📔Abstract

Governments around the globe have set goals to reduce carbon emissions by 55% by 2050. Since our economy has been based on fossil fuels for more than 150 years, reduction alone will not be enough to meet these ambitious goals. Compensation for CO2 emissions will be needed to facilitate a transition to a carbon-neutral economy.

The current voluntary carbon market (VCM) is inefficient, ineffective, untransparent, and hard to access for both suppliers and consumers of carbon offsets. Projects involved in capturing and locking carbon do not receive maximum value for their efforts due to middlemen like carbon banks, carbon brokers, and intermediary institutions. Therefore, less capital is available for these carbon-capturing projects to reinvest and plant more trees, thereby, sequestering less carbon.

Coorest introduces a new carbon standard and a platform based on blockchain technology to cut out the middleman allows for easy and transparent access to carbon compensation.

The certified Coorest Carbon Standard focuses on newly planted trees (additionality) only and allows the onboarding of farmers and green projects globally enabling them to generate and monetize their carbon sequestration efforts. All projects are monitored via satellite data to warrant the continuity and transparency of carbon sequestration efforts.

The Coorest carbon ecosystem has four tokens; NFTrees, CO2 token ($CCO2), Proof of Carbon Compensation certificate (NFT), and a governance token ($CRST). Through the tokenization of trees, absorbed CO2 and the claim on carbon compensation, the problem of double counting of compensated carbon emissions is avoided. Via the Coorest platform, retail, companies, and institutions can easily compensate for their carbon footprint while having maximum transparency.

Coorest introduces two types of NFTrees that are linked to either fruit-bearing or regular trees. Holders of these Coorest NFTrees, trees planted and owned by Coorest, accumulate CO2 tokens for generating PoCC certificates. Once the fruit-bearing trees are planted and mature enough to produce fruit, the NFTree holder has the right to that fruit’s profit, therefore, generating an additional yield. The combination of revenue through the sales of CO2 tokens and yield-bearing possibilities associated with a tree ensures voluntary markets continue to drive finance to catalyze and generate additional emission reductions and removals.

To ensure the permanence of captured carbon, Coorest collaborates with Etherisc to develop a natural disaster insurance product for NFTrees and CO2 tokens. Lost trees and released CO2 can be recovered through replanting minimizing negative effects on the backing of CO2 tokens.

The Coorest Platform seeks to democratize platform governance. This is accomplished through the use of $CRST tokens. By holding $CRST people get decision power according to their allocation within the $CRST staking pool. Hence, participation in the DAO will allow users to vote on changes to a token’s protocol. Governance token holders will be able to influence decisions regarding further development of the platform and ecosystem, which will lead to a higher engagement and legitimacy of the decision-making and result in a more collaborative governance process.