How To Bridge your Carbon Credits using the Toucan Carbon Bridge
What is Toucan?
Toucan is a protocol that is trying to make DeFi work for the world, by turning carbon credits produced by any real-world entity, into on-chain tokens (aka. Carbon reference tokens) which can be used within DeFi applications or NFTs, brought into the metaverse, or used by companies to buy offsets with on-chain transparency.
In an effort to build a regenerative financial system that supports the Earth rather than exploiting it, they believe the first step is setting up the infrastructure that brings programmable carbon to web3, unlocking its potential for the regenerative economy.
What is the Toucan Bridge?
To bring carbon on-chain, they have built the Toucan Carbon Bridge. The Toucan Bridge allows anyone to bridge their carbon credits from approved legacy registries (right now, this is limited to the Verra registry) on-chain, to ensure that bridged credits come from a trustworthy source.
Through the Toucan Carbonbridge, the credits can be onboarded into the Toucan Meta-Registry as tokenized carbon credits (TCO2s). These tokenized carbon credits retain their metadata and can be deposited into Carbon Pools, where a fungible carbon reference token is created for every deposited TCO2. Fungible carbon reference tokens like BCT and NCT can be used as building blocks across Web3, or they can be offset with on-chain transparency.
The Carbon Bridge can technically be connected to all established and reliable sources of offsets. Toucan is starting with approving offsets from widely-respected and established registries, such as Verra, and are constantly working on expanding sources for high-integrity credits.
Here’s how it works:
How to Bridge:
- Start by going to toucan.earth. You’ll be greeted by their landing page.
2. Press Launch App in the upper right. You will be taken to a page like this and asked to connect your wallet.
3. Connect to the app with your Metamask wallet. If you have multiple wallets, you may switch to the wallet you want to use. If you don’t know how to selec a different wallet under the same MetaMask login, check out this article here.
You’ll know your wallet is connected once you see the green connected signal on your Metamask. Make sure you are connected to Polygon Network. If you don’t know how to connect to Polygon network, you should check out this article.
Make sure the wallet you use to connect to Toucan has a tiny amount of MATIC (>0.05 MATIC) (the polygon network’s token). You will need to use these tokens to be able to mint a batch NFT and use the Toucan’s bridge.
If you do not know how to get tokens from Ethereum to the Polygon network, check out this article on how to bridge here.
4. Once your Metamask is connected, begin by pressing the “Initiate Bridging” button.
5. You’ll be met with a page like this. As of now, they only offer bridging credits from Verra, so I will select that as the provider.
In order to bridge your credits onto the blockchain, you will need to retire your credits on the Verra Registry. In order to retire your credits, you will need to access the credits by logging into Verra or collaborating with a broker who has access and can retire on your behalf.
If you have access to your Verra registry details, select “Yes, I have access to the registry”
and then press the “Initiate Batch” button.
6. This will prompt a transaction on Metamask, like so. Press “Confirm”.
6. Once you’ve confirmed your transaction, you may have to wait a few seconds for the transaction to go through.
You’ll then be met by a page like this:
Follow the steps listed in the prompt to retire your carbon credits on the Verra registry. Once you have your serial number, press “I have my serial” and move on to the next step.
7. You will be met with a page as seen below.
Add your serial number into the box, and then press “ + Add serial”. It is recommended that you add your email so you can be notified of all important updates in the processing of your serial number. Go ahead and press “Confirm serials” once you are done.
8. You will be met with a page that confirms the details of your carbon credits. Confirm that the details of your credits are accurate and that they are the credits you would like to retire.
Once you are sure everything is accurate, press “Submit for approval”.
9. You will once again be met with a Metamask confirmation.
Go ahead and press confirm to continue. You may have to wait a few seconds before the transaction goes through.
10. You will be met with a confirmation page and an approximate wait time. For me that is 12 hours.
11. You can also see the status of your credit approval by looking at your “Overview” dashboard or by pressing on the “Bridge” tab.
12. By the end of the estimated waiting period, your tokens should be fully onboarded into Toucan, resulting in seeing your TCO2 Batch as successfully bridged.
Final Note 👋:
Hope you found this article helpful. Feel free to email me with any questions at satvikagnihotri12@gmail.com or contact Toucan directly through this Typeform. Thanks for reading!
