On a global scale today, combating climate change is more critical than ever. Nations and enterprises are setting ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions, and a new financial instrument is emerging to support these efforts: carbon assets. Similar to gold or oil in the past, carbon assets are poised to become the new anchor in the global financial system, driving sustainable economic growth. However, to fully harness the potential of carbon assets as a crucial tool against climate change, we need to rethink their management and distribution, envisioning a decentralized, transparent, and inclusive system.

Why We Need a Decentralized Carbon Asset Network

Carbon neutrality has gained global consensus. As public goods, the management of carbon assets should not be confined to any single entity or nation but should be achieved through a digital, decentralized system that ensures transparency and inclusivity.

By leveraging blockchain technology, we can envision a networked world where carbon assets do not depend on any single country or institution. Instead, through machine-trustworthy digitization, they can achieve self-certification, self-issuance, and full lifecycle circulation on the chain, becoming decentralized assets. These decentralized carbon assets will be collectively owned by the global community, transforming them into truly public assets. This approach not only democratizes access to these crucial resources but also supports a new era of economic growth driven by environmental sustainability.

To unlock the full potential of carbon assets, we need to build a decentralized public carbon asset network designed to maintain the following key attributes:

• Liquidity: Ensuring that carbon assets can circulate freely on a global scale, enhancing their utility and value.
• Transparency: Providing clear visibility into asset transactions and usage, preventing information asymmetry.
• Low Barriers: Making it easy for individuals and various organizations to participate and benefit.
• Openness and Permissionless: Allowing anyone, anywhere, to access the network to issue, consume, and trade assets without restrictions.

How to Combine Public Goods with Commercial Sustainability

Balancing the public welfare nature of public goods with the commercial sustainability of infrastructure networks is a complex issue. Traditionally, public goods rely on funding from governments or charitable organizations, while the operation and maintenance of infrastructure networks require a stable commercial model to ensure long-term functionality.

In this context, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) offer an innovative solution. The DePIN model effectively combines public welfare attributes with commercial sustainability through community co-construction and co-ownership. Community members are not only users of the network but also builders and owners. They collectively invest in, manage, and maintain the network, sharing in the benefits it brings.

Arkreen‘s vision is to organically integrate voluntary carbon neutrality with a commercial carbon asset network through the DePIN model, creating a sustainable, inclusive climate action platform and a public carbon asset network.

The advantages of this model include:

• Transparency and Trust: Community co-construction and management ensure the network’s transparency and credibility.
• Sustainable Development: Community ownership incentivizes more people to participate in the construction and maintenance of the network, ensuring its sustainable development.
• Shared Benefits: The co-ownership model allows for the distribution of benefits within the community, achieving a win-win goal for both public welfare and commercial interests.

Arkreen’s vision is to organically integrate public climate action with a commercial carbon asset network through the DePIN model, building a sustainable, inclusive climate action platform and public carbon asset network. This network aims to incentivize corporate participation and provide individuals with convenient ways to participate and gain recognition. Through decentralized technology, Arkreen seeks to achieve transparency, credibility, and inclusiveness of carbon assets, genuinely promoting the global carbon neutrality goal.

Market Entry: Inclusive Carbon Market for Individuals

However, the scope of carbon assets is broad. From which niche market should Arkreen start? Currently, carbon assets primarily serve enterprises. There is no inclusive carbon asset platform or tool for individuals who want to contribute to climate change today, enabling them to participate and gain recognition. Individual participation is crucial for achieving the global carbon neutrality goal. Although Ant Forest is a good attempt, it still relies on corporate funding and fails to form a sustainable business model. Therefore, we believe there are opportunities on both the supply and demand sides of the inclusive carbon market for individuals. On the supply side, due to the low ROI of digitizing and developing environmental rights for individual green behaviors, no third-party centralized institution is willing to develop these small green assets. However, aggregating this long-tail market can result in a significant asset. On the demand side, there is currently no low-barrier, low-cost voluntary carbon neutrality trading market for small retail users to participate in.

Arkreen’s Market Entry Point: Inclusive Carbon Market for Individuals

Solutions: Technology and Community-Driven Strategy

Therefore, Arkreen adopts the community model of DePIN and token incentives for the cold start of both the supply and demand sides.

