Nori’s Roadmap: Past, Present, & Token Launch

Our vision for reversing climate change, progress so far, and the road ahead.

Nori

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Nori

5 min readSep 8, 2022

Nori’s Vision and Progress So Far

We’re on a mission to reverse climate change. For that to actually happen, we’ll collectively need to remove over a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air — a lot more than any one person or company can take on. That’s why, at Nori, we’re working to incentivize more people to remove carbon and ultimately return the atmospheric carbon to under 300 ppm. There are many roles to be played in the pursuit of reversing climate change, and we’re here to provide the financial infrastructure to encourage carbon removal at scale while advancing new carbon removal methodologies.

Shortly after Nori’s founding in 2017, we released a white paper outlining our plan to create a commoditized and transparent system to incentivize and scale carbon removal projects, and to build a liquid market with transparent price discovery for carbon removal. We completed Phase 1, and are moving into Phase 2.

Phase 1 : The NRT marketplace ✅
Phase 2: The $NORI token for price discovery 🚀

Here’s a brief recap of what we’ve accomplished in Phase 1, then a look at what we’re focused on next.

Phase 1 : The NRT marketplace ✅

Since we founded Nori five years ago, we’ve developed a marketplace for creating, managing and selling carbon removal credits, or NRTs, that are retired on-chain. One NRT (Nori Carbon Removal Tonne) represents one tonne of CO2 sequestered and stored for a minimum of 10 years. We’ve sourced our NRTs thus far by working directly with projects and enrolling them into Nori’s US croplands methodology for soil carbon sequestration. We will develop more methodologies as our marketplace grows.

Nori has proven market interest in carbon removal, with more than 117,000 tonnes of carbon sold, and more than $1.8M paid out to over 17 farmers who sequestered and stored this carbon in their soils.

In addition to angel and seed rounds, in February 2022, we raised our Series A round led by M13 and joined by the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund as well as follow-on from Placeholder. This has allowed us to grow the team and continue to work on streamlining the supplier enrollment experience for more efficient data collection and NRT creation, preparing new APIs to expand carbon removal’s reach, and evaluating new methodologies beyond soil carbon.

During this phase, NRTs have sold at a static price ($20 today) and are immediately retired on-chain and never re-sold. However, in order to scale growth of carbon removal, or supply of NRTs, we need clear incentives for suppliers. They need to know how much they can expect to get paid for removing carbon and there should be dynamic price discovery between supply and demand of NRTs. This is where the $NORI token comes in.

Phase 2: Launching the $NORI token 🚀

In addition to growing supply and access to NRTs in the marketplace, Nori is currently focused on launching the $NORI token, a price discovery mechanism that can be used to purchase Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs). There are many aspects to this. Nori will continue to work through each milestone identified here and will provide updates on our Discord, Twitter, and blog (see links below).

The Road Ahead

$NORI Token Launch on Polygon Mainnet (Coming soon!)
$NORI token will be able to be bought and sold on Polygon Mainnet, starting with a Balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool. Availability will expand to more crypto platforms and exchanges over time.
$NORI Utility Launch
$NORI tokens will be able to be used to purchase NRTs, creating a new financial mechanism to pay people to remove carbon dioxide and reverse climate change.
*Launch supplier insurance mechanism (Restricted NORI)
As part of the $NORI Utility Launch, we will launch a supplier insurance mechanism. This will mean that if a farmer discontinues regenerative practices or if we can find that the carbon is released back into the atmosphere, we fully replace the customers’ purchase. This insurance policy will remain true when we incorporate methodologies beyond soil carbon (more detailed explanation to come!). *This step is part of the $NORI Utility Launch.
Launch Nori Carbon Removal API
We’ll launch both on-chain and web-based APIs, allowing people to easily purchase carbon removals as part of other transactions, from online purchases to minting carbon-negative NFTs.
Formalize Tonne-year accounting and permanence requirements for new CDR methods
We’ll develop processes for adding new CDR methodologies in our marketplace, with formalized tonne-year accounting and permanence requirements.
Introduce new carbon removal methodologies to Nori’s marketplace
We’ll be adding new methodologies beyond soil carbon sequestration to Nori’s marketplace, and making $NORI payments available to these new carbon removal suppliers.

How You Can Get Involved

We’re actively working with partners like The Sandbox, STEPN, Rarible, and Menthol Protocol to engage their users and create campaigns for removing more and more carbon from the atmosphere every day. For organizations looking to get involved, please reach out to our team at hello@nori.com.

We can remove carbon at a greater scale with the help of a strong community. We launched our Discord in July, and have already welcomed nearly 7,000 members. But we need to expand the community to make a massive global impact. Join our Discord for exclusive community events, direct access to our team, conversations around carbon removal, and more. Invite your friends too!

We also need to share the word about carbon removal versus carbon offsets beyond the existing climate community. This video on How Carbon Offsets Work outlines the history of carbon offsetting and where Nori’s carbon removals come in, and is a great primer for understanding the overall landscape of carbon removals. Watch the video here.

If you want to track the $NORI token launch, sign up for our Token Launch Newsletter! We’ll keep you in the loop on launch details, as well as giveaways, events, and career opportunities at Nori. Sign up for Nori’s Token Launch Newsletter.

To stay in the loop on Nori in general, sign up for our Nori Wrap newsletter.

Our team at Nori is working diligently to take transparent, verifiable action in reversing climate change, and we hope you’ll join us.