The launch of XCHG’s GEO offers what the voluntary carbon market has been pining for—a global benchmark providing a reliable price for carbon backed by credible emissions-reducing projects. This benchmark gives buyers assurance that offset products above this benchmark will result in measurable results, offering a viable path to compliance.

“As we started working with CORSIA, we found that a lot of the big energy companies and corporations saw that vetting process that ICAO and CORSIA had gone through as a great tool for them,” Melby said. “And that was a major breakthrough. That’s when we started thinking about how to make it even easier for people to develop projects or to buy offsets by itself. Major companies like Verra, ACR, and Climate Action Reserve’s projects connect directly in, and that then enables us to create a single product that alternatively has a single price. And that’s where the really interesting thing happens from a market perspective. When you have a single price, you can develop a forward curve, you have a price signal. And that enables investment in those projects.”