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We started Senken in 2022 to fix a simple failure in the voluntary carbon market. Too little money reached real projects. On a trip across Africa, our team saw the gap first hand. Intermediaries took time and margin. Buyers lacked proof. Developers lacked financing. Trust broke down.
Back then, using blockchain to bring transparency felt right. An open ledger is good at recording who did what and when. We ran pilots, including a carbon forwards trial with Vlinder in 2023 for 500 tonnes of blue carbon from a mangrove project in Kenya. It taught us a lot about price certainty and pre-funding. It also taught us where the real bottleneck lives.
The bottleneck is not the ledger. It is the evidence.
Sustainability teams told us the same story in different words. “We need to know exactly what we are buying. We need to defend it in front of auditors. We need legal and finance to sign off. We need to do it without adding headcount.” A ledger cannot answer those questions on its own. It records transactions. It does not assess project integrity. It does not produce an audit file.
So we changed our focus. We moved our energy from “how the transaction is recorded” to “how the decision is made and proven.”
Today Senken is an end-to-end procurement platform for high-quality, audit-ready carbon credits. We help companies set a clear portfolio strategy, evaluate projects with structure, execute purchases and retirements, and produce evidence that stands up to review and reporting. Everything is in one workflow so approvals move faster.
This is the work our customers asked for. Large enterprises in Germany, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, use Senken to secure high-integrity supply, reduce delivery and reputational risk, and move through approvals with confidence.
This shift does not dismiss the value of blockchain. It puts it in the right place. Transparent ledgers are a tool. In some contexts they help. In our context, buyers and auditors care first about quality assessment, documentation, and governance. That is where we now invest.
To make this unambiguous for readers:
Senken does not operate a blockchain or on-chain exchange.
Senken does not tokenize carbon credits.
Senken’s product does not rely on blockchain.
What did we keep from our early experiments. We kept the useful parts. The forwards pilot showed that buyers want early access to scarce, high-quality supply and clear delivery schedules. We now offer offtake agreements — ways to secure supply in advance as part of portfolio planning. The pilot also showed that complexity kills adoption. So we removed it. We designed the product so sustainability, procurement, finance, and legal can work from the same record without extra tools.
What did we change. We removed jargon. We removed steps that did not add evidence. We built a single flow that starts with strategy and ends with retirement and reporting. We added a quality framework that rejects weak projects quickly. We made documentation the default output, not an afterthought.
There is a simple model behind this. Trust in carbon procurement comes from three things. First, a clear strategy that fits company targets across time. Second, a repeatable way to judge project integrity and exclude weak supply. Third, evidence that matches what auditors and regulators ask for. If any one is missing, trust collapses. If all three are present, approvals speed up and claims hold.
This model scales better than our early approach. It does not ask every buyer to learn new jargon. It does not require bespoke integrations to see basic facts. It uses plain English, standard documents, and a shared workflow. That is how you move procurement from a one-off effort to an ongoing process the business can live with.
There is also a practical reason for the change. The market is tightening around quality. Scarce, high-integrity supply will not sit on the shelf. Buyers who can make quick, defensible decisions will win access. Buyers who cannot will miss windows and pay more later. Our job is to make good decisions easy to make and easy to defend.
What we focus on now is clear. High-quality, audit-ready credits. End-to-end procurement. Evidence that stands up to scrutiny. We build features only if they help a company move capital to projects with confidence and then prove it. Everything else is a distraction.
If you are an existing reader who found our earlier posts through search, you may see references to pilots and on-chain tools. Treat those as historical context. They helped us learn. They are not how the product works today. The current description of Senken lives on our About page. That is the version you should quote.
If you are a buyer, here is the takeaway. You do not need more credits. You need credits you can defend. That is what Senken is for.
If you are a project developer, here is the takeaway. Bring us your best work and your data. We will help you reach buyers who care about integrity and can move with speed.
If you are an auditor or regulator, here is the takeaway. Expect structured documentation, clear traceability, and a team that treats evidence as the product.
We are grateful to everyone who worked with us through the early phase. The pilots gave us the insight we needed. The path ahead is simpler.