Earth Markets

Origin

Earth Credits are an instrument of measurement: one acre-year of verified ecological condition, scored across six SEEA dimensions, anchored to a county-recorded Nature Rights Deed. They are part of the Landseed PBC ecosystem, and Earth Markets is their price-discovery layer. Before any credit can trade meaningfully, a forecaster network has to put a public price on the underlying ecological state — biodiversity, carbon, water, soil, climate, ocean — so that the credit's value can be reasoned about in the same coordinate system as the world it claims to represent.

Problem

Voluntary carbon markets price estimates, not measurements. They have no public reference price for the state of the world; they have only a registry's word that an offset is worth what the registry says it is. The result is a market in which rigorous and casual accounting are indistinguishable at the unit of trade, and the price signal is noise. What's needed is a separate market — open, public, continuous — whose only job is to put prices on Earth-system state. Earth Credits then settle against that reference rather than against opinion.

Approach

Earth Markets sits on top of an Earth API that aggregates first-party scientific sources into a programmable layer, and runs prediction markets across six Earth systems — biodiversity, climate, ocean, water, energy, protected areas. Forecasters take positions; an autonomous market maker re-prices on a regular cadence by comparing live readings against open positions. The price discovery seeds Earth Credit valuation: when an Earth Credit is issued from a parcel, the market already has a continuously-updated reference for what the underlying state is worth.

Methodology

Three-phase evolution. Phase 1 — Storytelling: signals as content, public legibility, no real money on the line. Phase 2 — Tradeable: a separate Signal Markets entity domiciled where the regulator recognizes prediction markets on environmental state. Phase 3 — Convergence: signal speculation feeds back into Earth Credit valuation through a published reference rate; the credit and the market are different instruments, but they share a coordinate system. A multi-entity Landseed structure carries the components — verifier, exchange, signal markets, institutional vehicle, market making — at arm's length from each other.

Selected milestones

• Co-founded with Greg Curtis (Patagonia's former Deputy General Counsel)
• Earth API operational, aggregating first-party scientific sources
• Prediction-market surface live across the six Earth-system categories
• Autonomous market maker cycling against live Earth-system readings
• Public thesis statement: 'The Unauditable Market', Dhaka Courier, April 24 2026

Collaborators

Greg Curtis, co-founder and co-CEO, formerly Deputy General Counsel at Patagonia. Built alongside Landseed PBC, the verifier and registry of Earth Credits.

Open questions

• Which jurisdiction the Signal Markets entity should domicile in
• How the market-maker cycle should adapt under high-frequency Earth-system events (storms, fires, mass mortality)
• What the right reference-rate mechanism is between Earth Markets pricing and Earth Credit settlement
• How forecaster reputation should compound across Earth systems vs reset per system

Ask me about

• How prediction-market price discovery feeds Earth Credit valuation
• Why a separate jurisdiction for Signal Markets
• What the Earth Market Maker actually does every six hours
• How forecaster positions reconcile against an autonomously-updating Earth API

Stack

External

https://earthmarkets.ai