Open Network for Carbon Markets (ONCM) is an open, interoperable digital infrastructure layer codeveloped by IIMB CDPG with Networks for Humanity (NFH) and Indian Institute of Forest Management Bhopal (IIFM), that connects every actor in the carbon credit lifecycle from carbon credit marketplaces, from resource owners, project developers, verifiers and auditors, MRV providers, registries, exchanges, and buyers across both voluntary and compliance markets. The core thesis is that trust in a carbon credit comes from its evidence trail (dMRV data, verification, ownership, retirement) being interoperable and tamper-evident across every registry and market. Done right, this turns carbon credits into a durable, financeable asset class: one that can unlock livelihood income and climate finance for farmers, forest communities, and small projects, not just large intermediaries. ONCM is structured as three interdependent layers: a neutral foundation, namely the NFH fabric, that provides shared registries, credentialing, and tokenization infrastructure; a network layer carrying country-specific rules and methodologies; and an innovation layer where existing exchanges, platforms, and applications operate freely.
India supplies about 17% of the world's carbon credits, the second-largest share globally, and is entering a rare policy inflection point as the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) launches in mid-2026. The rules and digital infrastructure for its carbon market are being shaped right now. But today's market runs as disconnected islands. Registries barely talk to each other, most voluntary trading happens opaquely over-the-counter, and MRV is a manual, paper-based process that can take 12–18 months and cost thousands of dollars per project. That cost structure locks out exactly the participants carbon markets are meant to reward a smallholder farmer, a community forestry group, a rural solar cooperative. ONCM is built on the reverse of that logic. Shared infrastructure lowers transaction costs, lower costs enable transparent pricing and provenance, provenance builds auditability and trust, and trust is what lets the market scale from one farmer to ten million, without renegotiating the chain each time. As AI and automated verification reshape how climate claims get made and checked, this compounding effect helps the market's growth reach the last mile.
A farmer in Odisha plants an agroforestry plot. For the first time, her land's carbon sequestration is verified through satellite and IoT-based dMRV evidence, not just costly manual site visits months later. A project developer finds her directly on the network: onboarding her, preparing the project documentation, and shepherding the project through verification and registry listing. A corporate buyer in Mumbai compares her credits against others across multiple registries, checks the underlying claim instantly, and retires the credit on-chain. The registry updates in real time, confirming retirement instantly and ruling out any risk of the same credit being counted twice. A regulator watches the entire journey from issuance to retirement in a single tamper-evident audit trail, without ever having to ask anyone for a report. One shared source of truth, visible to everyone in the chain, ensuring more of the value flows back to the farmer.
Every carbon credit claim that is transacted on ONCM rests on digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV). Instead of one-time, paper-based audits, dMRV treats verification as continuous: satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and ground data feed a shared, tamper-evident record that any registry, auditor, or regulator can check against, not a fresh report every time. That's what lets supply-side and demand-side verifiers work off the same evidence, instead of reconciling two different stories after the fact. And because that evidence comes out the other end as verified reports, registry submissions, dashboards, and APIs, the same underlying data can serve project reporting, credit issuance, ESG disclosure, and policy monitoring all at once, one evidence base institutions can keep reusing, instead of rebuilding a new system for every use case.
This is an evolving thesis, and we'd love to have regulators, registries, exchanges, project developers, ACVAs, VVBs, MRV/dMRV providers, and corporate buyers in the room with us to co-create it together. We are looking to develop a minimum viable ecosystem pilot with prototype readiness targeted for September 2026. Join us to co-create the Open Network for Carbon Markets.
