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Update: First carbon credits bridged onto the blockchain

It’s official: we’ve just launched a key piece of infrastructure to enable the carbon market of the future. Specifically, as of this week, Thallo has officially brought the first carbon credits onto the blockchain through our two-way bridge.

🧐 What’s a two-way bridge?

When we refer to a two-way carbon bridge, we’re talking about a piece of tech infrastructure that allows us to bring carbon credits from a registry onto the blockchain, where the blockchain-based credit remains linked to the underlying registry so any trade or retirement event is reflected in both places at once, thereby avoiding any double counting.

Sometimes you’ll hear us use the word “tokenize” to refer to this action – that simply means the creation of a version of the carbon credit that lives on the blockchain (hence a “token”), which we refer to as a “tokenized carbon credit.”

👉 Read more about our two-way bridge in our Bridge Litepaper.

🌉 What did we bridge?

The first credits we bridged (or “tokenized”) came from the Delfines Cupica REDD+ project in Colombia.

👉 Learn more about the project through our interview with Biofix, the project developer responsible for the project:

We bridged the credits directly from BioCarbon Registry, a registry based in Latin America with strong nature-based projects in several countries.

👉 Read more here about our integration with BioCarbon Registry here.

How did we do it?

The credits were bridged via the Polygon blockchain – if you want to get into the nitty gritty, head over to our CTO Adam Dry’s Twitter account for more:

🤷‍♂️ So why does this matter?

This transaction marks the first time that carbon credits have been brought onto a public blockchain via a two-way bridge, where the credits remain live and un-retired. This is important because it’s a way to link the on-chain and off-chain carbon market.

It’s a first step toward creating the carbon market of the future: a single, unified and transparent carbon market that uses blockchain technology to ultimately make the market work better for everyone.