CryptoNewsZ: Welcome to CryptoNewsZ, Dr. Bo Bai. Our readers are curious to know about MetaVerse Green Exchange and how it contributes to the blockchain space?
MetaVerse Green Exchange (MVGX) is a green digital asset exchange licensed and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It is headquartered in Singapore, renowned for its progressive stance toward financial innovation and its strong sustainability ambitions.
Our goal is to leverage emerging technologies to enable investors, businesses, and governments to align their financial objectives with sustainability goals. As the first exchange to mandate carbon disclosure for both issuers and investors through our blockchain-backed carbon neutrality platform, our users can effectively hit their carbon neutrality targets, all with the assurance of verifiable, auditable impact.
MVGX bridges the gap between the crypto ecosystem and traditional financial services, enabling investors to benefit from the best of what digital assets can offer in terms of portfolio diversification and liquidity enhancement, all within a safe, secure, and regulated environment. Enabled by our proprietary, patent-pending Non-Fungible Digital Twin (NFDT™) technology and Carbon Neutrality Token (CNT™), MVGX facilitates cross-border carbon trading, all while generating new capital inflows to green infrastructure projects. This new digital infrastructure aims to help governments and businesses meet their sustainability targets in line with measures set out in the Paris Agreement (COP21).
Powered by NASDAQ’s advanced trading and surveillance technology and its proprietary ledger with a carbon footprint tag, MVGX provides a transparent, efficient platform for asset owners and investors with a full-service infrastructure, including primary issuance, secondary trading, settlement, and custody of digital assets.
CryptoNewsZ: According to you, what value does blockchain bring to the table when it comes to tackling some of today’s challenges in carbon offsetting?
Before we go into the challenges, it merits devoting some time to understanding why carbon credits and carbon offsetting play an indispensable role in how businesses and governments will be able to achieve their net-zero targets and why this matters now.
First of all, we need to understand the root of all of this — namely, in terms of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, where 196 parties at COP21 adopted its terms and pledged to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. To achieve this, governments will need to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible based on their plans for climate action, which were submitted in 2020 — otherwise known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
One particular area of the Paris Agreement worth examining is Article 6, which stipulates that “cooperative approaches” between countries could help governments achieve their national carbon reduction targets through international carbon reduction credit transactions. However, a critical challenge that arises here is that of double-counting. Double-counting refers to the phenomenon where two separate entities — be it the organization that’s trying to offset its emissions in Country A or the country where the sustainability project is hosted (Country B) — claim credit for the same carbon removal or emission reduction. This is problematic if both countries A and B claim one credit for the same emission reduction when only 1 tCO2e has been removed from the atmosphere instead of 2 tCO2e. Due to this issue, cross-border carbon trading has not grown, despite its potential to finance green projects internationally.
Beyond governments, companies also need to play a role in offsetting their emissions. According to Ecosystem Marketplace, the value of the global voluntary carbon market surpassed US$1 billion last year, pointing to the growing demand for initiatives to help entities reach their net-zero emissions targets and drive capital towards green projects in line with ESG mandates.
In line with this, MVGX’s Carbon Neutrality Token (CNT™) is a private-sector solution that directly supports the mandate proposed in Article 6, enabling businesses to responsibly offset their carbon emissions while preventing the issue of double-counting countries’ NDCs. These CNT™ represent Voluntary Emission Reductions (VERs) — a form of carbon offset exchanged in voluntary markets for carbon credits. With CNTs™, international buyers can directly fund real green projects worldwide with the assurance that both the seller and buyer of tokenized carbon credits will fully view carbon footprint disclosures as they are independently verified and tracked on the blockchain to prevent double-counting.
CryptoNewsZ: Has the Carbon Neutrality Token been used to finance any green projects?
