Flowcarbon: Tackling Climate Change with Blockchain Technology

Name: Flowcarbon: Tackling Climate Change with Blockchain Technology (English version)
SKU: W42621

Jenny Bicong Ge, Hubert Pun, Zhichuan (Frank) Li

Product #:W42621

Supplier:Ivey

Discipline:Entrepreneurship, Finance

Setting:United States, 2024

Details:Case (PDF) • 8 pages • 2025-08-26

Subjects:

Entrepreneurship Finance and investing

Geography:

United States North America

Your Price:

$10.54

Purchase this material with a free Educator Account and enjoy more benefits:

Free Educator Copy
Free Teaching Notes
Build your coursepack
Discounted academic price

Flow Carbon Inc. (Flowcarbon), based in New York City and backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, offered a blockchain-enabled trading platform for project developers to sell carbon credits through digital assets known as tokens. Since raising US$32 million in 2022, Flowcarbon had aimed to tap into the growing market of companies offsetting their carbon emissions through carbon credits. However, this endeavour had proved to be difficult in a highly regulated field with strong incumbents who controlled the supply of carbon credits. Thus, in June 2023, Flowcarbon’s chief blockchain officer was mulling over three strategic paths to push Flowcarbon and the frontier of financial innovation forward: move off-chain credits to the blockchain, wait for the market to change, or work with smaller carbon-credit issuers.

Learning Objectives

The case advances students’ knowledge of strategy and financial technology, specifically in terms of innovation and disruptive technology. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:

Understand carbon credits and the carbon-credit market.
Understand why carbon credits are important in addressing climate change.
Understand the challenges of the carbon-credit market.
Understand tokenization and the advantages of leveraging it in the carbon-credit market.
Understand the approaches to take for the adoption of innovative technology in a regulated industry.