Issue

Transfer

Transform

Settle

A Carbon Inventory Certificate has a lifecycle, and every stage of it is a recorded state change. Naming the five states is not bookkeeping theater — each one happens exactly once, in one place, and that is precisely what makes the whole instrument auditable.

Verified performance at origin becomes a certificate with a unique ID. Intensity, vintage, and evidence are attached at birth. Nothing gets issued that was not first measured — the Tier 3 measurement is the precondition, not an afterthought. The issuance record is the first artifact in the eventual audit trail.

This is also where over-issuance is prevented at the source: the quantity of performance issued is bounded by the quantity measured, so the books start balanced.

Custody passes downstream as the commodity changes hands. The certificate moves with the goods, and each handoff is logged with a timestamp — the chain of custody in practice. A buyer three steps down the chain can see an unbroken line back to origin rather than a black box.

When the commodity is processed — cattle into tallow, grain into oil — mass balance carries the performance across the transformation into the byproduct, without ever letting the credited output exceed the credited input. This is the step that lets a byproduct buyer inherit a reduction measured on the source herd.