How Infura Is Powering Nori’s Marketplace and API for Verified Carbon Removal

Executive Summary

Born out of the ConsenSys hackathon “Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition”, “Nori” is a blockchain-based platform for incentivizing sustainable farming practices and facilitating a marketplace for verified carbon removals. The Nori team works with farmers who adopt new regenerative farming practices that build up and sequester carbon in their soil. Once that carbon removal is verified, the farmers are able to sell their Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs) to buyers on an easy-to-use marketplace platform.

Nori is also building an API so that carbon removal payments can be embedded into any other software application. With Nori's API for carbon removal, customers can select to pay for carbon removal to negate the impacts of the product or service they are paying for, whether it’s shipping, manufacturing, or operation. In the future, Nori intends to enable various methods of carbon removal. They envision a world where every ecommerce shipment, every Uber ride, every plane ticket bought will also include the cost of removing the CO2 emissions associated with it.

The Technical Challenges of Carbon Markets

Until the innovation of blockchain technology, one of the key challenges in traditional carbon markets has been the double-counting problem. For example, when someone does an offset project, they're issued carbon credits, which they typically sell to a broker; then that broker sells credits to someone else, and they get resold more than a handful of times. Sometimes, the end-buyer chooses to “retire” the carbon credits, which means they are no longer available for resale. It’s easy for market manipulators to do off-book swaps with these credits, and it’s very opaque and difficult to track their provenance.

Nori’s marketplace solves the double-counting problem by separating the carbon certificate from the method of payment. When a farmer sells a Nori Carbon Removal Tonne (NRT) to a buyer, it is immediately retired in that buyer’s account and can never be resold. Proving who paid for it, and where it was retired is critical for countries to meet their Paris Climate Accord targets, and Nori’s blockchain-based system is the perfect tool to improve upon the legacy carbon markets.

Solution: Scaling Carbon Removal Certifications With Infura

Before partnering with Infura to deploy their platform on the Ethereum mainnet, Nori was running their own private Ethereum testnet and API, which they managed using puppeth deployed on Google’s Cloud platform. Their self-managed approach required constant attention and increasingly more engineering resources, which distracted the Nori team from product development:

"This experience was quite painful and distracting and ultimately slowed us down in the early stages of iteration. Eventually, we decided to trial Infura and found the experience to be seamless. This switch ultimately saved us entire days of engineer-hours over the course of Nori’s timeline."

-Jaycen Horton- Co-Founder, Nori

With Infura’s instant access APIs, Nori can now generate and manage thousands of certificates of carbon removal on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as easily manage their API call volume and monitor their bandwidth via their Infura Dashboard. Nori uses Infura as their web3 provider for rapid prototyping on the Ropsten testnet, as well as for production operations. In both cases, they use Ropsten to submit transactions in the form of ERC 721 NFTs to represent the creation of carbon removal certificates to the blockchain. To date, they have created certificates worth nearly 10,000 tonnes of CO2 removed and issued them to buyers across the globe.

Infura is proud to have provided Nori with trusted infrastructure for every single one of these certificates and for a marketplace that is setting a new standard for certified sustainability and working to reverse the effects of climate change.

Visit Nori’s website to explore how you can make your business carbon-negative or carbon-neutral by either paying, or having your customers pay, for carbon removal for your company by plugging into Nori's API.

See how our other customers use Infura to handle their infrastructure needs.