Across the globe, projects are experimenting with ways to link PoW mining to renewable energy generation, carbon credit creation, and verified impact reporting.
The approaches differ, but the goal is the same: make the incentives work for climate-positive operations without rewriting Bitcoin’s code. That shift is not only possible, it’s actually already being built.
Toucan Protocol & KlimaDAO
(Global, Ethereum-based) Toucan Protocol and KlimaDAO, operating globally on Ethereum, built one of the earliest large-scale bridges between traditional carbon markets and blockchain. Toucan’s “Carbon Bridge” brought more than 22 million credits from registries such as Verra on-chain as ERC-20 tokens, with origin data preserved via BatchNFTs. KlimaDAO then locked these credits in its treasury in an effort to influence carbon prices and create scarcity. In practice, credits are retired in traditional registries, tokenized, and traded on-chain for greater liquidity and transparency. The model proved the potential for open carbon markets but also highlighted the risks: questions over credit quality led Verra to restrict tokenization of certain retired credits, pushing both projects toward live issuance with higher-integrity sources.