February 2026: designing Veridium Carbon, a blockchain for carbon credits

February was the month Veridium Carbon went live. It is a blockchain built for one job: carrying certified carbon credits so they can be bought, settled and checked without paper trails, manual processing or the same credit being counted twice.

Designing how the coin is issued

Every blockchain has to answer a simple question before anything else: how many coins will ever exist? How do new ones appear? For a carbon market that answer matters more than usual. If supply can be inflated, trust in every certificate built on top of it goes with it.

I designed Veridium's issuance rules around that. There is a hard ceiling on the total supply. Half is created at launch to seed the market. The rest is released steadily through mining, with a new block every minute, so the pace of new supply is predictable years ahead. A development team built the chain to that brief. The design of the rules was mine.

A ledger nobody can quietly add to

Open blockchains let anyone with enough computing power produce blocks. That is right for a currency, but wrong for a register of real-world assets. On 18 February the network moved to a chain where every new block must carry the network's own signature before it is accepted. Anyone can still read every record and check every transaction. Only the network can add one.

I chose that trade deliberately. For a register of carbon credits, being able to check everything matters far more than letting anyone write to it.

Bringing the network up

Launching a chain is more than the software. Alongside it went the public pieces that make it usable: a block explorer so anyone can look up any address or payment, a mining pool plus nodes spread across several servers so the network does not rest on one machine. Getting them all talking to each other cleanly was most of the month's practical work.

You can see the network today at veridiumcarbon.com, with live figures read straight from the chain.