Some see it as an effective tool in the fight against climate change, others brand it as greenwashing: CO2 certificates. Emissions trading has now reached Bitcoin space.
The investment company SkyBridge has entered into a partnership with the emissions trader Moss Earth. The operator of several Bitcoin-related funds acquired tokens that represent 38,346 tons of CO₂ saved.
A current one Press release it can be seen that SkyBridge wants to offset the CO₂ footprint of its Bitcoin reserves with this step. After the acquisition, the fund operator immediately removes the tokens from the market. The income that Moss Earth generates with the distribution of these tokens will benefit various projects that work against deforestation. By purchasing the tokenized emissions certificate, companies are theoretically helping to avoid the distribution of CO₂.
Said MCO₂ token has existed since 2020. It is listed on several Bitcoin exchanges. Moss Earth claims to have sent a total of 15 million US dollars to the Amazon. 800 million trees are said to have been saved from deforestation. The supported projects are checked by the independent evaluation organization Verra.
After research, the medium claimed The Guardian However, the majority of Verra-certified projects actually save less CO₂ than indicated. An exact calculation of emission values, which will only be distributed in the future, is methodologically extremely difficult. Verra criticized the Guardian study, but at the same time promised to continuously adapt its own standards to research results.
SkyBridge founder: BTC climate neutral by 2030
Despite such concerns, SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci sees the certificates as a welcome interim solution for the Bitcoin space. Scaramucci, who also gained fame as Donald Trump’s brief communications director, said:
We expect bitcoin mining to be fully renewable by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, carbon offsets are an effective way to make the Bitcoin network greener and easier to adopt by environmentally conscious investors.
SkyBridge is still not the only crypto company looking to reduce its environmental footprint. In the past few months, the Bitcoin exchanges FTX, Gemini and BitMEX have also acquired CO₂ certificates.
Bitcoin in the climate debate
It is anything but a coincidence that crypto companies are now making public efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. Because at least since Elon Musk declared Bitcoin to be a climate killer by tweet in May, the debate has been heated. Due to the poor environmental balance of crypto mining, Musk suspended the acceptance of BTC payments at Tesla at the time, sending the price downhill. The Chinese mining ban is at least superficially justified with environmental reasons.
In response to Musk and Co., MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor set up the Bitcoin Mining Council. A short time later, the lobby association published a study that attested that mining had a positive carbon footprint. However, this has methodological weaknesses and should therefore be treated with caution at best. BTC-ECHO also addressed the topic in the July issue of the Kryptokompass.