The following are the most important libraries in the core Green Proofs software development kit:

• React: Used to build the user interface of our application. React allows us to create reusable components, manage state efficiently, and ensure fast updates with its virtual DOM.

• Typescript: Used in every part of the Green Proofs stack. TypeScript enhances JavaScript with static type definitions, which helps catch errors early during development and improves code maintainability and readability.

• Postgres: Used for the back-end database storage. Industry-standard relational SQL-compliant database that is used for most of the off-chain data.

• Kysely: a type-safe and autocompletion-friendly typescript SQL query builder. Inspired by knex. Mainly developed for node.js but also runs on deno and in the browser. Used to query Postgres DB.

• Nest.JS: Nest (NestJS) is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications. It uses progressive JavaScript, is built with and fully supports TypeScript (yet still enables developers to code in pure JavaScript) and combines elements of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), FP (Functional Programming), and FRP (Functional Reactive Programming). Under the hood, Nest makes use of robust HTTP Server frameworks like Express (the default) and optionally can be configured to use Fastify as well.

• X-state: Used for managing the state of our application (both for UI and backend processes), allowing us to model the state logic using finite state machines and state charts. XState provides robust state management with clear and predictable state transitions, making complex state logic easier to understand, maintain, and test.

Bitcoin mining is a major global energy user, estimated by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance to have consumed over 121 TWh of electricity in 2023. This energy use translates into negative climate impact - but not all mining operations contribute equally to it. Climate-conscious mining operations are contributing to grid decarbonization by purchasing renewable energy, strategically locating mining operations in low-carbon grids, and participating in demand flexibility programs.

The Green Proofs for Bitcoin (GP4BTC) platform is a solution to bring consistent metrics and much-needed transparency into the climate impacts of individual Bitcoin mining companies so industry stakeholders can make better decisions to align with a net-zero future. GP4BTC offers a certification program for climate-conscious miners and one-stop shop for companies seeking to transact with them. Using GP4BTC's self-sovereign approach to data-sharing, market participants such as exchanges and payment processors can discover, validate, and compare the sustainability credentials of participating miners and launch innovative programs to recognize and reward climate-aligned mining.

In April, 2024, Energy Web announced a strategic collaboration with PayPal's Blockchain Research Group to deliver cryptoeconomic incentives to climate-aligned miners using the GP4BTC platform. For more details, please read the project whitepaper here.

GP4BTC Application Context Diagram

Building a registry for clean commodity certificates: Today many commodities—from electricity to liquid fuels, steel or aluminum, or even digital assets—are adopting technologies to reduce their carbon footprint. Commodities that are produced in a sustainable manner can be differentiated from conventionally produced alternatives if they can be digitally tracked throughout their lifecycles.

Green Proofs has been implemented in several of these use cases already:

EW Green Proofs is a customizable solution for registering and tracking the environmental attributes of commodities, including renewable energy certificates (guarantees of origin), the carbon content of sustainable jet fuel or maritime shipping fuel, or green hydrogen.

Today it’s challenging to create standard procurement tools and establish mature markets for emerging clean commodities and products that span multiple geographies and jurisdictions because it's really difficult to establish a unifying framework, and deploy a common software solution, to measure, verify, and track energy attributes and sustainability claims throughout supply chains. This especially applies for products that have complex, global supply chains like aviation fuel, or steel, or even finished products, but also applies to electricity in many contexts (particularly deregulated markets and e-mobility).

What problem is Green Proofs solving?

In these settings (and to an extent, even in situations where established registries exist), it’s challenging for external stakeholders to independently verify anything about the process by which sustainability reporting and clean energy tracking is done. This makes it costly to audit, difficult to get buy-in from the general public, and challenging to grow markets.

Markets need a simple way for everyone involved to be able to verify that the data processing and the business logic and the data itself is all being handled in a proper way. This can help build trust and credibility, so that clean commodities can be truly differentiated and marketed as a value-added solution.