Ahead of COP26 in Glasgow last year, we launched our first batch of CNTs™, equivalent to 10,000 tCO₂, tied to carbon credits generated by a wind project in Zhangjiakou, located in China’s Hebei province. This project is owned by CGN Wind Power Co., Ltd, a subsidiary of the national state-owned enterprise CGN Power Corporation. The Foreign Economic Cooperation Office has verified the project, Ministry of Environmental Protection of China (MEPFECO) and is registered with the national carbon registry, which holds to the same high standards as the European Union. The first tranche of 5,000 carbon credits was sold to Hong Kong-based private equity firm Celadon Partners last year, pointing to the appetite for ESG assets for retail and institutional investors in the Asia Pacific.
CryptoNewsZ: We’ve also seen that MVGX has trademarked its Non-Fungible Digital Twin technology? How is this different from a standard NFT?
Our Non-Fungible Digital Twin (NFDT™) technology is an exciting innovation. It borrows principles from digital twin technology — a virtual representation that serves as the real-time digital equivalent of a physical object or process. This is different from a regular NFT as these are generally static. For example, if I had an NFT of a painting, if a stroke of red paint were added onto the canvas after the NFT was minted, the NFT wouldn’t automatically update to reflect that. In contrast, a digital twin would be able to do so.
With our focus on bringing real-world assets into the metaverse, our NFDT™ technology allows us to do this so that all interactions with objects in the digital realm reflect their actual state in the real world. NFDTs™ effectively ensure that assets in the metaverse are ‘living,’ with new information relating to them from the real world constantly being updated and recorded onto the blockchain.
In line with our CNTs™, NFDT™ technology is an accompanying feature that can allow an investor to track the integrity but, most of all, the performance of the carbon credit through its unique NFDT™ directly from the green project it originates.
CryptoNewsZ: You recently announced the launch of the Carbon Management System. How do companies benefit from this?
The launch of our Carbon Management System is something that we are incredibly proud to unveil as a promising start to this year. With so many businesses around the world struggling to navigate the challenges of carbon reporting, we designed the Carbon Management System to support businesses with the reporting, calculation, and validation process to credibly certify carbon neutrality in accordance with the British Standards Institute’s ISO 14064-1:2018 Carbon Footprint Verification and PAS 2060 Carbon Neutrality Verification. Backed by our proprietary protocols and blockchain, the system is built to instill integrity, transparency, and trust into carbon neutrality certification. Simultaneously, the combined use of our CNTs™ and NFDT™ technology gives companies the real-time data they need to support an immutable and continuously updated record of carbon performance.
Using ourselves as the first case study to attest to our carbon neutrality for 2021, the Carbon Management System is now available to all institutions looking to enhance their sustainability commitments and further their ESG mandates. Upon using the Carbon Management System, MVGX generated a carbon neutrality certification recorded on the blockchain and minted as an NFT, uniquely authenticating an organization’s sustainability efforts.
CryptoNewsZ: What’s next for MVGX?
2022 has been a promising year for MVGX — from welcoming ex-Société Générale executive Eddie Hui as our new COO to our latest strategic cooperation with Greenland Financial Group Technology (Shanghai), a core platform of Greenland Group, a global Fortune 500 company and one of Shanghai’s largest state-backed enterprises. This collaboration with Greenland Financial Technology is especially significant. It marks a critical step toward MVGX’s mission of building a connected international network of carbon trading exchanges backed by our CNTs™ for cross-border carbon credit trading.
We’ll be working together to promote tokenization opportunities for green infrastructure assets and green buildings through this partnership, creating channels for international capital to finance these green projects in China and other developing countries with aspirations to achieve carbon neutrality. We’ll also be working with Greenland Financial Technology’s controlled subsidiary, Guizhou Green Finance and Emissions Exchange, to establish the most advanced digital carbon trading platform and registry arising from carbon assets in China — especially China Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) projects in the real estate and green infrastructure industries. With our CNTs™, GGFEX will be able to create a secure carbon registry that can set the benchmark for other VER markets in the region.
This partnership with Greenland Financial Technology is but a starting point regarding the types of partnerships you can expect to see from us in the coming months — so watch this space; exciting things are on the way!
CryptoNewsZ: That was quite an informative interaction! Thank you for your time, and we wish you luck with all your future projects!
