We did not design the CAT to avoid your diligence. We designed it to survive it.
Most carbon credits are built to be sold. The LMCX Carbon Avoidance Token was built to be underwritten — which is a different discipline, aimed at a different reader. The buyer we designed for is not a voluntary-market participant retiring a credit for a report. It is a bank, a treasury, an allocator, or an insurer whose first instinct, when handed a new asset, is to try to break it. This post is a walk through the questions that reader actually asks, and the deliberately unglamorous ways the CAT answers each one.
“Was it actually measured, or estimated?” This is the first question, and for most credits it is also the last, because the honest answer is “estimated.” The abatement behind a CAT is quantified to OGMP 2.0 Level 5 — direct source-level measurement reconciled against satellite observation — not derived from an emission factor. The answer to the first diligence question is a measurement, which is what lets every subsequent answer stand on something solid.
“Who verified it, and does the verifier meet a recognized standard?” Many credits claim to be “verified” without ever disclosing the standard applied to the verifier. That is a meaningful gap: a verification is only as credible as the body performing it. LMCX verification is conducted under ISO 14064-3 by The Kent Group Associates, whose own accreditation runs to ISO 14065. That distinction — an accredited verifier working to a published standard, rather than an issuer’s self-attestation — is precisely what an audit team can interrogate against criteria rather than take on faith.
“Was it accounted conservatively, or optimistically?” Discretion in carbon accounting almost always runs toward issuing more. We quantify methane on a 100-year global-warming-potential basis, declining the 20-year figure that would roughly triple the credit count for the same molecules. When there is a conservative choice and an aggressive one, we have taken the conservative one and documented it. An underwriter does not have to trust that; they can check the basis and see it.
“Where does it live, and can it be double-counted or lost?” A conventional registry credit is a serial number in a private database; its uniqueness and retirement depend entirely on that database continuing to operate correctly. The CAT is issued and custodied through Fireblocks MPC — institutional-grade custody with SOC 2 Type II controls — with retirement executed as a permanent on-chain burn and the certificate pinned to immutable storage. The provenance and the retirement are independently inspectable, not dependent on a single operator’s good behavior.
“What happens if something goes wrong later?” The reference projects are engineered against reversal with a nine-barrier plug-and-abandonment architecture, backed by an issuer-level integrity package — an AM Best A+ rated, investment-grade insurance layer and a recorded property covenant administered by an independent collateral agent. We are precise about what this package is and is not: it is designed to fund remediation of the environmental claim in the event of a verified reversal. It is a permanence architecture, documented in the legal package for your counsel to read, not a slogan.
Notice the pattern. Every one of these answers is designed to be pulled on. The measurement can be audited against the OGMP standard. The verification can be checked against ISO. The accounting basis is stated so it can be recomputed. The custody and retirement are on-chain and inspectable. The permanence architecture is a set of recorded instruments your lawyers can read. We did not build a wrapper of reassuring adjectives — “high-quality,” “premium,” “best-in-class” — around an unexamined core. We built a core whose components each point at a published standard, and we invite the reader to follow every pointer.
This is deliberately the opposite of how much of the market sells. The pitch you usually receive leads with a superlative and hopes you don’t check. Ours leads with the diligence trail and hopes you do — because the entire design assumes a reader who will. An asset built for underwriting has to be legible to the people whose job is skepticism: the auditor, the risk officer, the counsel, the treasurer who has seen a hundred instruments and trusts none of them on first read.
There is a commercial logic to this that goes beyond principle. The institutions we are built for move slowly and buy rarely, but when they buy, they buy with conviction and at scale, and they tell their peers. You cannot earn that with marketing. You earn it by being the asset that got harder to doubt the more closely it was examined — the one whose every claim resolved to a standard the buyer could verify without asking permission.
So we will not ask you to take the quality of the CAT on faith. Faith is not a diligence input. Run the process you would run on any instrument that was going to sit on your balance sheet or behind your issuance. Ask where the tonne was measured, who verified it, how it was accounted, where it lives, and what happens if it fails. We built the answers to be checkable on purpose. The invitation is the product.