At a macro level, the goal of Green Proofs is to help energy markets and supply chains accelerate decarbonization by following the playbook that electricity markets used over the last decade to advance renewables: using voluntary purchasing of renewable electricity from large electricity buyers through various instruments like PPAs, RECs, and other procurement instruments that are widely recognized, easily implemented, and trusted. The main problem that we aim to solve is that in markets and commodities and supply chains where it's not practical for one single entity to be the sole administrator (or registry operator, or authority to govern the entire market) Green Proofs provide a solution that allows many different participants to mutually authenticate and engage in transactions while knowing that a set of rules and business logic that defines how the clean commodities will work is being executed correctly and securely and transparently.

What are the use cases for Green Proofs?

In 2023 Energy Web is focusing Green Proofs development on three specific use cases:

• 24x7 Clean Energy Matching for independent power producers, energy retailers / suppliers, e-mobility providers, and distribution utilities.

• Sustainable Aviation Fuel tracking for fuel producers, airlines, and institutional aviation buyers.

• Green Proofs for Bitcoin, an initiative to bring an independent, standardized energy measurement system to the Bitcoin mining industry.

Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, there are many other emerging sectors like green steel, green hydrogen, some other heavy industries in the hard-to-decarbonize sectors that could leverage Green Proofs.

Green Proofs addresses two challenges currently facing clean energy supply chains:

1. In complex, multi-stakeholder environmental commodity markets, central administrators create bottlenecks. Well-intentioned regulators and standards bodies understandably want to increase their oversight of commodity markets to ensure that sustainability claims are accurate. However, given the inherent complexity and geographic scope of the supply chains targeted in this proposal, it is very costly and cumbersome if not impossible for a single entity to take on the responsibility of qualifying producers, administering transactions, and accounting for all market activity. For environmental commodity markets to scale and accommodate thousands of producers and facilities meeting demand from millions of buyers, methods to trace and verify data associated with these products need to evolve.

2. Because data is siloed across multiple participants, markets are opaque and commodities are difficult to differentiate. The supply chain for many emerging environmental products is inherently complex from an accounting and data reconciliation perspective. Data needed to establish that something is true about each of these products is fractured across multiple market participants, each of whom has limited information that is narrowly related to their specific role in the supply chain. This approach makes it difficult for interested buyers to trace products from cradle to grave, trust associated attributes, and as a result dampens demand. This problem is largely by design; historically, commodity markets have been optimized to produce interchangeable, identical products, so there was no need for full transparency. Yet differentiating sustainable vs. conventional aviation fuel, renewably produced vs. fossil fuel-produced cryptocurrencies, or hydrogen made from renewables vs. natural gas requires harmonizing multiple datasets across multiple organizations. These entities need a way to jointly share and process trusted data without revealing trade secrets or other confidential information; legacy technologies such as centralized databases offered as-a-service by large technology companies are not capable of meeting these requirements.

Green Proofs provides the simple user experience of a traditional book-and-claim registry platform, but leverages decentralized, open-source technology to unlock advantages over conventional alternatives in three key ways:

1. Streamlined auditing and verification capabilities enhance transparency and trust: In Green Proofs, user identities (and their associated credentials, roles, and permissions), low-carbon commodities, and the business logic that defines their various interactions and lifecycles are anchored as unique digital assets on a blockchain. No single party can unilaterally delete or tamper with these data. At the same time, many parties can quickly and independently verify the data, eliminating complex and costly data reconciliation processes. This enables a robust and transparent tracking system that improves confidence among stakeholders that emissions claims associated with registry activity are legitimate and unique.

2. Shared ownership and governance creates incentives for industry adoption: Green Proofs offers a unique commercial and governance model in which producers and buyers not only own the IP underpinning the registry (and capture value from its adoption) but also have the ability to jointly make decisions about its operation, as well as the creation and assignment of roles and permissions for users within the system. This supports traditional models of standards creation and administration (i.e., a single entity writes the standard and updates it from time to time) as well as decentralized models in which several organizations collaborate on this task. It can also support multiple companies serving as issuing bodies (while remaining subject to oversight and audits rights from other stakeholders), and a multilateral governance approach to transaction and other fees (where a consortium of relevant stakeholders can set and update fees on an ongoing basis).

3. Scalable and secure identity and access management: Green Proofs streamlines enrollment processes for users by leveraging a self-sovereign approach to identity and access management. In this approach, every participant manages their own identity, but acquires roles and permissions through credentialing processes that are jointly established by relevant stakeholders. Embedding identity and access management logic in this way obviates the need for a central administrator to review and approve users and improves security by eliminating a central repository of user data and credentials.

