Northern Trust has completed the first stage of an industry-wide voluntary carbon credit ecosystem, enabling institutional buyers to access carbon credits digitally through a blockchain-based platform.
Facts
- Northern Trust, listed on Nasdaq as NTRS, has achieved the initial phase of creating an industry-wide voluntary carbon credit ecosystem.
- The ecosystem employs private ledger digital blockchain technology to connect institutional buyers with carbon credit suppliers, focusing on reducing greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.
- The fully digital platform allows purchasers to transact tokenized carbon credits directly with project developers and offset their carbon footprint.
- Institutional buyers, such as MyCarbon and White Star Capital, conducted fully automated transactions on the initial minimum viable product (MVP) digital carbon credit platform, developed in collaboration with carbon avoidance and removal project developers like Go Balance Limited, ReGen III, and a direct air capture company.
- Smart contracts via the Avvoka legal contract tool are used to generate legal agreements for online transactions between project developers and buyers of voluntary carbon credits.
- Further platform development, including the first official live transaction, is planned for late 2023.
- Northern Trust’s Digital Assets and Financial Markets group is behind this project, aiming to support digital asset markets while providing market access and insights across traditional securities services markets.
- Northern Trust Asset Servicing has a history of innovation in digital transformation, including blockchain technology for private equity fund administration (2017), tokenization and fractionalization of bonds (2020), and partnering in the launch of Zodia Custody, an institutional-grade crypto asset custodian (2021).
