Carbon Credits & Carbon Trading

We started with the basics of how a credit comes into existence: how credits are generated, verified, stored and traded, mostly through purpose-built projects whose primary aim is generating credits in the first place.

Alongside that we studied regulatory intent in India, existing platforms and global case studies (our favourites: Verra, IETA, Varaha, Bayer and AirCarbon Exchange), and demand-side realities for mid-sized companies.

We charted the full lifecycle of a carbon credit: generation, monitoring, verification, how it finally reaches a buyer through platforms, and retirement at the end of its life.

MRV (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification) became central to every discussion. We broke it down beyond the acronym: how carbon is stored and classified into POM and MOM, why permanence, additionality and leakage matter, and how credibility at the verification layer directly drives pricing and buyer trust.

Regenerative agriculture kept standing out because of its dual impact: improved soil health alongside sequestration. And its natural fit with a country of India's farming scale. We studied the operating models of Varaha and Grow Indigo and found most models are structurally similar: onboard farmers, shift practices, measure soil carbon, aggregate credits, sell to institutional buyers. The differentiation lies in the technology stack, farmer aggregation strategy and strength of the MRV system.

Here's the idea one of our members called a cash cow: instead of burning farm waste, farmers hand it over to someone who processes it into a form that improves soil fertility, reduces emissions and increases water retention. And they get paid extra for doing so. The process that turns farm waste into biochar (a biofertiliser that raises soil carbon content, with applications in steel smelting too) is called pyrolysis.

Liquidity: the model is CapEx-heavy and credit issuance takes a long time.

Seasonality: farm waste isn't available year-round, which leaves the off-season unanswered.

Geography: not all inputs can be sourced everywhere; different states offer very different opportunities.

Rather than build further on guesses, we paused and spoke to founders, project developers, registry experts and operators sitting across different parts of the carbon market value chain. Not just to validate our idea, but to understand how the market actually works beneath the surface.