Toucan is live on Celo!

#ReFlySummer is here — we're thrilled to announce that Toucan Protocol is live on Celo! With great support from cLabs, Abacus, Curve Labs, Bld.AI and Climate Collective, we’ve launched our carbon reference tokens and the Toucan-Celo bridge as a first step of our deployment on Celo.

You can now bridge NCT (Nature Carbon Tonne) and BCT (Base Carbon Tonne) tokens to and from Polygon to Celo. Contribute to a thriving ReFi ecosystem on Celo, by adding tokenized and programmable carbon into protocols and applications. This unlocks automated and rapidly scalable climate financing. Soon, you will also be able to help the world reach our climate goals, by independently offsetting your own emissions.

Toucan 🤝 Celo

Teaming up to build on Celo was an obvious choice for Toucan: we align with Celo’s mission and values, love the strong Celo community, the global reach —  and their good vibes! We look forward to contributing to Celo’s mission to create conditions for prosperity for everyone, and real-world impact with web3.

Celo is a planet-positive, mobile-first EVM-compatible blockchain with the mission to use new technologies to create a more inclusive global financial system.

Initiatives for a liquid carbon market on Celo

Celo’s #ReFiSummer campaign aims to help create a deeply liquid on-chain carbon market on Celo, which unlocks new ways of climate action and supports efficient financing for climate solutions. Carbon tokens will be swappable with a variety of other assets across exchanges like Uniswap, Ubeswap and Symmetric. Some examples: Protocols Moola and Ubeswap will launch a mcUSD/NCT liquidity pool on Ubeswap. BCT and NCT will also be onboarded to the Mento Reserve to back cUSD and cEUR with NCT — an important step towards realizing Celo’s aim to increase the allocation of nature-backed assets in the Mento Reserve, and to enable nature-backed Mento stable assets.

On-chain take climate action for everyone

Another benefit of liquid carbon markets: Everyone can participate in taking climate action, by simply buying and retiring carbon credits. Additionally, innovative protocols ReSource and Symmetric will launch a cReFi index token which holds a basket of impact projects. This will make planet-positive investing as easy and hands-off as possible.

Building on Celo — strengthening and promoting the ReFi ecosystem

We strongly believe that any Web3 builder should be able to build with carbon. That’s why we've been planning to take Toucan cross-chain since the very beginning. We see a deep value alignment with the whole Celo community, and are very excited to be a part of it! Our deployment on Celo will strategically build out the already thriving Celo ecosystem with carbon, and allow new and existing ReFi projects to build on Celo.

Currently, we have 100+ projects building with tokenized carbon on top of our infrastructure. Many of these projects are excited to expand to Celo with us. Others are natively launching on Celo. An example for this is Spirals Protocol, a protocol that builds regenerative infrastructure directly into any proof of stake blockchain.

One carbon standard — myriad marketplaces

Pooled carbon reference tokens like NCT solve the liquidity and fungibility issues of the current voluntary carbon market, but they aren’t the right choice for every buyer. Sometimes, climate investors want to view and compare the unique traits of each tokenized carbon credit instead of buying into a basket of credits. By looking at individual credits, they can choose the most suited ones to compensate for unavoidable emissions. Transparent and accessible on-chain carbon marketplaces leverage the Toucan TCO2 carbon standard and are the counterpart to Toucans Carbon Pools.

Marketplace Senken, for example, provides one single, web3-powered interface where everyone can browse, buy, hold and retire specific carbon projects, while project Atem leverages efficient and automated carbon APIs.

When a carbon credit is bridged on-chain, it is not fungible. It has a variety of different traits, which makes the credit harder to price and trade. Toucans Carbon Pools aggregate credits that share some of the same traits, and exchange them for fungible and liquid carbon reference tokens, like NCT.

We’re looking forward to seeing builders from our and the Celo community get creative and shape a new era of climate action!

Easy retirements and automated climate action

The Celo blockchain has a heavy emphasis on convenient usability and embedding climate action into the core of everyday transactions — which we love!

One example: Book your flight to the next blockchain conference or vacation via the Celo-native travel-booking platform flywallet, pay in cUSD and offset your carbon footprint in one single transaction. Climate action becomes seamless  — and trustless.

Coming soon*

We’re planning to add a “retirement” module to our infrastructure, which will allow users to retire carbon tokens directly on Celo. Retirements are where climate action happens, and they can be performed by individuals or corporations to compensate for unavoidable emissions. Also planned is a bridge to move carbon credits from legacy registries to Celo, where they can be deposited into Toucan’s Carbon Pools.

Additionally, our friends from Return Protocol consider following us to Celo. With Return, builders can embed offsetting into on-chain activities, which roots climate action into the way we interact on-chain.

*timelines and deployments subject to change

We 💚 builders

Celo’s carbon ecosystem is nascent. We need builders to get creative with programmable carbon and explore new use cases with this green asset!

If you are building something cool, we are excited to support you along the way. Have a look at the Toucan Grants Program and Climate Collective Grants Program, or join our regular builder calls and the Toucan Builders Channel on our Discord.

What will you build with carbon? 👀

Celo at a glance

Celo is a carbon-negative, permissionless, layer-1 protocol with a rich ecosystem of global partners building innovative Web3 applications within the DeFi, ReFi, and NFT sectors on Celo. This supports the community’s mission to create a more inclusive global financial system. Accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, the Celo ecosystem consists of a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (the Celo Protocol), the CELO token, and several Mento Protocol stable assets (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL) that make it easy for anyone to use crypto like cash or other types of currency — every day. Launched on Earth Day in 2020, the open source Celo mainnet now supports 1000+ projects created by developers and artists located around the world. For more information, please visit the Celo Foundation.

We are thrilled to work with Celo, Climate Collective, our respective communities and builders to foster new use cases for carbon that positively impact the health of our planet.