Reduce first. Then fund the tonnes you cannot yet cut — through credits that are verified, permanently retired in your name, and evidenced well enough to survive a regulator, a journalist and a sceptic.
Sixty-plus carbon pricing instruments now sit on top of a voluntary market that is smaller than the headlines suggest — and getting stricter fast. Both matter, and they do different jobs.
Sources: World Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing · Ecosystem Marketplace, State of the Voluntary Carbon Market 2025 · ICVCM CCP supply share, H1 2026. Figures current August 2026.
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MSCI’s mid-range scenario has the carbon-credit market growing roughly fifteen-fold between 2024 and 2030 — from about USD 1.5 billion to somewhere between 7 and 35 billion, and 45 to 250 billion by 2050.
The spread is the point. The market’s size in 2030 depends almost entirely on whether buyers can trust what they are buying. Integrity is not the ethical add-on to this market; it is the growth mechanism.
Source: MSCI, Sustainability & Climate Trends. Ranges are third-party projections, not forecasts by Quantum Earth, and are not a return of any kind.
One is a legal obligation with a price you must pay. The other is a choice about funding mitigation you are not obliged to fund. Confusing them is how greenwashing happens.
Governments cap emissions and issue allowances. The EU Emissions Trading System was the world’s first international carbon market and remains the largest, covering around 40% of EU greenhouse gas emissions. From 2026 the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism extends that price to imported goods.
Nobody makes you buy a voluntary credit. You buy one to fund mitigation, removal or restoration beyond your own boundary — after you have cut what you can. The market contracted sharply as buyers demanded better evidence, and the supply that survived is tighter.
Sources: European Commission, About the EU ETS · ESMA Carbon Markets Report 2026 · Reuters analyst survey, July 2026 · Ecosystem Marketplace · ICVCM progress update. Prices are historical market data, shown for context only.
Every tonne that passes through the exchange follows the same path. Nothing is held for resale, nothing is double-counted, and nothing is claimed without the paperwork behind it.
We start from crediting programmes and methodologies assessed against the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles, then read the project documents ourselves — baseline, additionality, permanence, leakage, and who on the ground actually benefits.
You see the project, country, vintage, registry, methodology and the price you pay, with our margin stated separately. No blended portfolios that hide a cheap vintage behind an expensive story.
The credit is cancelled in its registry in your name. It cannot be resold, re-issued or claimed by anyone else. Retirement is the default and the only outcome we offer — the exchange holds no trading book.
You get serial numbers, registry links, retirement date and the wording you may and may not use — formatted to drop straight into an IFRS S2 or ESRS E1 disclosure without a lawyer rewriting it.
A logo on a website proves nothing. A retirement record with serial numbers, a registry you can check and a date you cannot move is the only thing worth putting your name to.
Credits purchased through Quantum Earth Exchange are bought to be retired. They are not held for resale, they are not a financial instrument in your hands, and we offer no return, yield, appreciation or resale market of any kind.
What you get back is mitigation funded and a claim you can evidence. If anyone offers you carbon credits as an investment opportunity, treat that as the warning it is.
Illustrative format only. Actual records reflect the registry, project and serial numbers of the credits retired on your behalf.
On 26 February 2026 the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism approved its first-ever issuance: 58,428 A6.4ERs from a clean-cooking project in Myanmar — the first of roughly 165 projects transitioning across from the old Clean Development Mechanism.
It matters because it gives the voluntary market a state-backed reference standard, with host-country authorisation and corresponding adjustments deciding whether a tonne can be claimed once or twice. Article 6.2 covers bilateral transfers of ITMOs between governments; Article 6.4 is the centralised mechanism anyone can buy into.
We track authorised and unauthorised units separately, because only one of them can be used against a national target and the difference changes what you are allowed to say.
Source: UNFCCC, first issuance under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, February 2026.
Join the exchange and get access to screened, CCP-aligned supply — retired in your name, evidenced properly, priced in the open.
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