Green Proofs is built to provide maximum customizability while maintaining the simple user experience of traditional registry platforms. As an open-source solution, Green Proofs benefits from continual improvements and enhancements contributed to its codebase by Energy Web’s global community of members and customers.

Building a traceability platform for 24/7 renewable electricity tracking and matching: Enterprise energy consumers are interested in accurately measuring (and mitigating) their carbon footprint through the procurement of renewable electricity. One strategy to accomplish this is to track their electricity consumption and match it with locally available renewable electricity on an hourly basis. Many established tracking systems for renewable electricity fail to provide this level granularity: today most renewable certificates are issued at a monthly interval at best, and often annually. Green Proofs can be used to create a digital platform with the following functionalities:

· Digital onboarding of all parties

· Collection of granular (e.g. hourly, sub-hourly) generation and consumption data 24/7

· Verification of the sources of data by checking the DID of the data provider

· Performing of matching of generation and consumption data based on predefined logic (e.g. preferences of buyers, prioritization of assignment of available supply)

· Decentralized validation of the matching results by multiple eligible actors (worker nodes)

· Issuance, transfer and redemption of EACs via immutable, tamper-proof, and auditable digital certificates

· Reporting: customizable user interfaces and reporting tools to visualize and export different metrics for generators and consumers.

Historically, the easiest way for an organization to claim it is powered by clean energy is to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) from third party renewable energy generators. RECs represent the environmental attributes of the renewable energy produced and are sold separately from the actual electricity, typically on an annual basis. RECs have been beneficial for the development of renewables, but they fail to truly account for the carbon impact of an organization’s electricity consumption. A more accurate way to decarbonize operations is to match actual electricity consumption with available renewable generation within the same grid on a real-time, continuous basis. Energy Web’s 24/7 Green Proof solution is capable of tracking and matching consumption and generation within a granular time frame, moving from a yearly or monthly basis (with RECs) to an hourly or sub-hourly basis.

Example: Performing matching for 24x7 renewable energy applications

The role of workers in a 24x7 solution is to execute a matching algorithm that assigns renewable generation to specific customers (consumption centers) to improve accuracy and reliability of clean energy accounting.

Onboard Renewable Generators and Consumption Centers

• First, workers establish a registry of known renewable generators (or data providers who own/operate multiple generators) and end-customers (i.e. individual load centers that want to account for their electricity consumption) using pseudonymous identifiers. In this architecture, each worker only “knows” the list of approved IDs, not the real-world information about the entities.

Execute Matching Between Supply & Demand

• Upon authentication, eligible workers fetch consumption and generation data independently from external data sources via API. The frequency of this process depends on the desired granularity for matching (hourly is most common, but currently workers can support matching at one minute intervals).

• Workers run the matching logic to match consumption and generation data based on the predefined algorithm. The matching algorithm factors in parameters such as the volume of renewable generation in the current time step, the volume of electricity consumption, consumer preferences (e.g. price they are willing to pay for renewables, preferences for specific types of generation like solar vs. wind, etc.), and any other rules that govern matching within that market.

• The consensus among workers triggers the issuance of granular renewable electricity certificates for that time interval and transfer / retirement of these certificates to the given consumer.

Reporting

Every worker creates a hash of the result using the keccak256 (SHA-3) hash algorithm. Thus, every single match is transformed into a Merkle Tree. Then from all transformed matches are nested within another top-level Merkle Tree - the hashed result of each voting round. The advantage of using this technique is the ability to verify what's inside each hash without revealing any properties to the public.

The purpose of using worker nodes for 24x7 matching is to have a robust system for being able to verify computations and results without having to trust one single party. The idea is to allow multiple parties to process the same data and logic independently. If a majority of these parties arrive at the same result, then the computations are very likely to be true and can be trusted. These events (consensus and derived results) can then be anchored on the blockchain to have an audit trail for further verifiability of results. Another advantage is redundancy. If one worker is down for whatever reason, then there are multiple other parties to fetch and process the data. This helps avoid downtime of a system and smooth user experience.

This Miner User Guide walks through the steps required to connect with the GP4BTC dApp, apply for certification, and share your certification publicly.

