Carbonable, a startup that uses the public Ethereum blockchain to track carbon contributions and help prevent greenwashing, has raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Ethereal Ventures and La Poste Ventures.
Carbonable uses the Ethereum scaling overlay built by Starkware, which is also an investor in the seed round, to keep tabs on the carbon credit lifecycle, from the selection of the projects to the monitoring, issuance and retirement of carbon credits.
It’s rare to hear about someone actually doing something useful with blockchain technology, and the tokenizing, tracking and trading of carbon credits is a steadily growing field of infrastructure growth.
“This is a very immature market, which has some major flaws at the moment,” said Carbonable co-founder Guillaume Leti in an interview. “There’s a big lack of trust and transparency, as well as an upcoming supply crunch in good quality carbon credits. We enable companies to drive their climate contributions using blockchain as the glue and including other tech like satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.”
The way things currently stand, a consumer simply has no choice but to trust a large company when they claim to be carbon neutral, said Carbonable co-founder Ramzi Laieb.
“The idea for the future is that anyone will be able to audit the mechanism behind a company’s carbon contribution rate,” Laieb said.
