What strategies does Patch use to build trust among its users on the marketplace?

When you get out of an Uber, there's an obvious “delivery”—you got to where you were trying to go. With carbon markets, you have a digital asset that maps to a physical asset that moves an invisible gas over time, so there's a lot less obvious proof that something is taking place. 

To get listed on Patch, the data we require if you are a reforestation provider versus a direct air carbon capture provider are fundamentally different.

First and foremost, the high-level shape of the data typically comes in the form of registry data. There are these external systems that are called carbon credit registries where the credit is actually minted. In order to get a credit, you have to go through a process called verification. You can almost imagine a world where you have a Deloitte-type character auditing the work of the project, and them saying, "Okay, you've minted that you've removed 10, 20, 30, 100 tons of carbon so you get 10, 20, 30, 100 carbon credits."

We take that data and pull that into our system. That’s the minimum bar in order to get listed, though that's not usually enough.

Post-transaction, we work with third-party monitoring systems to understand if the asset that carbon credit is secured against is still alive and operational. There have been instances where forests in the Pacific Northwest used for carbon credit projects have burned down and the holders of those carbon credits were left holding the bag, so we're securing against that post-transaction trust element as well.