Contents:

1. Configure MetaMask settings

2. Log in to the GP4BTC dApp using MetaMask Wallet

3. Verify your email

4. Submit your company’s KYC Credential request

5. Submit your Energy Evaluation Credential request

6. Submit your Mining Evaluation Credential request

7. Request your Green Proofs for Bitcoin certification

1. Configure MetaMask settings

GP4BTC users must use the MetaMask wallet to log into the GP4BTC dApp and sign transactions (including the submission of certification data).

• Go to Settings > Networks and click Add Network button to add Energy Web Chain. Enter the details below to add Energy Web Chain as a new network.

You can also use ChainList to quickly add Energy Web Chain as a new network to your MetaMask. To use this tool, please follow this link and click “Add to MetaMask” button.

• Select Energy Web Chain from the dropdown (by default, the Ethereum Mainnet will be selected) before navigating to the GP4BTC dApp homepage.

Funding Account

2. Log in to the GP4BTC dApp using MetaMask Wallet

• After navigating to the URL above, click on the Use MetaMask button on the welcome screen of the GP4BTC dApp to log in.

• The MetaMask plug-in will pop up in the top right corner of the browser and request a signature to log in.

  • If you are logging in with a MetaMask account, you will be prompted to sign the message in the MetaMask Extension.

  • If you are logging in with a hardware wallet account (via MetaMask), you will also be prompted to connect to your hardware wallet and sign the message on that device.

• After providing the signature, you will be logged in into GP4BTC dApp.

3. Verify your email

The first step in applying for GP4BTC certification is to verify your email address.

Steps

• The GP4BTC dApp requires registering and verifying a valid email address in order to log in.

• After entering your email on the dedicated text input area, click the Submit button. This will initiate another prompt to sign a message in order to trigger a verifiable credential request.

• After signing the message, you will receive an email in your inbox that will prompt you to confirm your email address:

• After clicking the “Confirm My Email Address” button in the email, an email verification credential will be issued to the user and you will be redirected to a confirmation landing page. From there, click the Return to Homepage button to navigate to the GP4BTC homepage.

• When you return to the GP4BTC homepage, it should now show the Credential Inbox page and the other pages you will need to access to move forward with your certification application.

4. Submit your company’s KYC Credential request

Once you have confirmed your email address, GP4BTC will ask for basic Know-Your-Customer details about your organization.

Steps

• Navigate to the “Apply for Credentials” page from the navigation bar on the left to access the Company KYC credential request form.

• Descriptions of each field can be found in the table below. Fields marked “( * )” are mandatory.

• After filling all the mandatory fields, click Submit button and use the MetaMask wallet to sign and send the credential request.

• Once you have submitted the Company KYC form, an Energy Web auditor will review your information and issue a Company KYC Credential to your account.

• After issuance, you can view the details of this credential on the Credential Inbox page.

5. Submit your Energy Evaluation Credential request

Once you have received your Company KYC Credential, you can proceed with the Energy Evaluation. In the Energy Evaluation, you will provide details about your company’s energy use during the years for which you are applying to be certified.

• Navigate to the “Apply for Credentials” page from the navigation bar on the left to access the Energy Evaluation credential request form.

• Descriptions of each field can be found in the table below. Fields marked “( * )” are mandatory.

• After filling in all the mandatory fields, click the Submit button and use MetaMask to sign and send the credential request.

• Once you have submitted the Energy Evaluation form, an Energy Web auditor will review your information and issue an Energy Evaluation Credential.

• After issuance, you can view the details of this credential on the Credential Inbox page.

6. Submit your Mining Evaluation Credential request

The final step in the certification application process is to provide details on your mining activities. GP4BTC uses this information to validate that the energy consumption you have reported for a given year aligns with the mining rewards you have received in that year. This section is not required for companies that exclusively provide hosting services to other companies.

PLEASE NOTE: Unlike the information submitted in the Company KYC and Energy Evaluation sections, Mining Evaluation data cannot be shared publicly in the miner profile or other data sharing tools. Energy Web will keep information that is submitted in the Mining Evaluation confidential, as described in the Green Proofs for Bitcoin Terms and Conditions and Energy Web’s Privacy Policy.

