Apr 09, 2025 / By Melissa McClements
In a new interview series, we’re speaking with leaders from the technology, aviation, travel, tourism, retail, and hospitality sectors about their solutions to critical sustainability challenges. First up is Francisco Benedito, the founder and CEO of ClimateTrade, the world’s first climate credit marketplace based on blockchain technology.
In 2019, the impending birth of his child inspired Francisco Benedito to set up ClimateTrade, a new kind of online marketplace where people and companies can easily invest in projects tackling the world’s greatest sustainability challenges.
“When my partner was pregnant with my daughter, I was very worried about what kind of world we were going to leave to her and future generations,” said the Spanish fintech entrepreneur. “That was when I came up with the idea of using the latest technologies to support the biggest sustainability projects around the world. The carbon market already existed, so I decided to focus on making it better.”
Blockchain Technology for Climate Action
Since its inception in the 1990s, the voluntary carbon market is where investors buy and sell credits that represent certified removals or reductions of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. However, 'double counting' issues—when different entities inadvertently claim the same credit—have dogged it since the beginning.
To address this problem, Benedito’s unique idea was to base his marketplace on the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies. “When you sell a credit, the first thing you need to give is proof that the credit has been cancelled in the market’s register,” he explains.
“With ClimateTrade, once we sell a credit and we pay the developer for it, that credit is cancelled—but it cannot be double-counted because the proof of cancellation in the registry is included in a blockchain transaction. This means that whenever we send the funds to the developer, we also record it on the blockchain, which is immutable. No one can tamper with the data stored in its ledger.”
A One-Stop Shop for Climate
This unmatched traceability is not ClimateTrade’s only distinguishing feature. Its marketplace also offers businesses and individuals a one-stop shop for investment in sustainability solutions—not only carbon offsetting projects, like tree planting schemes, but also a comprehensive array of community, biodiversity and anti-plastic projects. These include everything from the distribution of clean energy stoves to rural women in India to algae regeneration in the Caribbean Sea for atmospheric carbon removal and the construction of a new hydropower plant in China.
Often described as an ‘Amazon for climate’, ClimateTrade is also like Jeff Bezos’ tech behemoth in that it grew out of a digital bookstore. In 1997, at the age of 17, Benedito created Spain’s first online marketplace for books. After studying law in Madrid and earning an MBA in Paris, he went on to a career in banking until his concerns for his daughter took him back to his entrepreneurial roots. Combining the learnings from his early business venture with his financial expertise, he founded ClimateTrade.
High-Quality Credits
To counter the common criticism that voluntary carbon markets are dominated by low-cost, low-quality credits for projects that fail to meet their own objectives, ClimateTrade’s marketplace only offers credits related to the highest quality projects.
Benedito said, “All our credits must be certified and verified by one of the recognized global standards. Our minimum requirement is at least one certification that aligns with the standards set by the International Organization for Standardization. We have a specialist team that undertakes due diligence on every project that comes onto our marketplace. They check that the owner really is who they say they are. Then they check the project itself, via its linked standard and on the register.”
Current and Future Success
In just six years, ClimateTrade has enjoyed much success. To date, the company has neutralized 6.5 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide and gained an array of high-profile corporate clients, including Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica, hotel chain Meliá Hotels International and Santander Bank. Moreover, in 2021, it won the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s competition for Sustainable Development Goal 13, which is about taking urgent climate action.
Later this year, Benedito is launching the world’s first climate cryptocurrency, ClimateCoin. The perfect sister company to ClimateTrade, it will enable people and companies to buy and sell digital tokens to invest in sustainable development.
As for the future of ClimateTrade, the entrepreneur highlights three barriers that stand in the way of the voluntary carbon market realizing its potential.
“The first is the volume because the market is still small,” he said. “The second is the lack of investment. And the third is regulation, because there is always a fight between the voluntary and mandatory markets, with governments prioritizing the mandatory ones because they are a source of funds for them. For example, with the European Green Deal, a lot of the money comes from the mandatory market—but the voluntary market could be a separate source of money. The challenge is to get the right regulations in place.”
By overcoming these challenges, Benedito is certain a global investment movement in sustainability solutions could be unleashed.
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