Carbon trading lacked live pricing

The key insight is that carbon was operating more like a bespoke brokerage business than a real commodity market. The basic infrastructure, registries, brokers, and private bilateral deals, tracked serial numbers and retirement, but often did not expose live price and volume data broadly, so market size was inferred from surveys and reports instead of a transparent tape. That gap is what made Nori frame the problem as market design, not just offset supply.

• Kyoto created the legal idea of tradable carbon units through the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation, and emissions trading. In practice, that produced a project and crediting system first, not a simple exchange where anyone could see standardized prices and volumes the way they can in oil or corn.
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• The traditional workflow was slow and fragmented. A project developer worked through a registry methodology, hired validators and verifiers, got credits issued, then sold through brokers before an end buyer retired them. Nori’s critique was that each resale inflated trading volume without creating new carbon removal.
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• This is also why adjacent companies split the stack differently. Patch built software to aggregate project information, pricing, and purchases for buyers, while Persefoni focused on helping companies calculate emissions first. Nori went after the missing price signal itself, using tokenization to make forward buying and supplier financing easier.
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The market is moving toward more software, better diligence, and more visible pricing, but the structural prize is still the same. The winner will be the company that turns carbon removal from a hand-sold consulting workflow into a liquid, trusted purchasing system that suppliers can finance against and buyers can plan around years in advance.