Carbon Index Protocol Whitepaper

The voluntary carbon market is at an inflection point. Trillions of dollars are flowing toward net-zero commitments, yet the underlying credits, claims, and corporate disclosures remain fragmented across dozens of registries, opaque PDFs, and unverifiable press releases. The result is a market where price discovery is broken, retirements are double-counted, and greenwashing is structurally rewarded.

Carbon Index Protocol (CIP) is an integrity-first benchmark, token, and settlement layer designed to fix this. CIP combines three primitives: the C100 Index — a quarterly-rebalanced benchmark of the 100 most carbon-material listed companies; the CIP Score — a composite 0–100 integrity metric powered by an AI due-diligence stack; and $CUT — a hard-capped utility token whose burn loop is mathematically tied to real-world retirements via the Proof-of-Carbon-Action (PoCA) standard.

A company retiring millions of low-quality offsets while emissions rise is penalized, not rewarded. A registry that issues non-additional credits is downgraded. A corporate disclosure that fails MRV is flagged. Every retirement is an EIP-712 typed receipt; every score change is logged in the append-only Vault.

This whitepaper specifies the protocol in full: the C100 methodology, the seven scoring pillars, the $CUT economic model and burn schedule, the multi-chain architecture (EVM + Base), the AI verification pipeline, and the governance roadmap toward a fully decentralized carbon settlement layer.