Patch, a carbon removal marketplace, requires supply partners to meet verification standards rather than verifying itself, avoiding conflicts of interest. The invisible product makes trust essential, so Patch stores verification data and can refund buyers if partners commit fraud or negligence.
Chapters
You know, touching on one of the kind of aspects of it as a marketplace, you know, how are you finding the partners and is there some kind of like vetting or kind of like auditing process for onboarding them?
Yeah, absolutely. So that's a great point. So, you know, one of the big components of marketplaces are trust and safety, right? That's like, that's what a lot of marketplaces spend a lot of time on. Now, safety is, I think, less of a meaningful concern, right? Like, it's not like we're renting out a car or a home where someone's like personal life can be in danger. It's not to say like direct air carbon capture can't have like any sort of incident, but that's a lot less common. Trust, however, is paramount because this is a very abstract service that's being provided. We have this effectively invisible gas in the atmosphere that someone is saying, I removed some of it. And so it's like, well, prove it. And so you need that trust layer. So the way we evaluate that is essentially there's what are called verification standards. And so what a verification standard is, is you can think of it as almost like certified organic, where there are specific steps and processes per sequestration type that you need to go through in order to actually be able to create a ton of CO2 that's transactable or sellable. Patch does not run that process. So that's something that's really important to call out is Patch cannot be at the same time a marketplace And a verification standard, because that's a huge conflict of interest. It's almost like we'd be the credit rating agency and the stock exchange at the same time. We see already kind of the crazy stuff that can happen when those are separate parties between like a Moody's and a NASDAQ, assuming they're the same, it would cause havoc. And so we think it's incredibly important that structurally, to prevent any sort of like conflict of interest, we never are doing the verification ourselves. That being said, we still require particular verification data to be provided to us and loaded into our system in order to start transacting. So although we are not producing the data, we are ensuring that the data is provided, and we actually have legal and financial recourse with each of our supply partners that if, for whatever reason, any of the information that is given to us becomes invalid because of gross negligence, or because in some, like in most severe cases, fraud, we actually have legal and financial recourse to make that right on the platform and either reallocate or refund the end buyer. So we kind of provide that, the legal and financial guardrails, even though we are not verifying the work ourselves. And really, again, that goes back to the idea of the kind of inherent conflict of interest that if we were the same party.
