Nori's Carbon Price Discovery
Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori, on tokenized projects for social good
This reveals that Nori was trying to turn a one off environmental purchase into a continuously traded commodity market. Most carbon credits are sold project by project, with thin trading and no shared screen showing a live market clearing price. Nori’s design tied one token to one carbon removal tonne, so buyers could lock in future supply and suppliers could either cash out immediately or hold exposure to a rising carbon price, which is much closer to how oil or power markets form reference prices than how traditional offsets are sold.
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Nori’s actual workflow was built around verified soil carbon removal. A farmer signed a 10 year contract, a third party quantified stored carbon using a USDA based approach, Nori issued an NRT for one tonne removed, and the platform had paid nearly $1.5 million to farmers across about 86,000 tonnes sold at a flat $15 cash price since 2019. The token was meant to replace that fixed price with a market price.
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That is a different role from companies like Patch. Patch focused on being the API and transaction layer that connects buyers, projects, and accounting systems, while explicitly avoiding verification conflicts. In practice, Patch helps companies buy credits inside software workflows, while Nori aimed to create the benchmark price that those workflows could reference.
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The broader market has since split these functions apart. BeZero and Sylvera built independent project ratings businesses that help buyers compare quality across projects, using public methodologies and project level assessments. That points to a market structure where the winning stack likely separates quality scoring, transaction rails, and price formation instead of combining all three in one marketplace.
Going forward, carbon markets are likely to look more like other financial markets, with distinct layers for measurement, ratings, payments, and trading. The strategic prize is still the reference price. Whoever becomes the default source for what a durable removal tonne is worth will shape how developers finance projects and how corporate buyers budget years of carbon purchases in advance.