LedgerWorks <> HBAR Foundation address the most critical issues in voluntary carbon markets today by providing sustainability asset discoverability.
As Hedera works to bring the balance sheet of the planet to the public ledger, through our Eco Connect platform, we are helping to ensure auditability and data discovery while enabling liquidity through providing near real-time data to automated market makers to adjust carbon prices. Eco Explore is an easy to use browser to discover and view detailed offset tokens. Ledger Works provides infrastructure and services that make data auditable and discoverable along with notification services that allow automated market makers to ingest new offsets, trades, and burns in near real-time.
It has been clearly shown that the effects of our daily activities on the planet are causing excess production of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which have material and long lasting effects on our environment and global climate. Changes to our global climate over the past 100 years are now leading to warmer temperatures over time that disrupt weather patterns, leading to hotter temperatures, more severe storms and increased drought - all which pose many risks to all forms of life on earth.
"Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time."
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1
These effects are happening today, are irreversible on the timescale of those alive today, and will worsen in the decades to come if we don’t take immediate action to begin to remediate carbon in the atmosphere and drastically change how we engage with the world around us every day going forward.
One effective approach to address climate change today is generation of carbon credits, to offset emissions while we all work to reduce carbon emissions across the globe. While this does not immediately address the problem, it provides a mechanism to work towards balance as we collectively work to reduce emissions to zero over the next several decades.
Historically, the problem with carbon offsets has been that they have lacked integrity and transparency. There are problems with assessing quality, whether the offsets represent additionality (e.g. they don’t reduce the overall amount of carbon that would have been generated had the project, and associated offsets, not occurred) and tracking what happens to the offsets once they’re sold.
Eco Connect
Our sustainability data moat powers our Eco Connect sustainability APIs. Our API allows interested stakeholders direct access to aggregated and query optimized sustainability data about Guardian standard registries, policies, tokens, verifiable credentials, and verifiable presentations. All of this data is captured from the ledger in near real-time, filtered, parsed, and then made available in a standards-based way via REST APIs.
Leveraging our Sentinel platform, we provide real-time callbacks upon sustainability data changes, whether it’s the minting of new tokens, that represent GHG emissions or carbon offsets, or changes to existing tokens through transfer or burning. Automated regression market makers and other interested parties can subscribe to these notifications using a simple REST API to ensure that the most recent activity will be incorporated into their ongoing pricing analysis.
Eco Explore
In order to make sustainability assets discoverable by interested users directly, Ledger Works created the Eco Explore browser. Using the browser, users can search for and drill down into the lineage of any offset token on the network and view information relating to the project that generated the token (e.g. project design document, methodology, verification report, project location, project developer information, among others.)
Users can also view token specific information. For example, for offsets related to renewable energy, in this case a wind project, users would be able to view details associated with the specific turbines, like type and installed capacity, tower type, Breaking and Yaw systems, vintage, etc.
How Ledger Works can work with your organization
If you have interest in discovering sustainable tokens on the Hedera network, you can use our Eco Explore search to find, drill into and examine in detail any eco token on the network.
If you want to seamlessly integrate token emissions and offset data into your own platform or applications, you can sign up for a developer account by contacting us, and once provisioned you can create an API key, and then access our Eco Connect API. Documentation for our API is available for mainnet and testnet.