• Navigate to the “Apply for Credentials” page from the navigation bar on the left to access the Mining Evaluation credential request form.

• The user should fill all the inputs marked with ( * ). Descriptions about each field can be found on the table below.

• After filling all the mandatory fields, click the Submit button and use MetaMask to sign and send the credential request.

• Once you have submitted the Mining Evaluation form, an Energy Web auditor will review your information and issue a Mining Evaluation Credential.

• After issuance, you can view the details of this credential on the Credential Inbox page.

7. Request your Green Proofs for Bitcoin certification

Once you have competed the Company KYC, Energy Evaluation, and Mining Evaluation forms, the GP4BTC auditor will review your application and determine your Clean Energy and Grid Impact Scores for the certification year. If either score is equal to or greater than 50, you will be eligible for GP4BTC certification and will be prompted to complete the following steps.

• After navigating to the “Certifications” page, select the year for which to request certification from the dropdown menu.

• Clicks the Request Certification button to send a certification request.

• After issuance, you can view your certificate details along with your Clean Energy and Grid Impact scores.

8. Create your public profile

Once your organization has been certified, you will be given the option to share your certification(s) and/or underlying data via a public profile page.

• After navigating to the “Data Sharing” page, select a year for which to create a public page.

• On the form, you can select which information should be listed on the public profile. To create a public profile, you must share your company’s name, website, logo (if provided), and certification status. Sharing of all other data (including scores, facility locations, energy use, etc) is at your discretion.

• After setting your profile preferences, you can preview the profile page before publishing it.

9. Update your public profile

After you created a public profile page for your organization you have an option to update the data sharing settings any time.

• After navigating to the “Data Sharing” page, you may create and manage a public page for each year that you have earned certification.

• On the form, select which information should be included/hidden from the public profile page including company’s name, website and logo (if provided).

• After updating your preferences, you can preview the public profile page before publishing it.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• Why I need to sign two times when sending a credential request?

→ GP4BTC uses two credential types as part of Energy Web’s IAM stack (you can read more in detail here) therefore requires users to sign two messages when sending an enrollment request (email verification, company overview, energy evaluation, mining evaluation) in order to obtain both of the credential types.

• Why I need to sign to share my profile settings?

→ GP4BTC requires a signature to store user’s data sharing settings into a verifiable credential and another signature to transport user’s data to backend application to serve the data publicly. GP4BTC only transports the data that a miner has agreed to share in the data sharing settings for her public profile. Miners may update data sharing settings any time. Updating your profile will remove old data from the GP4BTC backend.

Background

The was the first production Green Proofs registry launched in Q4'2023 as a collaboration between , , , and to decarbonize the aviation industry.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is jet fuel produced from renewable feedstocks that emits significantly less carbon than petroleum-based jet fuel. For SAF producers, it is important to track the origin and attributes of the SAF to create new revenues by selling these attributes to environmentally conscious airlines and corporations. For airlines and consumers of air transport services, having a verifiable audit trail of SAF origin and attributes helps them implement credible decarbonization strategies.

The follows the "" chain of custody model, once the SAF is "booked" in the registry, its environmental attributes are may move separately from the physical fuel. The registry tracks key information about the underlying SAF production, including who produced the fuel, what sustainability certifications they hold, the fuel's feedstock (e.g., waste cooking oil), how much SAF was produced (measured in tonnes), its estimated carbon savings per unit of fuel, when the SAF was blended with conventional aviation fuel, etc.

The offers the following to its users:

• Organizations and individuals can easily join the platform and create accounts with specific abilities based on the type of company they represent

• "Fuel Providers" are special organizations - that produce SAF and hold 3rd party certifications - that can provide generation / production data to the platform for to issue SAF certificates (SAFc)

• All data fields represented on the platform stem from 3rd-party verified information and certifications, and SAFc may only be issued by accounts holding the proper credentials

• The Registry's web-interface is very user-friendly and familiar to corporate users; power users may interact with the platform via API

• Worker nodes on Energy Web X provide transparency into the inner-workings of certificate issuances, transfers, and redemptions. This allows registry users, stakeholders, and the public to trust that the registry is operating with integrity.

Worker Nodes

The role of workers in a SAF registry is to govern the lifecycle of SAF certificates, which are linked to each tonne of SAF produced.

