R.A.C.E - An Announcement from AirCarbon

foreign [Music] my name is Tom McMahon I'm the CEO and co-founder of the air carbon exchange the the legacy of exchanges is is is global different marketplaces have been scaled over time very often markets are scaled in isolation carbon as an asset class and what we're addressing at air carbon cannot scale in isolation the key is about interoperability and portability if you look back and as I'll make this very quick the reality is that back in 1992 when the world met in Rio de Janeiro for the first of the vision of what the the hopefully would have been a a more rapid decarbonization effort around the world no one knew what a world was going to look like as it is today and here we are 30 years later the very first cop was in 1995 in Berlin so cop number one and we're just finishing up cop27 what is the opportunity in the next year as we head towards cop 28 and and air carbon and what we're going to talk about now is just really we want to be intrinsically in part of that and embedded in it the air carbon Journey began in 2018 my legacy comes out of New York and Wall Street and commodities industry I was a member of the board of directors of of nymex and nibot and now the aggregated CME Group and I've traded on multiple exchanges and I've had the opportunity to build a number of them my first one in the region was in 2004 and in Dubai the DME and fast forward to today we're in we're in if you want to call about a crisis mode in terms of climate but more importantly the voluntary carbon Market had no Frameworks other than the methodologies it had no standards for trade had no standards for financialization or financing so we saw the opportunity to bring take the opacity out of the market take the friction out of the market build a standard of execution on a hybrid exchange model so we employ blockchain distributed Ledger architecture asset-backed tokenization custody and Trust architectures for the underlying holding and we've adopted traditional markets architecture of of a trade settlement the ability to buy sell trade hold and transfer and retired carbon in a single platform and that's air carbon in a nutshell what we are doing today and what we're going to talk about I only have three minutes so it'll be very short what I'm going to talk about the reality is the opportunity that was given to us two years ago in February of 2020 we were invited here to to get a look at HUB 71. um we had no idea what it was it was an invitation to to basically an incubator um there were a lot of them around the world we didn't know if this was going to be different or unique as it turns out it has been um and then covet happened so February we didn't we couldn't continue the conversation and then several months later it was able to pick up when we had a gap in covid and we brought our first employee out here who's now the head the SEO of air carbon and he's sitting here in the front row and I know a number of you met him in the room well the team has grown substantially since then and the key was a year ago I came here and I had a meeting with the fsra and adgm and we put a plan in place cooperatively on both sides to say could we bring a Marketplace to Abu Dhabi could we bring it to adgm could we bring an iteration or or an instance of air carbon which was operating in Singapore at the time to Abu Dhabi the answer was yes what grew out of that was not just an instance or or an extension of the announcement today is that air carbon is here we are now as of this week a fully regulated voluntary carbon market exchange so and and what that means is it's actually the first in the world um there are exchanges that trade voluntary markets on a futurized version no one has done it as a standalone exchange no one has taken the focus to put regulation around it adgm fsra and as well as the Hub 71 folks really gave us the support and any iteration to do it but from a regulatory perspective they took a lead um voluntary carbon credits may be transacted but they're actually not regulated in entities like in the United States or in the UK or or in Singapore where we incubated it here the key was could you get recognition and it was mentioned earlier by Emmanuel from adgm recognition of it as a fully regulated Financial instrument that had issued carbon credit is a spot commodity it changes the nature of how you can Finance carbon Finance carbon projects transact it use it as a close as a collateral and put it into portfolios alongside of other assets so this will allow for the unlocking of Finance clearly about trade but it will really become a pricing Center excuse me so um and I'll wrap up I have 25 seconds we think it's appropriate it's a new day for carbon it's a new day for Abu Dhabi and it's definitively a new day for air carbon so we've created a new logo and a new brand so and here it is and we're introducing it here first and it'll be our lead and it'll be our brand in Abu Dhabi from this day forward and also for ACX globally so thank you very much [Applause]