Technological Approach: Utilizing trusted digitization, blockchain, and tokenization technology, Arkreen implements a ReFi model that ensures the full lifecycle circulation of green assets on-chain, from certification and registration to issuance, trading, and retirement.

Operational Approach: On the supply side, using the DePIN model, Arkreen supports the issuance of small green assets by building the distributed energy digital infrastructure required for these assets through a bottom-up global community effort. On the demand side, Arkreen’s GreenBTC.Club application incentivizes and drives individuals worldwide to continuously engage in small-scale voluntary carbon-neutral actions.

Business Perspective: Arkreen captures external value using utility tokens representing network usage rights, thereby enabling incentives for the cold start and the flywheel effect for sustainable development.

Arkreen Solutions: Technology, Operations and Business

Through the DePIN model, Arkreen aims to incentivize the global community to continuously engage in climate action for the public good, jointly building and owning a decentralized, bottom-up public carbon asset network.

Supply-Side Mechanism: Impact to Earn

On the supply side, individual green behaviors (such as rooftop solar power generation, energy-saving air conditioning, and electric vehicle usage) are digitized through IoT solutions, structured according to specific methodologies, and registered and issued as green assets on-chain. A green asset is equivalent to one ton of carbon reduction or one kilowatt-hour of thermal power saved (or one kilowatt-hour of green power generated), similar to carbon credits or green certificates. For example, household distributed photovoltaic systems can have their solar power generation data digitized and registered on-chain, and green certificates (ART, tokenized on-chain green certificates) can be issued based on the methodology of one certificate per thousand kilowatt-hours of solar power. The Arkreen network rewards these efforts with utility tokens (AKRE) and supports liquidity by creating trading pairs for green assets (ART) on decentralized exchanges (DEX). The DePIN model can incentivize community users in developing countries to accelerate carbon reduction actions, invest in renewable energy, and enhance energy-saving measures.

Supply-side mechanism: Impact to Earn

Demand-Side Mechanism: Play to Impact

On the demand side, individuals can achieve voluntary carbon neutrality by purchasing tokenized green assets on DEX and retiring them on-chain. These green assets may come from Arkreen’s supply-side activities or external carbon assets bridged into the network. By retiring these assets on-chain, users contribute to voluntary carbon neutrality. Arkreen will reward these voluntary carbon-neutral actions with utility tokens (AKRE).

As a cold start for the demand side, Arkreen launched GreenBTC.Club to promote the consumption of green assets. Community participants purchase green assets, such as on-chain green certificates (ART), and participate in green Bitcoin carbon-neutral tasks by retiring these assets on-chain to offset the historical carbon emissions of the Bitcoin network. The Arkreen network will reward these participants with utility tokens (AKRE) and other asset rewards. As the system develops, Arkreen plans to enable users from developed countries to directly support the purchase of green assets, achieving on-chain voluntary carbon-neutral offset.

Demand-side mechanism: Play to Impact

Token Model: Capturing Value and Incentivizing Public Welfare

In the Arkreen network, the utility token AKRE is used to pay transaction fees for the issuance, retirement, and trading of green assets, capturing the value of the inclusive climate action platform and the green public asset network.

• Supply-Side Value: The more low-carbon activities recorded and green assets issued and traded, the more issuance fees are collected on-chain, increasing the value captured by the network.
• Demand-Side Value: The more voluntary carbon-neutral actions and green asset retirements, the more retirement fees are collected on-chain, further driving the network’s value.

This utility token model perfectly combines public welfare incentives (rewarding community participants in inclusive climate actions with utility tokens) with commercial value (capturing value through the utility token in the community-built public green asset network). This synergy is at the core of Arkreen’s strategy and DePIN model. It not only supports the construction of a decentralized, bottom-up public carbon asset network but also encourages continuous community participation in climate actions. This holistic system promotes a sustainable and inclusive path to global carbon neutrality.

