The Climate Action Data Trust (CADTrust) is one of the best real world use cases of blockchain in the entire industry and one of the few that is in actual production use.
In late 2023 they launched the CADTrust Public Data Dashboard. During that time the Government of Bhutan and the world’s largest carbon registry, Verra, both onboarded their registries onto CAD Trust.
Let’s look at what else has happened since then.
CAD Trust Service Layer API
The CAD Trust Service Layer was released and offers a scalable and secure API for entities looking to interact with the metadata layer. In fact, this is what I use to pull data for visualizations and charts below.
Tero Carbon integrates with CAD Trust
It was announced on July 22, 2024 that Tero Carbon is the first Brazilian certifier to integrate with CAD Trust, using the aforementioned Service Layer API to automate their data flow. Tero Carbon is themselves a carbon certifier that leverages a blockchain (Polygon, an Ethereum L2) to record all of its operations for transparency and traceability. However with the Chia blockchain hosting the global metadata platform for all carbon credit tracking, Tero Carbon is now replicating their data to CAD Trust as well.
Over 85% of the carbon credit market is tracked on Chia
In a media article on April 3, 2024, it was celebrated that the CAD Trust has coverage of 85% of the global carbon credit market with plans to expand further within the calendar year. This was in large part driven by onboarding Verra, the world’s largest carbon credit issuer for the voluntary carbon market.
In addition to national registries which will be onboarded over time, other major registries in discussions to be onboarded include:
Registries continue to settle updates to Chia
As recent as the day of writing, registries continue to create, delete, and update entries to their local DataLayer databases. Occasionally, these updates are batched and settled onto the Chia blockchain as a transaction that stores proofs (hashes) to ensure a node’s data is provable, calculable, and correct.
A chart of the settlement transactions is shown below. Note that although BioCarbon has the most settlement transactions, Verra has the most DataLayer entries but settles on-chain less frequently and in larger batches. Almost all registries are making semi-regular updates.
With a default transaction fee of 300,000,000 mojos, the total transaction fees generated is about 1.2 XCH. The CAD Trust itself is not meant to be a significant source of fee pressure since DataLayer can be considered a type of L2 that enables batching of local/off-line database updates.
Continued hints of carbon tokenization
In April 2023, the first publicly verifiable carbon offset transaction and retirement was registered onto the CAD Trust and 10,000 tons of carbon was minted into a Chia Asset Token. Some of these tokens were purchased by Melonn and Sumitomo Corporation of Americas and marked as retired on-chain.
Since then, we’ve seen more of these CATs move on-chain as well as heard teasers and seen roadmap items relating to tokenization. This is a move towards realizing a maturing carbon credit trading market (“One Market“) within the Chia ecosystem leveraging Offer Files.
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