A Singaporean company has taken steps to be the first in the Southeast Asia region to connect with the China carbon market as well as build an international network using a proprietary digital asset that is designed for cross-border carbon credit trading.

MetaVerse Green Exchange (MVGX) partnered with Greenland Financial Technology Group (Shanghai) as part of a joint effort to meet increasing investors’ desire for cross-border digital carbon credits and crypto-assets on regulated and licensed platforms.

MVGX is a digital green exchange licensed and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore while Greenland is a global Fortune 500 company and a state-backed enterprise with a focus on real estate, infrastructure, and finance. Their partnership will see MVGX make its patent-pending blockchain-powered carbon registry and cross-border carbon credit trading platform available to a subsidiary of Greenland, Guizhou Green Finance and Emissions Exchange, as they combine financial service capabilities and promote tokenization (or digital securitization) of green infrastructure assets and green buildings. They will also create channels for international capital to finance green infrastructure projects in China and elsewhere to achieve carbon neutrality.

The collaboration could also be the first step toward MVGX’s plan to connect carbon trading exchanges using its proprietary Carbon Neutrality Token which combines the immutability of NFTs with real-time data updates of carbon performance records.

China launched the online carbon market last year. It started trading carbon on July 16 as the country aims to reduce its carbon footprints and meet emission targets. In the market, companies can trade carbon emission allowance (the total allowed to be emitted) as given to them by the government. The carbon trading market enables companies that have less allowance to buy and cover their shortfall while those with excess quota get to sell. An assigned third party monitors the activities of market inspectors for data falsification.

In 2020, China set a target to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. This goal, among other things, was reportedly threatened by crypto mining hence the May 2021 ban on related activities by the Chinese government as a policy intervention to prevent a rise in energy consumption and higher emission.

In another development that is related to carbon trading, the general office of the Chinese ruling party’s Central Committee and the State Council this month released a guideline on building a unified national energy market. China vowed in the guideline to develop a unified national ecological and environment market as well as create unified carbon emissions and water rights trading markets through which consistent industry standards and supervision will be applied.

Interest in digital asset-based carbon trading is growing elsewhere in the globe. Earlier this month, a public blockchain custom-built for global carbon accounting in the Cosmos ecosystem, Regen Network, announced that it has purchased all the city forest carbon credits – stored in 13 urban forestry projects – currently available in the US. The purchase by the technology company which develops a global marketplace for earth’s ecosystem assets, services, and data, is the largest and first-of-its-kind transaction. Regen Network plans to digitize carbon credits to offer them for sale through its platform in the future.

Meanwhile, MVGX recently certified its status as the first company in the world to be a carbon-neutral business through tokenized cross-border carbon credits using blockchain technology based on the British Standards Institution ISO 14064-1:2018 and PAS 2060 verification processes.