Token model: used to capture value and incentivize public welfare

Market Strategy: Expanding DePIN and ReFi Ecosystems

In the short to medium term, Arkreen will actively expand DePIN projects within the Web3 market by converting green actions in its ecosystem into physical proof-of-work (PoPW) recorded on the Arkreen platform. This will facilitate the issuance of green assets and commercial monetization. Additionally, Arkreen plans to collaborate with ReFi projects or Web3 projects with ESG goals, aligning their on-chain voluntary carbon-neutral demands with Arkreen’s green asset retirement services. In the traditional non-Web3 market, green asset sellers can use the Arkreen platform to issue assets, eliminating intermediary costs and achieving better returns. Buyers can engage in real-time trading on the Arkreen platform 24/7 and access highly transparent and impactful green assets (such as household renewable energy projects in Africa).

In the long-term strategy, Arkreen aims to advance the decentralized voluntary carbon-neutral market, particularly at the C2C (consumer-to-consumer) level, enabling point-to-point or decentralized models. In this system, consumers on the demand side purchase green assets to directly support individuals on the supply side who are making green actions, thus encouraging more green activities. This model also eliminates intermediary profits, offering buyers more cost-effective green assets and greater incentives for sellers. Furthermore, the construction of the Arkreen network will simultaneously promote individual-inclusive climate action accounts and global personal carbon asset wallets, facilitating global participation in climate action and personal carbon asset management.

Core Product Stack: Driving Decentralized and Inclusive Climate Solutions

The Arkreen network comprises three core product stacks:

• Decentralized Inclusive Climate Action Network: This includes the Miner product on the supply side and the GreenBTC.Club application on the demand side.
• Decentralized dMRV Framework: This includes TLay BoAT3 IoT Oracle and AREC Bridge, which manage the lifecycle of digital green certificates. TLay BoAT3 IoT Oracle ensures high-quality renewable energy data on the Arkreen platform, enabling fair reward distribution.
• DePIN+ReFi RePIN Application Chain: Developed in collaboration with TLay, this supports the issuance and management of green assets on a dedicated application chain. The TLay DePIN application chain provides Arkreen’s on-chain services with high trustworthiness, interoperability, and flexibility, achieving environmentally friendly outcomes at moderate costs.

Arkreen’s Year of Growth: Operational Data and Trends

Since the launch of the testnet in May 2023 and the mainnet in March 2023, Arkreen has shown a trend of rapid growth over the past year.

• Supply and Demand Side Growth: There has been a significant increase in the number of miners on the supply side and the utilization of green assets on the demand side.

• On-Chain Transactions: Both the number of on-chain issuance and offset transactions, as well as transaction fees, have seen significant growth.

• On-Chain Asset Scale: Arkreen now supports over 100,000 miners, with a total cumulative power generation of 2 GWh. More than 30,000 ART tokenized green certificates have been retired for voluntary carbon neutrality.

Ecosystem Collaboration: Driving Web3 Innovation and Sustainable Partnerships

In terms of government recognition, InvestHK selected Arkreen as a Web3 innovation case and technical partner during Hong Kong FinTech Week. Similarly, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) highlighted Arkreen during the Singapore FinTech Festival. On the B2B collaboration front, the leading ESG public chain Celo has begun purchasing Arkreen’s ART on-chain green certificates through its Celo Carbon Offsetting Fund to support its ecosystem’s carbon neutrality efforts. Top Web3 enterprises and communities such as Hashkey, OKX, and RPC have chosen Arkreen’s GreenBTC.Club as their platform for voluntary carbon neutrality programs. In terms of standardization, the Web3 Standards Association is working with Arkreen to advance industry standards for Web3 carbon neutrality. Additionally, global leaders in photovoltaic inverter manufacturing and core partners in international renewable energy certificates (IREC) are collaborating with Arkreen to explore innovative pilot projects for the tokenization of renewable energy certificates (REC). Arkreen is also actively involved in ecosystem development, having partnered with the Hashkey Group to initiate the DePIN Hong Kong Initiative to promote the development of the DePIN ecosystem in Asia. Arkreen has also teamed up with ReFiDAO to establish a ReFi local node in Hong Kong, advancing regenerative finance in Asia. The GreenBTC.Club platform now boasts over 20 partners supporting voluntary carbon neutrality and sustainable practices.

Vision & Mission

Arkreen is dedicated to advancing inclusive climate action worldwide through a community-driven and bottom-up model, creating a public green asset network based on a trustworthy digital foundation of renewable energy.

Arkreen invites the global community to collaboratively build a decentralized, inclusive, and sustainable green future.

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