Photo by Matthias Heyde on Unsplash
Carbon credits are a messy business. Most people in crypto know the basics by now: companies offset their emissions by buying “credits” that supposedly cancel out their pollution. In practice, many of those credits are unverifiable, short-term, or double-counted. Despite a growing market and public pressure, trust in the system has been in steady decline.
A recently announced partnership between two lesser-known players points to a different approach. Fedrok AG, a Swiss blockchain infrastructure company, and TechXEarthSpace, a Bangalore-based climate tech firm, have joined forces. Instead of trying to fix traditional offset models, they’re focusing on a narrow but high-impact category: permanent CO₂ removal. Captured from the air, verified, stored underground, and tracked entirely on-chain.
It’s not a hype story. But it is an instructive one, especially for how blockchain can serve as infrastructure, not just finance.
Direct Air Capture Meets Layer-1 Blockchain
TechXEarthSpace operates in a space known as engineered carbon removal. Their systems pull carbon dioxide directly from the air, a process called Direct Air Capture (DAC), and inject it into deep geological formations for long-term storage. The company uses fracturing optimization, AI-driven injection protocols, and subsurface mapping to increase the permanence and safety of the storage.
Once removed, that CO₂ becomes the basis for a token.
This is where Fedrok’s infrastructure comes in. Their Level 1 blockchain, designed specifically for tokenizing climate-related assets, will issue a digital carbon credit for each ton of removed and stored CO₂. These tokens are not only symbolic. They’re time-stamped, independently verifiable, and tied to specific storage events. No double counting, no overpromising.
Fedrok’s Proof of Green™ protocol, a consensus mechanism that requires renewable energy input for any token minting, adds another layer of integrity. It links the creation of each credit to both climate-positive action and clean energy usage, a notable departure from energy-agnostic blockchain validation models.
Why This Matters Now
Carbon markets are in flux. While the voluntary carbon market (VCM) continues to grow, McKinsey estimates it could reach $250 billion by 2030, many of the underlying assets are facing increased scrutiny. Several high-profile reports in the last year have questioned the quality of existing credits. In response, buyers are starting to shift from quantity to quality, and from “avoided emissions” to actual removals.
What Fedrok and TechXEarthSpace are doing fits that shift. Their credits are engineered, not estimated. They rely on measured extraction and storage, not projections. And they’re designed for market infrastructure that’s transparent by default.
Also worth noting: Fedrok’s platform holds both ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certifications, covering quality and environmental management, a rare layer of real-world compliance in blockchain infrastructure, especially within climate-related markets.
What This Isn’t, and What It Could Be
This isn’t a new token launch or a public network activation. It’s the start of a focused infrastructure build. The initial deployment will be piloted in southern India, where TechXEarthSpace already operates. Longer term, the companies are planning to expand into other regions with high CO₂ concentrations and regulatory interest in carbon removal.
For the crypto space, this represents a case of applied blockchain that doesn’t chase trend cycles. It’s slow-moving, heavy-lift infrastructure, and for that reason, it may not get the same visibility as consumer-facing protocols.
But it’s exactly the kind of system crypto is well suited to support: permanent records, traceable assets, verifiable transactions, and programmable logic for a sector where trust is in short supply.
