RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – IBM is further expanding its embrace of blockchain with plans to issue a token as part of a partnership with carbon credits startup Veridium Labs.

As CNBC notes, IBM already has embraced blockchain in deals with shipping line Maersk as well as Walmart and Nestle.

Blockchain workflow

“By moving this process to an easily auditable blockchain, and tokenizing the credits in a similar way that a bitcoin tokenizes monetary value, IBM’s newly appointed blockchain offering manager, Jared Klee, believes a vibrant market could eventually be opened up to a much larger audience,” Forbes reported Tuesday.

The tokens are called “verde.”

Forbes reports that they will be issued on the Stellar blockchain, and will give “enterprises that pollute the environment a way to offset that damage by supporting a patch of Indonesian rain forest.”

“We’re creating a fungible digital asset, a token which part of the goal is to create a market where people can buy, sell, trade and then redeem it for the underlying credits,” Jared Klee, who recently was put in charge of IBM’s token initiatives, told Forbes. “By having a liquid market you open up a world of possibilities.”

Forbes notes that the IBM effort is aimed at “providing assurance that the money was actually used to replenish the environment is both time-consuming and opaque” through a public blockchain that can be audited.

Klee told CNBC that the IBM initiative would remove “friction” from carbon credit trading.

“Right now, if you look at the carbon credit market — specifically the voluntary carbon credit market — they’re traded through bilateral agreements which means there’s a lot of friction involved,” Klee said,

“They’re not fungible assets, you see that in pricing that one can be very different, the same asset with large price fluctuations between two of them. And we see that reflected in other places like secondary volumes and what not.

Read the full Forbes story online.

The CNBC also is available online.

IBM employs several thousand people across North Carolina and at its campus in RTP.