actualize their ESG goals through the adoption of blockchain technology is exciting.”

According to GuildOne CEO James Graham, the low carbon intensity of the Cardano platform and its native asset and smart contracts functionalities were key to the company’s decision to use it for the initial credit launch.

“We have an incredible ecosystem committed to building solutions that can help bridge the global gap in climate finance, and Cardano’s commitment to sustainability made it our leading choice for a public blockchain platform,” he said. “We’re excited to continue our work on Cardano and also develop new interoperability with R3’s Corda, our private blockchain network partner.”

The next stage of GuildOne’s ESG1 initiative includes data registration on Corda linked to Cardano token issuances and to settling token transactions as native assets on the Corda network. The company is also developing projects to issue forestry backed ESG credits that support Indigenous environmental reconciliation in Canada.

View GuildOne’s carbon credits on the Cardano network:
https://pool.pm/addr1vxndwmq04hrgyh0asguvmagldkjph7w7zl25yc322ywsqfqswaavs

“We’re excited to continue our work on Cardano and also develop new interoperability with R3’s Corda, our private blockchain network partner.”