Certificate Issuance:

• The volume of SAF certificates must precisely match the actual volume of SAF produced in the real world. Accordingly, to issue certificates a Fuel Provider must first prove that they are an accredited producer and then prove that it really produced some volume of SAF. Workers need to verify both elements, and then introduce the correct number of certificates to the system.

• First, workers establish a registry of accredited producers using pseudonymous identifiers. In this architecture, each worker only “knows” the list of approved IDs, not the real-world information about the company.

• Fuel Providers submit requests to issue a volume of SAF certificates using a “Proof of Sustainability” document, which contains all of the important data about the SAF (e.g., number of tonnes or 'units' of SAF, origin, LCA GHG value...). Workers first check if the requestor’s ID matches an active ID in the accredited registry. Then, workers query the POS document and share the production volume via precise proof to check if the request to issue certificates matches the volume in the POS document.

• Workers vote to determine if the requestor is valid and the volume is correct; if consensus is reached, the approval triggers a workflow to issue certificate(s). When issuing a certificate the merkle tree root hash of the worker node voting round becomes part of that certificate hash so the consensus of the worker voting is inherently tied to the issuance of the certificate.

Selling & Transfer of Certificates:

• Once certificates are issued to Fuel Providers, they want to sell them to buyers like airlines. To transfer a certificate to a buyer, a producer sends a request to the worker pool with the volume to be transferred and the recipient (buyer) ID.

• Workers first check to verify that the volume requested in the transfer is equal to or less than the balance held by the producer. For example Producer A has 100 units and wants to sell 50 to Buyer B; workers check that the transfer request is 100 or less and submit votes on the result to approve (or deny) the transfer.

• Once the transfer is executed, the workers then vote to update the balance of the producer and buyer. Using pseudonymous IDs, workers can prove that the sum balance of transfers is correct without revealing parties involved (just like one can create many addresses from a public key, you create a bunch of random IDs for participants that link back to a core identifier).

• Each issued SAFc has a unique identifier, like an NFT; so the transfers always link back to original issuance. Transfers aren't reflected on-chain though the results of worker votes are.

Certificate Retirement:

• Eventually, a buyer wants to publicly claim the use of a SAFc and take credit for its avoided emissions. Buyers can claim either whole or fractional portions of SAFc units. Upon executing a process to claim a certificate, workers reference the unique identifier of the certificate and remove it out of the pool of transfers of “active” certificates. Through this process the certificate remains visible but it’s “frozen” and linked to a specific ID and consumption event.

• Similar to the selling and transfer process, the role of workers in retirement is to validate that the volume requested is equal to or less than the current balance of the requestor, and then establish consensus on precisely which certificate(s) are being retired.

There are two primary benefits of using worker nodes for SAFc:

• Providing full transparency on the total volume of SAFc in the system (keeping track of volumes that are issued, “active”, and retired) without revealing the real-world identities of the entities holding them, or their individual balances.

• By linking the voting events to the issuance, transfer, and retirement of each certificate (which itself has a unique identifier) the system provides real-time, continuous auditing of a cohesive balance sheet with double-entry accounting.

The diagram below shows the default architecture of a Green Proofs solution. This default architecture can be customized for a given Green Proofs implementation.

EW Green Proofs is a customizable solution for registering and tracking low-carbon products and their attributes throughout complex supply chains.

One implementation of Green Proofs is the Maritime Book and Claim (MBC) registry created by the Energy Web Foundation in collaboration with and . The MBC registry brings transparency and credibility to claims about the carbon impacts of maritime shipping voyages that use lower-carbon shipping fuels.

Decarbonizing maritime shipping is a critical effort because the sector accounts for some three percent of global emissions.

The registry includes the following main functionalities:

1. Issuance: The operator or owner of a ship can register the usage of low-emissions fuel. Multiple admins verify the request and approve the issuance of a ceritifcate representing the carbon impact of the fuel.

2. Transfer: The certificate can be transferred to any actors involved in shipping, including freight forwarders or cargo owners.

3. Retirement: actors can retire the certificate, which means that they can claim in their sustainability reporting that low-emission fuels have been used in transportation.

4. Transparency: After actors have retired the certificates, the information becomes public (after sensitive information is removed).