Tamuwa to Launch First Verifiable Emissions Reductions Platform in Africa on Hedera

CYNK will leverage the Hedera Hashgraph blockchain to bring trust and transparency to the voluntary carbon credits markets, increasing impact financing into projects and local communities by digitizing verifiable carbon emissions reductions.

Nairobi, Kenya — Wednesday May 4, 2022  Tamuwa, Kenya’s leading renewable biomass fuels production company, today announces the launch of CYNK (www.cynk.io), an end-to-end platform for the measurement, verification and sale of high quality verifiable emissions reductions (VERs). CYNK is designed to enable funding to reach projects which are answering the call to action on climate change and will launch on Hedera with the support of the HBAR Foundation.

CYNK is the first project in Africa to receive a grant from the HBAR Foundation’s recently announced $100M+ Sustainable Impact Fund. The fund prioritizes and supports projects creating solutions on Hedera that help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Tamuwa, owned and operated by the Tamu Group, has established itself as the leading renewable biomass fuels producer in the East Africa region, specializing in technology which upcycles agri-waste into high-quality renewable biomass fuels. Tamuwa provides renewable fuels to key industries such as tea production working with local companies and cooperatives, which produce over 65% of all the tea in Kenya, to multinational corporations. Tamuwa’s mission is to prevent deforestation in Kenya given that 70% of all energy demand is derived from burning wood. 

Sudi Matara, Head of the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) Foundation concurs and stated, “KTDA is currently working on an ambitious sustainability plan to sustainably address energy needs as a way of contributing to Kenya’s dream of transitioning 100% to cleaner energy by 2030. We aspire to transition the Kenyan smallholder tea sub sector through adoption of the 100% sustainable and renewable energy sources and working with partners like the Rainforest Alliance and Tamuwa to build the supply chain for renewable fuels to substitute firewood is critical.”

Increasing accessibility to the voluntary carbon credit markets will unlock much needed funding to projects, amplifying social impact by promoting financial inclusion. Tamuwa estimates that CYNK can increase the flow of carbon-based financing several-fold into vital projects currently being marginalized by the established players in the carbon markets. Michael Orang’i, Country Director Kenya and Tanzania for the Rainforest Alliance said, “Access to more funding will help the renewable sustainable biomass fuel producers such as Tamuwa to scale up and consequentially help substitute out more firewood, saving more trees and reducing costs. This ultimately will provide greater returns for the more than 800,000 small holder farmers and their families supporting today’s tea industry in Kenya”

The CYNK platform will significantly enhance transparency and efficiency in the carbon markets by increasing trust and reducing the cost of Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) for projects generating emissions reductions.  CYNK will offer direct connectivity to enable project developers to reach fair and transparent markets.

Stefano Celada an advisor on Effective Finance & Treasury in Africa to EuroFinance claims, “The voluntary carbon credit market has long suffered from opacity and over-intermediation wiping out environmental impact. Carbon asset developers have been forced to be price takers resulting in most of the capital raised being lost through a traditionally fragmented high-friction market. The current process is slow and cumbersome and developers are not receiving fair dollar value starving the projects of funding.”

Tamuwa will capture key verification data via an IoT platform with sensors located at every stage of the supply chain from raw material collection to production and delivery, uploading data real time. The meticulous MRV process is critical to ensure the tokenized credits on the CYNK platform have enriched data providing full visibility, generating high quality transparent carbon credits. CYNK is in discussions to onboard a number of further projects that include nature based solutions, regenerative agriculture and blue carbon and is aiming to be the leading source of high quality verifiable emissions reductions (VERs).

Nils Razmilovic, CEO at Tamuwa said: “The digitization of emissions reductions creates trust and transparency allowing much needed funding to reach projects combating climate change. Traditional certification processes and related markets are currently excluding many projects from participating, resulting in less financing flowing to projects and local communities involved in carbon saving initiatives.  Our use of the carbon negative Hedera Hashgraph, a public Distributed Ledger Technology, in conjunction with the HBAR Foundation’s astute funding from the Sustainable Impact Fund, completely aligns with our broader environmental goals, allowing us to disrupt traditional methods of certification and bring high quality credits to the market. The time is now to save our planet – we are already behind the curve.”

CYNK estimates it will generate over 65 million transactions on Hedera in the first five years, based on the tokenization and classification of different types of VERs. Conservatively, Tamuwa aims to create in excess of 5 million tokenized VERs with full granularity on CYNK using Hedera and the Guardian which will be sold through CYNK’s open marketplace on Hedera.

Wes Geisenberger, Vice President of the HBAR Foundation, said: “CYNK is exactly the kind of environmentally-focused project we had in mind when we launched our Sustainable Impact Fund. We’re delighted to support them and are eager to see the impact of their digitization process in the East African region in the coming years. We hope to see more projects follow Tamuwa’s innovative lead and make use of Distributed Ledger Technology in the pursuit of sustainable development goals.”