• Pilot transaction was executed on Tuesday, March 14, 2017 at 8:00 am (UTC+1:00) between the Russian Carbon Fund on the buying side and Aera Group, the largest supplier of African carbon credits, on the selling side in the DAO IPCI blockchain ecosystem with IT support of Airlab.
• The Verified Carbon Units acquired by Russian Carbon Fund are intended to offset carbon footprint in Russia and internationally, by airline passengers, in particular.
• Transaction rewards 1 year of blockchain application for carbon markets development undertaken by DAO IPCI team of blockchain and environmental markets experts.
• The new CO2 exchange / blockchain platform will ensure more transparency, integrity and lower transaction costs for buyers and sellers of carbon credits and other environmental mitigation outcomes.
• DAO IPCI has and ongoing working relationship with Backer McKenzie on the structure of the CO2 blockchain platform and transactions on the CO2 blockchain.
• The initiative aims at raising and catalyzing pre-compliance and voluntary CO2 offsets demand and support the emergence of a Russian carbon market.
• Russia is close to ratification the Paris Agreement and hopefully shall work on ambitious targets to reduce CO2 emissions under the Agreement, and corporates can offset their emissions and reach carbon neutrality thanks to carbon credits.
• Aera Group and the Russian Carbon Fund also announced a partnership to provide Russian buyers with direct and long term access to high quality African carbon credits.

Anton Galenovich, Chairman of the Council of the Russian Carbon Fund: “The platform developers’ idea is to provide common space for fair competition, provide early crediting, offsetting carbon footprint opportunities for the companies, and break the barriers dividing locations and types of high quality mitigation outcomes. Russian market mechanisms are in the trial pilot phase and may have significant offsetting capacity on the supply and the demand side in near future. Russian carbon credits developed and assured under strict requirements of the Integrated Program for Climate Initiatives are still under verification process to be issued in DAO IPCI ecosystem”.

Alexey Shadrin, CEO and Founder of the Russian Carbon Fund: “We have just witnessed a truly historical moment for the global low carbon economy - the first ever blockchain based climate deal. I am sure that our successful joint effort will mark the beginning of a new era of climate cooperation between nations and help the world reach sustainable development goals”. 

Fabrice Le Saché, Aera Group Executive Chairman: “We strongly believe that Russia will become a key player of the international climate transition in the years to come. Beyond environment, this is a matter of economic competition and performance as it drives innovation. We are pleased to pioneer a market and a technology at same time. We expect to connect Russian corporates with charismatic African CO2 offset projects yielding mitigation and adaptation benefits”.

Max Gutbrod, Partner at Baker McKenzie: “Blockchain technology is ideal to increase transparency in carbon markets; we are therefore pleased and honored to be acquainted with Blockchain Ecosystem and looking forward to further contribute it to reach its global potential”.

Ivan Panov, partner at Causa Privata Law Firm: “We have seen a huge number of transactions and projects involving carbon markets and carbon credits. But this particular project is literally a pioneer, for it is based on the technology and approaches which have been never used before. This may become a real breakthrough solution for the implementation of climate projects and their financing”.

Sergey Lonshakov, Leader of Airalab: “DAO IPCI is an example of the correct and logical use of the blockchain technology. Global scale project cannot have centralized hierarchy, which is why here the decentralization technology is ideally applicable”.

About the decentralized autonomous organization Integrated Platform for Climate Initiatives (DAO IPCI)

DAO IPCI (https://IPCI.io) is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization operating, sustaining and developing the Integral Platform for Climate Initiatives, smart contracts and blockchain technology-based independent ecosystem designed for carbon market instruments, including carbon compliance units’, carbon-offset credits, other environmental mitigations credits, environmental assets, rights and liabilities registration, accounting and transaction data. The DAO IPCI project is implemented with the technological support of Microsoft Russia, on Azure Blockchain as a Service cloud platform.

DAO IPCI is authentically private nonprofit project independent of government, corporate, business or green NGO particular interests.

On May 24, 2016, the Russian Carbon Fund has officially unveiled the Integrated Program for Climate Initiatives (IPCI) and IPCI-based Carbon Registry (www.CarbonRegistry.ru). 

“The Integrated Program for Climate Initiatives is designed to develop a distributed network of mitigation contributors based on common principles, rules and criteria, as well as provide an accounting platform which can achieve absolute emission reduction targets in compliance with quantitative emission limitation commitments. The goal of the Integrated Program for Climate Initiatives is to integrate corporate and regional mitigation initiatives.” (Sustain Europe) (http://APO.af/wTS3SL)

The IPCI derives from ongoing subnational and corporate climate initiatives and aims at providing for common investment instruments, which are based on climate change mitigation outcomes including high quality carbon offset credits. The IPCI has served as the initial climate program for genesis of DAO IPCI blockchain.

In view of isolation of carbon markets, software problems with traditional registries (see ex expert opinion on EU CO2 register issues) (http://APO.af/mEAY27), DAO IPCI (http://APO.af/Fja5kz) may be a reasonable alternative to provide falsification-proof, low or close to zero transaction cost option.