Singapore-based carbon exchange Climate Impact X (CIX) has launched its Nasdaq-powered spot trading platform CIX Exchange, which allows users to efficiently discover market-driven prices, compare individual projects and trade standard contracts.

To address industry calls for greater transparency and price certainty, CIX has introduced the first daily on-exchange liquidity window in the voluntary carbon market with firm bids and offers. This dedicated 30-minute pricing session, the company notes, pools all-day liquidity from Asia, Europe and Middle East to help sharpen benchmark prices and improve order depth for spot nature-based credits.

By close of trading on June 7 2023, bids and offers had converged to just a few cents, and seven transactions totalling 12,000 tonnes of carbon credits had traded and cleared on the company’s first standardized contract announced in March, CIX Nature X.

Bids, offers and transactions came from a variety of active market participants spanning leading project developers and suppliers, major financial institutions, trading houses and corporate end-users, and demonstrating support for price discovery and market scaling.

The first trades were executed by Chevron International Trading, CICC Commodity Trading, Engie Energy Marketing Singapore and Standard Chartered. Other supporters that participated include Carbon Growth Partners, DBS Bank, Hana Securities, RWE Supply & Trading, South Pole, Viridios Capital and Vitol Asia.

CIX Exchange currently lists 34 single nature-based projects which have been verified by Verra and curated from around the world. These projects support reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, improved forest management, and afforestation, reforestation and revegetation. This includes the 11 projects that are eligible for delivery into Nature X.

The company also launched a new clearing and settlement service for privately negotiated transactions, CIX Clear, that it says will enhance the accessibility and scalability of carbon markets by reducing onboarding friction and counterparty risk when establishing bilateral trade relationships.

Mikkel Larsen, the company’s CEO, adds: “The launch of our spot exchange completes the build of our core venues, which have been customized for the widest range of end-user, investor and intermediary needs.”