Tokenising Real-World Assets: Lessons From a Carbon Credit Marketplace
Tokenisation is back on enterprise roadmaps, this time with regulators, auditors and real cash flows attached. Building a blockchain marketplace for carbon credits taught us where tokens add value, where they add only complexity, and what the off-chain half of the system must look like.
By Solomiia Kots
CEO at Mirko
CarbCoin set out to quantify greenhouse gas reductions from secondary metal manufacturing and turn verified reductions into tradeable carbon credits. On paper it is a textbook tokenisation case: a scarce, auditable asset with a fragmented market. In practice, most of the engineering happened off-chain, and the token was the easy part.
The asset has to be real before it is digital
A carbon credit is a claim that a measured reduction happened. The claim depends on sensor data, process records and a methodology a verifier accepts. We spent more time on the measurement pipeline and the verification workflow than on Solidity. If the off-chain evidence is weak, the token is a liability. If it is strong, the token becomes a convenient way to transfer and retire the claim without double counting.
Off-chain components that decided the project
- Data capture from plant processes with tamper-evident logging.
- A verifier workflow with sign-off, revisions and an audit trail.
- Identity and KYC for market participants, mapped to wallet addresses.
- Retirement and reporting that regulators and buyers can read without a block explorer.
Where the chain earns its place
On-chain, three things justified the complexity: issuance that cannot be duplicated, transfer without a central registry that could be captured, and retirement that is final and public. Everything else, including price discovery and user experience, worked better as conventional software talking to the contracts through a well-tested backend.
Privacy and compliance are not opposites
Enterprise participants will not publish their positions. Our work on Aztec Protocol, a zero-knowledge privacy protocol for financial products, shaped how we think about this: transfers can be private by default while proofs of compliance stay verifiable. For regulated assets the design question is not whether to be transparent, but to whom.
Governance of the marketplace itself
Who can change the methodology, pause issuance or upgrade the contracts? We answered with on-chain governance built on Aragon OSx, the framework Mirko maintains, so the rules of the market can evolve through a transparent process rather than a single admin key.
