Why IMPT is so powerful.

Almost everything I've spent the last thirty years operating — financial services, BPO, telecoms — comes back to a single observation: a behaviour change that depends on the consumer paying extra, signing up for something new, or thinking about it twice will fail at scale. Doesn't matter how good the cause is. Friction kills.

That's the lens I bring to climate. The voluntary carbon market, in its first two decades, was a system that asked the wrong people to do the wrong thing. It asked individual consumers to opt-in to a separate purchase, to research what an offset even means, to compare project quality, and then to wonder whether the credit they bought actually got retired or got resold to someone else. Most consumers did none of those things. The ones who did, often got burned.

IMPT inverts that question. We don't ask the consumer to do anything new. We ask them to keep doing what they already do — book hotels, buy from retailers — and we bake the carbon retirement into the transaction the merchant was going to take anyway.

The two biggest consumer surfaces

Travel and retail are the two largest categorical surfaces of consumer spending on the planet. Travel alone represents around 10% of global GDP in any given year. Retail e-commerce in 2026 sits north of $6 trillion globally. Pick any climate intervention you can think of and you're not going to move more dollars more efficiently than by attaching a small piece of climate work to one of these flows.

Now stack the carbon footprint on top of that:

• Hotels are responsible for roughly 1% of global CO₂ emissions. A single mid-tier hotel night, depending on grid mix and laundry profile, embeds 20–40 kg of CO₂.
• E-commerce shipping plus packaging plus product manufacturing footprints add up to a huge multi-gigatonne stream of indirect emissions for which the retailer historically bears no climate responsibility at all.

Both of these surfaces sit on top of a margin structure that can absorb the cost of one verified tonne of carbon retirement. We know this because we run the numbers every day. The IMPT commission spread on a hotel booking is large enough that we can pay for the offset and still operate. The customer pays no premium. The hotel doesn't lose a euro.

Why "no premium" is the whole product

If the consumer-grade offset story has a single failure mode, it's surcharge. The classic "click here to add £2 carbon offset to your booking" widget converts at low single-digit percentages. It's a moral test placed at the worst possible point in the funnel, after the user has already decided what they're paying. The dropdown adds friction, the cost adds friction, the validation adds friction. Most users skip it, then feel mildly guilty about skipping it, then resent the prompt the next time they see it.

Bake the retirement into the merchant's commission spread and you eliminate every single one of those failure modes. The customer doesn't choose. They don't pay extra. They don't even need to know — although the receipt tells them, with proof.

This is the piece that took longest to land internally at IMPT. Founders pitched it to investors who kept asking how we'd "monetise the offset". The answer is that the offset is monetised by the booking that wouldn't have happened in our absence. The carbon retirement is the differentiator that wins the booking. The booking pays for the retirement. There's no separate revenue line item because there doesn't need to be.

The integrity layer

The hardest problem in the carbon market isn't generating credits. It's stopping them from being sold twice. The voluntary market spent fifteen years pretending this was solved by registries running on traditional databases. It wasn't.

The Verra/Greenpeace investigations of 2022–2024 made this brutally clear: a substantial fraction of credits that had been "retired" on registry pages were either never real, never additional, or had been quietly resold under different serial numbers. The institutional buyers walked. The consumer buyers were left wondering why their offset had a shelf life of six months.

IMPT's bet, from day one, was that the integrity problem is solvable with a public ledger and very little else. When you retire a credit on Ethereum, the retirement event has a permanent transaction hash, a verifiable serial number, a wallet address that can be checked, and a timestamp that nobody can rewrite. The credit can never be re-sold because anyone watching the chain can see it's already retired.

This is a small claim cryptographically and a large claim commercially. It says: here's the receipt, here's the chain, here's the audit trail, no marketing claim required. For an industry that's spent a decade in marketing claims, that matters.

Why now, why this team

Three things landed simultaneously that made IMPT viable in 2026 in a way it wouldn't have been in 2018:

1. Hotel API fragmentation collapsed. Five years ago, building a global hotel-search platform required relationships with dozens of suppliers. Today, two or three aggregators give you 8M properties and 195 countries through a single integration.
2. On-chain retirement infrastructure matured. Tucan Protocol, Toucan, KlimaDAO and the broader ReFi ecosystem solved the technical question of how to retire a credit verifiably on a public ledger. By 2026, this is engineering, not research.
3. Stablecoins and account-abstraction killed the wallet UX problem. Five years ago, "your customer needs a wallet" was a deal-breaker for any consumer integration. Today, the customer doesn't need to know there's a wallet. The retirement happens server-side and lands in a custodial address linked to their email.

None of these are speculative. They're production. We use them daily.

Where the next leg comes from

The hotel surface is what we run today. It's the proof point. But the model extends to anywhere a merchant has commission spread and is willing to attach a retirement event to a transaction:

• Retail checkout — physical and digital. Same model, smaller per-transaction footprint, far higher transaction volume.
• Air travel — a much harder integration politically, but a much larger per-transaction footprint.
• Subscription services — recurring retirement attached to recurring billing.
• B2B procurement — the largest single market, the slowest sales cycle, the highest deal value.

The thesis isn't that IMPT becomes the carbon-retirement layer for one of these. The thesis is that the same primitive — invisible retirement attached to existing commerce — works for all of them, and the platform that builds the rails first owns the category.

The honest part

None of this matters if the unit economics don't work. We've spent two years grinding on the operator question — what does it actually cost to acquire a hotel booking, what does the commission spread look like net of payment fees, and how much carbon can a single transaction afford to retire? The answer, today, is one tonne. That's what we ship. As scale comes in, that number can grow.

And none of this matters if the customer experience is bad. The hardest engineering problem we have isn't carbon retirement. It's making the booking flow as fast and clean as Booking.com on a saturated mobile network in a country where the data plan is on its third bar. That's what the team works on every day.

The carbon piece is the differentiator. The booking is the product.

That's why IMPT is so powerful. Not because we invented a new financial primitive. Not because the on-chain retirement is novel. Because we put a verifiable climate intervention behind a transaction the consumer was already going to make, charged them no premium for it, and made the receipt public.

Frictionless climate work, baked into the commerce layer the planet already runs on. That's the bet.

← Back to analysis