Originally published on: September 12, 2024
Northern Trust, a renowned financial services company, has recently unveiled its institutional carbon credit ecosystem on the cutting-edge Northern Trust Matrix Zenith digital assets platform. Serving as the custodian, Northern Trust will oversee the record-keeping, transfer, and settlement of digital carbon credit trades tied to “emission footprints” within the voluntary carbon market.
Powered by smart contracts on a permissioned blockchain, legal agreements will be generated to facilitate the trading of digital carbon credits for fiat currency, ultimately leading to their “retirement.”
The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem has successfully reached the minimum viable product stage, with two project developers and three purchasers, including Northern Trust itself, participating in September 2023. With the full version now live, a similar number of participants have joined the platform.
Justin Chapman, the global head of Digital Assets and Financial Markets at Northern Trust, emphasized that the system offers comprehensive support for the digital asset lifecycle, encompassing asset creation, pricing, trading, custody, and reporting.
Each carbon credit represents the reduction or removal of one ton of carbon, effectively offsetting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from various projects. The inaugural sellers of carbon credits on the platform were the UK-based small business Water Recovery Systems IP and Lichtenstein-based CUT Carbon Distributed Technologies, with CUT launching its Carbon Utility Token (CUT) for trading tokenized carbon credits on Arbitrum.
Among the buyers mentioned by Northern Trust, Adapt Global Limited, a global sustainability-focused telecommunications company, has shown keen interest in participating in the digital carbon credit trading platform.
With a long history of involvement in blockchain initiatives, Northern Trust has been at the forefront of cutting-edge projects. Partnering with PwC for private equity data management on-chain and offering digital asset custody since 2018, the company is also a co-founder of Zodia Custody and has collaborated on blockchain ventures with SWIFT, EY, and other industry leaders.
Stay tuned for more updates on Northern Trust’s groundbreaking digital carbon credit trading platform and its positive impact on the environment and financial markets.
