Carbify is a Dutch company that claims to have “Tree planting solutions for every sector.”

There are two Carbify companies: Carbify Group B.V.; and Carbify B.V. Both were registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce on 28 November 2023.

A Dutch company called Carbify has developed a game called Eco Empires in which tribes such as Frozen Vanguard, Stormbringers, and Waterborne wage epic battles for the Earth.

While the company claims to have “Tree planting solutions for every sector”, the game appears to be focused more on crypto.

According to the company’s website, the tribes in Eco Empires are collecting resources, building structures, and expanding their territory — all while becoming CO₂ neutral.

The game is set in a world that has been affected by climate change, and the tribes are working together to restore the planet.

There is also a crypto coin. 10.52 million CBY tokens are apparently in circulation. The tokens are currently changing hands for US$0.18, down from US$4.26 in April 2024.

And then there are NFTrees. These are crypto trees linked to trees planted in the Amazon. The CO₂ absorbed by the trees can be converted to crypto tokens, or $aCO₂, which represent 1 kilogramme of CO₂.

Earlier this year, Mongabay wrote about a report written by Planet, a satellite imaging company, Carbify, and a think tank called European Carbon Offset Tokenization Association (ECOTA).

“The sustainability and carbon market has a very deep-rooted integrity problem,” Maximilian Rösgen of ECOTA wrote in the report.

He added that the solution is satellite imagery and blockchain technology. William ten Zijthoff, one of the co-founders of Carbify, said that, “When we started Carbify, I found it very weird that nobody was asking where the carbon was coming from. We have companies in Europe that sell carbon credits and when you buy them and ask where they are from, they will say somewhere in Brazil or South Africa. We wanted to create transparent carbon offsets linking each kilo of absorbed carbon dioxide back to the original source. That can only be done by blockchain. Even blockchain was not ready for this. We had to develop a whole new smart contract that did not exist to link the carbon dioxide from the tree back to the geolocation.”

Unfortunately, Mongabay did not investigate Carbify’s operations.

But in September 2024, Follow the Money’s Mira Sys and Ties Gijzel published their investigation into the company.

It’s a great piece of investigative journalism that’s simultaneously funny and shocking: “This start-up claims to offset our emission by planting trees. But do those trees even exist?”

In April 2024, Sys and Gijzel visited the Impact Fair 2024 in Utrecht. After the fair, Follow the Money received a “Carbon Reduction Certificate” for the 215 kilogrammes CO₂ they had emitted by travelling to Utrecht and taking part in the fair:

The “certificate”, which came from Carbify, stated that,

This certificate is proof of tree planting as a means of offsetting carbon emissions. The entity responsible for this certificate has verified their compensation of CO₂ emissions using blockchain technology, adhering to the guidelines set forth in the UN Climate Agreement. The certificate is stored permanently on the blockchain and cannot be modified.

“Our interest is piqued,” Sys and Gijzel write. They decide to investigate.

In late 2023, Follow the Money received an email from Micha Klaarenbeek, a Dutch environmental expert. “When I visit the Carbify website, I see no information about where the money goes,” Klaarenbeek wrote. “There is little to no transparency about whether new trees are actually being planted.”

On its website, Carbify claims that,

Carbify ensures transparency and trust through the Global Carbon Standard (GCS) and UNFCCC-verified validation, making every carbon offset accurately measured and fully traceable.

But as Sys and Gijzel point out, the UNFCCC does not verify or validate tree-planting operations for the voluntary carbon market, like Carbify.

Global Carbon Standard

The Global Carbon Standard’s website was registered by Carbify. When Follow the Money asks about Global Carbon Standard, Ten Zijthoff says it’s a recently established US-based non-profit. Global Carbon Standard was incorporated in North Dakota on 8 March 2024.

Ten Zijthoff adds that Carbify does not pay for inspection of its tree planting operations, because the two companies have made a deal to share software in exchange for the inspection.

Here’s the Global Carbon Standard logo:

It gives the impression that it is somhow endorsed by the UNFCCC. But the UNFCCC has nothing to do with the voluntary carbon market.

Global Carbon Standard claims to be “certified by Earthood”. But the only mention of Carbify on Earthood’s website is a “Methodology for Assessment of Carbon Capture”. The service that Earthood provided is “DDR”. Whatever that means. It’s the only time that Earthood has provided that