The Spanish public postal service, Correos y Telégrafos de España, will use the ClimateTrade blockchain platform.
In fact, thanks to a close partnership with Acciona, Correos will use the carbon credits of the projects hosted on the platform to offset the CO2 emissions resulting from shipments made by citizens, and will facilitate the compensation of its corporate customers.
The announcement was made during the COP25 World Climate Summit held in Madrid.
The Climate Blockchain Initiatives startup in Valencia developed the ClimateTrade platform to offset CO2 emissions, hosting ecological projects that sell their carbon credits directly to polluting companies, without intermediaries. In particular, Acciona will grant the Spanish postal service Acciona Energy carbon credits.
The platform is based on a decentralised distributed ledger that eliminates the need for third parties for the management of transactions, making them cheaper, faster and more transparent. Previously, carbon credit transactions were managed by third parties which required de facto double accounting.
ClimateTrade’s co-founder and CEO, Francisco Benedito, said:
“Ours is a collaboration agreement. Article 6 talks about the collaboration between the parties to achieve climate targets and sustainable development in all countries. Blockchain technology allows funds to be traced. These range from Correos’ advance payments to the Acciona project. Acciona is the only zero-emission utility in the energy world. With our platform, we have avoided the previous double accounting for reselling carbon credits. When this happened, projects aimed at combating climate change did not receive the necessary funds, there were difficulties in completing the process. New initiatives have been reduced”.
It is not clear which blockchain the platform is based on, but when the prototype was presented for testing in 2018, it was based on Ethereum and Stellar.
Disintermediation in carbon credit transactions is made possible by the use of tokens that can be exchanged directly between sellers and buyers, in a trustless manner. This greatly simplifies the exchange procedure, making it also faster and less expensive.
