Earth Markets
The protocol layer underneath Earth Credits.
Origin
Voluntary carbon markets price estimates, not measurements. The architecture inherited from offset finance assumes that what matters can be modeled, sampled, and projected — that you can credit a forest for the carbon it is *thought to be* sequestering. The result is a market in which the most rigorous accounting is indistinguishable, at the unit-of-trade level, from the most casual; the price signal is therefore noise.
Problem
Replacing estimation with measurement requires three things at once: (a) sensor networks that produce continuous signal from the land itself, (b) a legal anchor that ties the signal to a specific parcel beyond dispute, and (c) an issuance protocol that translates ecological condition into an instrument tradeable inside existing market infrastructure. Each of those is a hard problem; together they are a stack.
Approach
Earth Markets is the protocol substrate. Sensor signal flows up into a six-dimensional condition score; the score is the basis for credit issuance; each unit is anchored to a county-recorded legal deed. The deed is the legal innovation: it is a public, jurisdictionally enforceable record outside the protocol's control, which means the protocol cannot collapse a credit's provenance even if the protocol itself fails.
Methodology
Build the sensor schema, the score, and the issuance rules outside any individual project, so that the protocol scales the way internet protocols do — by being thin, opinionated, and operated by many independent actors. Issued credits are instruments, not promises.
Selected milestones
- Co-founded with Greg Curtis (Patagonia's former Deputy General Counsel)
- Architecture being built in public alongside Landseed PBC
Collaborators
Greg Curtis, co-founder, formerly Deputy General Counsel at Patagonia.
Open questions
- Which six dimensions, and how their weights evolve as ecology evolves
- How county-level deed registries reconcile with cross-border conservation finance
- What replaces the registry-of-registries problem in voluntary markets
Ask me about
- Why six dimensions, and which six
- How county-recorded deeds anchor a market instrument legally
- What replaces the registry-of-registries problem
- How sensor data turns into a tradable unit