Millions of coconut farmers in the Philippines could gain a new route into global carbon markets through digital infrastructure built on Hedera.
EcoGuard Global and the Confederation of Coconut Farmers Organizations of the Philippines (CONFED) have launched the CONFED Carbon Office, moving a partnership announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year from agreement to an operating platform.
The system is designed to let agricultural projects register, collect monitoring data, undergo verification, manage carbon credits and ultimately transact those credits with buyers and investors.
The ambition is unusually large for an agricultural carbon project.
CONFED represents over 3 million coconut farmers. Philippine Coconut Authority figures provide a narrower official measure, showing 2.8 million registered coconut farmers and farm workers across 3.6 million hectares of coconut land, equivalent to 26% of the country’s agricultural area. The authority lists 340 million coconut-bearing palms nationwide.
That scale makes the project more than another enterprise blockchain deployment.
If it works as intended, the Carbon Office could become infrastructure connecting thousands of fragmented agricultural projects with the verification systems, registries and buyers required to turn climate-related farming practices into financial assets.
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The First Test Is on Samar
The Samar COCAL Agroforestry Project is the first major project being brought onto the Carbon Office.
Located on Samar, the Philippines’ third-largest island, the project has the potential to generate 200,000 carbon credits annually, according to EcoGuard and CONFED. EcoGuard has also invested in the initial tranche of credits expected to be generated by the project.
The companies haven’t disclosed the size of that investment.
They also haven’t disclosed a final price for the credits, the independent verifier for the first issuance or how much revenue would ultimately flow to participating farmers.
Those details will determine whether the project develops from digital infrastructure into meaningful climate finance.
Carbon platforms can improve record keeping and traceability. But the value of any credit still depends on whether buyers trust the underlying emissions reduction or carbon removal.
That distinction has become increasingly important as companies and investors scrutinize the quality of voluntary carbon credits.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market identifies additionality, permanence, robust emissions quantification, independent verification and protection against double counting among the core characteristics required for high-integrity credits.
What EcoGuard Is Building?
EcoGuard is a Swiss climate-technology company spun out of The Hashgraph Group, which develops enterprise applications around the Hedera distributed ledger ecosystem.
Its platform is intended to digitize the carbon-asset lifecycle, including project registration, digital monitoring, reporting and verification, issuance, tracking, trading and retirement.
CONFED and EcoGuard first announced plans for the Philippine Carbon Office at Davos in February.
At the time, EcoGuard said it planned to register 347 million coconut trees and build infrastructure capable of providing more than 3 million farmers with access to carbon finance. Telenym was named as the project’s local technology partner.
The new deployment is significant because the project has now moved from a memorandum and development plan into an operational system.
“The Philippines has significant potential to participate in global carbon markets through its extensive coconut-growing regions, agroforestry landscapes and agricultural communities,” CONFED President Charles Avila said in a statement shared with AlexaBlockchain.
The launch, he added, is intended to turn that potential into “measurable climate impact and practical financial opportunity for farmers.”
Why Hedera Is Being Used
EcoGuard is using Hedera as the distributed ledger layer supporting records across the carbon-credit lifecycle.
The idea is to create a tamper-evident audit trail showing when project information was recorded, how credits were created and transferred, and when they were ultimately retired.
Hedera has already been pushing further into environmental markets through Guardian, its open-source platform for digitizing environmental methodologies and managing assets such as carbon credits.
Carbon-standard organization Verra announced a long-term collaboration with the Hedera Foundation in 2025 to integrate Guardian with the Verra Project Hub. The project is intended to automate parts of project registration, methodology management and monitoring while creating more auditable data trails.
That gives EcoGuard’s deployment a broader context.
The Philippine project isn’t the first attempt to use Hedera for carbon-market infrastructure. It is instead a test of whether that technology can be extended to millions of small agricultural producers.
Blockchain also has clear limitations.
Making a record tamper-resistant after it enters a system doesn’t guarantee the original data was accurate. Carbon integrity still depends on reliable field measurements, credible methodologies, independent verification and appropriate baselines.
That is why digital monitoring, reporting and verification — or dMRV — may ultimately matter more than the blockchain itself.
The Philippines Is Building Carbon-Market Rules
The launch also arrives as the Philippines develops its broader carbon-market framework.
In March, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources adopted a Voluntary Forest Carbon Market Roadmap for 2026 through 2030. The plan focuses on policy development, carbon registries, monitoring and verification, institutional capacity and financing.
The country has also taken a major step toward international carbon trading.
The Philippines and Singapore signed an implementation agreement in April establishing a framework for carbon-credit cooperation under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The mechanism provides rules for authorizing mitigation projects and transferring internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, or ITMOs.
Corresponding adjustments are central to that system because they are intended to prevent the same emissions reduction from being counted by both the country selling the credit and the country using it toward its climate goals.
EcoGuard says the Carbon Office can support infrastructure aligned with Article 6.
That doesn’t mean credits created on the platform automatically become Article 6 credits. Projects would still need to comply with the relevant methodologies, verification requirements and government authorization processes.
Other Smallholder Carbon Models Are Starting to Scale
The commercial idea behind the Philippine project is already being tested elsewhere.
Rabobank-backed Acorn has built an agroforestry carbon program focused on smallholder farmers. It uses field information, satellite monitoring and independent verification to measure carbon removals and create carbon credits.
Acorn currently reports 591,761 farmers supported across 555,559 hectares and 372,605 tonnes of carbon dioxide removed. The program says 70% of carbon-credit revenue flows back to participating smallholders.
India offers another recent example.
Grow Indigo this month began distributing more than ₹2.9 crore ($302,607) to 2,550 farmers in Punjab and Haryana for regenerative farming practices tied to verified carbon credits. The government said the program generated more than 50,000 credits across 30,000 acres.
Those projects also demonstrate why agricultural carbon markets are difficult to scale.
Registering farms digitally is only the beginning. Establishing baselines, collecting evidence, monitoring changes, verifying emissions reductions, issuing credits and finding buyers can take years.
From Cocoa Traceability to Carbon Finance
The Carbon Office also expands The Hashgraph Group’s growing focus on agriculture.
Earlier this month, THG disclosed a cocoa traceability pilot with Merck and PwC Germany that combines physical authentication technology with records stored using Hedera infrastructure.
The system is designed to trace cocoa origin, authenticity, quality and compliance information across the supply chain, partly in response to increasing European regulatory requirements.
The CONFED project takes the underlying concept in a different direction.
Instead of using digital records mainly to establish where an agricultural product came from, EcoGuard wants to use them to support the creation and movement of a financial asset linked to an environmental outcome.
For farmers, that difference is crucial.
Coconut production has historically provided relatively low incomes for many Philippine farming households. Philippine government have estimated annual farmer incomes of PHP20,000 to PHP30,000 in parts of the sector, underscoring why additional revenue streams remain an important policy objective.
“The go-live of the CONFED Carbon Office is more than a technology deployment; it is the delivery of the promise we made in Davos,” EcoGuard Chief Executive Officer Yashodhan Ramteke said.
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