Carbify: Tree planting; An online game; The blockchain; A crypto coin; and NFTrees

And probably the best Queen cover version ever: “I want to buy trees”.

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.

Carbify doesn’t just plant trees. The company has developed a game called Eco Empires in which tribes such as Frozen Vanguard, Stormbringers, and Waterborne wage epic battles for the Earth. Players gather resources, build structures, and expand their territory — all while becoming CO₂ neutral.

And there is 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.

Transparent carbon offsets?

In August 2024, 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 tells Mongabay.

The solution according to the report is satellite imagery and blockchain technology. William ten Zijthoff, one of the co-founders of Carbify, tells Mongabay 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.

Do those trees even exist?

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 had 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 Impact Fair:

The “certificate”, which came from Carbify, states 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 somehow 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 service.

Earthood states that the region for the services provided to Global Carbon Standard is Europe / Estonia.

Carbify’s first company, Carbify OÜ, was registered in Estonia in December 2022, because that country is “crypto-friendly”, Carbify’s co-founders tell Follow the Money. On 24 April 2024, the company was deleted from the Estonian registry.

The Carbify founders also tell Follow the Money that they set up Global Carbon Standard and put together the team, mainly consisting of people they know from the crypto world.

One of them is Michael Beers. His name appears of the Global Carbon Standard’s Final Report for several Carbify projects. Follow the Money could find no information to confirm Beers’ academic background. The only employment he lists on his LinkedIn profile is “Lead Ecologist at Global Carbon Standard”.

Carbify’s co-founders

Follow the Money met up with the co-founders of Carbify: William ten Zijthoff, Jaap Harmsma, and Toby Wagenaar.

Until 2021, Ten Zijthoff was a branch manager at an Aldi supermarket. He had set up several companies linked to cryptocurrency, sustainability, and online gaming.

In 2016, Harmsma sold his web hosting company, MuntInternet, and started mining crypto coins from his garage.

They met each other, and Wagenaar at a company called Vulcan Forged, which has something to do with blockchain, crypto, gaming, and the metaverse. Oh, and there’s a Vulcan Forged token (obviously).

Harmsma and Ten Zitjhoff found out the company was incorporated in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. They “cautiously describe it as a scam”, Sys and Gijzel write.

They left Vulcan Forged.

And decided a tree-planting, crypto, gaming, tokenised, carbon offsetting company was their future.

A big problem with with carbon offsetting, they tell Follow the Money, is that the CO₂ in a carbon credit cannot be linked directly to a specific tree.

Agroforestry Carbon

In 2021, Ten Zijthoff met a forester called Gabriel Neto at the Blockchain Rio conference in Brazil. “Neto knew a lot of Brazilian farmers who could plant trees for Carbify,” Ten Zijthoff tells Follow the Money.

Neto’s partner is Letícia Wagner, an influencer who subsequently plugs Carbify on Instagram.

Carbify enters into contracts with Gabriel Neto’s company, Agroforestry Carbon. He pays the farmers to plant the trees. Carbify, however, has no proof of this.

Several of the contracts with Neto were with Carbify OÜ, the Estonian company. The fact that the company is now deleted from the Estonian registry means that the contracts are worthless. Follow the Money writes that Carbify has now decided to arrange new contracts with Agroforestry Carbon to replace the worthless contracts.

Carbify does not share any income from carbon credits with the farmers that plant the trees. Instead, farmers get whatever grows on the trees. Bananas, for example.

Global Carbon Standard’s reports about Carbify’s project are short, and all about ticking the right boxes. At the end of the Final Reports is a link to a spreadsheet of the co-ordinates of the trees that Agroforestry Carbon’s farmers have supposedly planted.

Here’s one of them:

There is a tree there. But would it have been planted if Carbify did not exist? There’s no way of knowing — at least not without travelling to Brazil and asking the farmer who planted the tree.

Other co-ordinates are even less clear:

Tree #1865

Follow the Money randomly chooses one of the trees that was supposed to be absorbing some of the 215 kilogrammes of CO₂ emitted because they attended Impact Fair 2024.

Weeks later, they receive a report from Agroforestry Carbon specially produced for Follow the Money about tree #1865:

Follow the Money estimates that the height of the tree is 15 centimetres. Carbify claims it is 60 centimetres. Whichever is correct, the tree has not absorbed much CO₂.

Whether or not it will do so in the future is anyone’s guess.

Carbify has no say in the matter. It does not own the land, and it has no contract with the farmer that planted the tree.

Follow the Money points out that,

Checking took weeks and the local partners had to go into the woods for it. Just human work. The blockchain, the carbon credits, the NFTrees, or the game did not make this work any easier or more transparent.

Follow the Money asks Carbify’s Ten Zijthoff why the company didn’t plant the trees closer to home. That would have increased the transparency — at least for people buying Carbify’s carbon credits in the Netherlands.

“Dutch companies don’t care much if I plant tree in the garden here. In Brazil we can really make an impact,” Ten Zijthoff replies.

I want to break free

My favourite part of this story is the song “I want to buy trees.” It’s by a Carbify fan. It’s a cover version of Queen’s “I want to break free.” And it’s brilliant: