At MetaForum Lugano this past May, the mood around carbon markets was equal parts hopeful and skeptical. The voluntary carbon market is projected to surpass $50 billion by 2030, but its credibility crisis is already here. Blockchain has long promised to clean up climate finance, but apart from glossy decks and pilot registries, real breakthroughs remain rare.
Artyom Harutyunyans, CTO of Fedrok, took the stage at a panel titled “Blockchain for Tokenizing Carbon Credits”, hosted by The Cryptonomist. His message? Tokenization alone won’t solve the carbon market’s credibility problem. Infrastructure will.
“We don’t need more carbon tokens. We need systems that make integrity enforceable by design.”
Fedrok is building that system. We sat down with him after the panel and asked him a few questions. In this interview, Harutyunyans explains why tokenized offsets miss the mark, how their Proof of Green consensus works in the field, and what it will take to restore trust in environmental markets.
Metaforum Lugano: Q&A with Artyom Harutyunyans, CTO of Fedrok
What was the core message you wanted to leave with the audience—and what reaction in the room told you it landed?
I wanted to be very clear: this is not just another carbon tokenization project. We’re rethinking the foundational infrastructure of ESG accountability, and we’re excited about it. Everyone took it with a big interest, and after the panel, several attendees approached me to learn more, especially those working on registries and decentralized MRV. That interest validated the message.
Many climate-focused blockchain projects center on tokenization. You’ve emphasized that Fedrok isn’t just another carbon token. What do you see as the limitations of token-only approaches, and why is building at the infrastructure layer so important?
You can’t solve integrity gaps in carbon markets just by issuing tokens. Tokenization can be useful, but on its own, it often creates more fragmentation than trust. What we’ve seen is that without robust underlying infrastructure, especially around verification, auditing, and data provenance, tokens risk becoming disconnected from real-world impact. At Fedrok, we’re focused on integrating ESG principles directly into the consensus mechanism. That way, environmental accountability isn’t layered on afterward, it’s built into the chain’s logic from the start. I believe that’s what it takes to make carbon markets verifiable, scalable, and ultimately credible.Fedrok’s consensus is called ESG‑native infrastructure. Walk me through one transaction’s lifecycle on Fedrok, flagging where ESG assurance is baked in. What problems does this solve that PoS or standalone carbon tokens don’t?
Fedrok ties environmental performance directly into block production. When a green-certified miner, say, one using verified low-carbon energy, mines a block, that action triggers the minting of an FDK coin on our chain and rewarded to the block generators. It’s automatic, auditable, and linked to real-world activity. So each FDK coin represents carbon reduction on consensus level. Unlike PoS, it’s not only about staking, it’s about proof of environmental work. That linkage is what gives the token credibility.Voluntary carbon markets struggle with bad actors and murky valuations. Can chains like Fedrok genuinely restore trust, or is that overpromising? Where does on‑chain transparency stop and independent verification start?
Restoring trust is a big claim, and we don’t make it lightly, it’s one of our main missions. Independent verification will always be essential, the question is how verifiable it is. Fedrok ’s structure makes that verification auditable and tamper-resistant. Miners are audited annually, and every minted token is traceable to its origin, everything stays on chain. No one can mint a huge amount of coins. If a bad actor is found, they will be removed, and their impact on the system is isolated. It’s not a magic fix, but it’s a real step forward.Many projects treat sustainability as a separate feature, but Fedrok seems to be building it into the system itself. Can you give an example of how that’s happening in practice—and what metrics or KPIs you’re looking at to validate it?
That’s right, we’re not trying to tokenize emissions after the fact. We’re embedding ESG logic directly into the infrastructure. One example is our work on T4G Pay in Papua New Guinea, where part of every transaction fee is automatically routed to rural landowners. There’s no need for a third party to issue credits later, the value flow is built into the protocol. Similarly, in Chad and Niger, we launched a microtransaction challenge for local developers building grassroots payment tools. These won’t be speculative apps, they will be systems designed for offline, low-data environments where climate and financial inclusion go hand in hand. For us, KPIs aren’t just chain activity, they include how value is distributed, who earns it, and whether it aligns with local environmental impact.Is the goal to stay as base‑layer infra others plug into, or become a market‑setting platform yourselves? Which milestone in the next 12 months will convince doubters you’re on track?
We want to become the standard others build on. The next 12 months are about launching the chain, getting traction and validating our assumptions. Can we attract the right ecosystem partners, demonstrate our compliance tools, and show the ESG layer works in practice? After that we want to onboard some of the bigger names in the carbon credit industry, especially those that were still skeptical of Web3 solutions.Regulation is sprinting to catch up (EU CSRD, US SEC climate disclosure). How does building at the infra layer future‑proof Fedrok against shifting policy?
Transparency and traceability are central to where climate regulation is going. In theory, Fedrok should be the only truly decentralized blockchain with AML compliance abilities. Fedrok builds compliance into the minting process: every new FDK coin has a known origin. That’s a key distinction from early crypto, where asset origin is unclear. We’re designing for a world where accountability is not optional, and we want to make that easy for regulators to verify.xWhat moment in your career convinced you that on‑chain infrastructure—not carbon credits alone—is the lever for climate impact?
It was when I met Philip, Fedrok’s CEO. He’s spent decades working across climate, engineering, and financial systems, not just from a theoretical perspective, but on the ground in places like Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. When we started discussing how difficult it is to ensure trust and traceability in traditional ESG systems, something clicked. His view was clear: unless climate finance is embedded in the actual infrastructure, not just layered on with offsets, we’ll keep repeating the same cycle of inefficiency and greenwashing. That idea stuck with me. It shaped how I now think about the role of blockchain: not as a marketplace for carbon credits, but as a system of accountability where sustainability is enforced by design
Fedrok’s story is a reminder that tokenizing carbon credits won’t fix broken systems, but building credible infrastructure might. From miner-level incentives to rural payment rails, the chain embeds ESG into every transaction.
If the next phase of climate finance is about trust, not just scale, then the future won’t be written in tokens alone, it will be written in code that holds itself accountable.