Open infrastructure for carbon markets.

Klima Protocol is autonomous, rules-based coordination infrastructure for the retirement of voluntary carbon credits, running on the Base blockchain. Its function is deliberately narrow: to publish the terms on which carbon credits can be supplied and retired, apply those terms uniformly to every participant, and settle activity without discretionary intervention. It is not a financial product, an investment vehicle, or an asset management system.

Smart contracts publish execution rates from the protocol's own state, so both sides of a transaction see the same visible terms. A supplier who delivers eligible registry-issued carbon credits receives kVCM at a rate published in real time; a buyer who pays kVCM to retire credits gets a rate produced the same way. Participants who lock tokens and allocate them across carbon classes determine those rates and each class's capacity, so the market's behaviour is set by the people using it rather than by a procurement desk.

kVCM is the protocol's primary unit of account and the common denominator for carbon intake, carbon retirement, and governance deposits. Its supply expands when carbon enters the protocol and contracts when carbon is retired, so it reflects underlying activity. K2 is the secondary governance and incentive token, used to modulate capacity — how much of a given carbon class the protocol can process without materially altering the execution rate.

The protocol charges no fees for retirement transactions payable to the Klima Foundation, to any development entity, or to any operator. There is no revenue stream inside the protocol denominated in dollars and no mechanism to route one out, so a buyer's payment reaches the retirement outcome without passing through a margin layer inside the protocol. Onchain network costs still apply.

No. Retirement is the only way a credit leaves the protocol. There is no withdrawal path, no reversal, and no re-listing on a secondary venue — the protocol handles carbon credits for the purpose of retirement and no other purpose. A confirmed retirement is permanent and cannot be undone, refunded, or reused, which is what prevents the same environmental claim being made twice.

Base. Retirements settle onchain in seconds and are auditable end to end, so any party can independently verify from public ledger state that a specific credit was permanently consumed, rather than relying on a counterparty's record.

By three routes. The x402 endpoint, co-developed with Carbonmark, lets any AI agent or ordinary HTTP client discover retirable carbon classes, quote a live executable price, and retire credits — with free discovery and quoting, and retirements from 0.001 tonnes where supported. Teams already working onchain can call the Retirement Aggregator contract on Base directly. Teams building off-chain products can settle retirements through the Carbonmark app without writing code.