Historically, the problem with carbon offsets has been the lack of integrity and transparency that comes with them. There have been gaps in assessing the quality of an asset and tracking what happens after they have been sold. Not only does this leave opportunities for things like fraud and double counting, but this lack of trust now directly affects the funding of potential sustainability projects that are looking to make real change. Ledger Works is working with the Hedera Foundation to help address the most critical issues with offsets in voluntary carbon markets today.

The key to bringing a trusted balance sheet of the planet to the public ledger is ensuring auditability and data discovery while enabling liquidity. There is a need to provide near real-time data to automated market makers to adjust carbon prices. Ledger Works provides infrastructure and services that make emission data and carbon credits auditable and discoverable. With this, it will be possible to have notification services that allow automated market makers to ingest new offsets, trades, and burns in near real time.

Ledger Works has several offerings to address the above issues. The first is Eco Explore which provides the ability to discover sustainability-related assets on the Hedera network and ensure that a buyer can easily view the associated verified information. They also have their Sentinel platform, which supports the creation of a series of rules that allows their tool to:

1. Capture Guardian-generated sustainability data in near real-time.

2. Reach out to related Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS) and other oracle data sources to enrich on-ledger data

3. Expose that data in a user-friendly sustainability data browser.

4. Expose that data in a standard set of easily accessible APIs

Leveraging this same service, Ledger Works provides real-time callbacks upon sustainability data changes. Whether it’s the minting of new tokens that represent Greenhouse Gas GHG emissions (or carbon offsets), or changes to existing tokens through transfer or burning, automated regression market makers can subscribe to these notifications, through a REST API, to ensure that the most recent activity will be incorporated into their ongoing pricing analysis.

Ledger Works is in the business of helping customers make sense of ledger data through their mirror API, Eco Explore, and Eco Connect (both the sustainability ledger and domain-specific APIs). Anyone interested in sustainability data on the Hedera ledger can use the explore product to navigate through Guardian data. This includes Standard Registries, policies, RECs, and tokens representing emissions and carbon offsets.

It has been shown that the effects of our daily activities on the planet are causing excess production of carbon dioxide and GHG emissions. Changes to our global climate over the past 100 years are leading to warmer temperatures that disrupt weather patterns leading to natural disasters. These irreversible effects are happening on the timescale of people alive today and will worsen in the decades to come if we don’t take immediate action.

The combination of Hedera and the Guardian solves a real-world climate use case - maintaining accurate and trustworthy sustainability data. By combining the open-source Guardian dMRV policy workflow engine with Hedera’s enterprise-scale throughput, fair ordering, security, and predictable fees; token-based carbon offsets can be brought to market with transparency, auditability, discoverability, and liquidity. Ledger Works is excited to power the discoverability of sustainability assets on the Hedera ledger.