What Route 3 is (and isn't)
R3 is a programmatic pass-through service. Participants subscribe to a pool that already has contracted corporate offtake. The pool's renewable assets generate attributes (I-REC, GO, hourly 24/7 certificates) and, where eligible, verified carbon tonnes; the pool retires those certificates in external registries on the buyer's instruction, anchors the Issue and Retire IDs on-chain, and passes a disclosed percentage of the revenue through to participating slot-holders as stablecoin distributions.
R3 is not a fund, not a Collective Investment Scheme, not an Alternative Investment Fund, and not a security. Participants do not fund assets. There is no pooled capital being deployed by a manager with discretion. Slots are non-transferable, distributions follow a published formula, and the legal form is a service pass-through with no secondary market in slots.
What R3 is: a way for households who cannot host renewable assets (renters, apartments, heritage buildings, shaded roofs) or who can host but earn very little in clean-grid markets to receive a disclosed share of corporate offtake revenue, with the underlying retirements visible on-chain.
What R3 is not: a speculative token, a retail trading scheme, or a bill-credit programme. The slot is a service entitlement, not a tradable instrument.
Who R3 is for
Two groups of households are the primary scope: those who cannot host (renters, apartment dwellers, occupants of heritage or building-code-restricted properties, shaded sites) and those who could host but would earn very little from R1 or R2 in their local market (clean-grid regions where the attribute price clears in pennies, jurisdictions outside the U.S. SREC areas where voluntary attributes are thin).
The household-level addressable scope is large in absolute terms. Dense urban housing stock in the EU and the UK, condos and apartments in the U.S. and Canada, high apartment shares in Australia, Japan, and Singapore. These are populations that will not produce R1 or R2 certificates from their own roofs but can participate in pool-level offtake.
R3 also fits households that already use R1 or R2 on their own assets and want to stack additional income from a pool they don't host. R3 never touches the participant's own assets, so the routes coexist.
How R3 works
A pool is composed of real assets in a region. The pool operator publishes the asset list, the corporate offtake contracts in place, the reserve policy and waterfall, the pass-through percentage, the slot count, and the cohort calendar before the cohort opens. An auditor signs the pool composition.
Pool assets generate ETTs through the standard R1 or R2 base flow (depending on whether the asset is on a vintage-window or hourly attribute contract). BESS assets in the pool also produce flex revenue: availability payments and dispatch events. The ETTs and the flex receipts accrue to the pool's account.
A corporate buyer signs an offtake contract specifying the attribute type, volume, vintage, and target retirement registry. The pool assembles a vintage batch from its ETT inventory matching the contract, retires the attributes in the external registry, anchors the Issue and Retire IDs on-chain, and the backing ETTs are marked consumed and non-transferable.
Pool revenue from attribute settlement, flex events, and (where eligible) carbon settlement accrues in the Community Treasury. The pass-through formula (Pool revenue × pass-through percentage ÷ active slot count) computes each participant's share, and stablecoin distributions sweep to participant Earnings Vaults on the published cadence. Participants claim on demand; a 4% total fee applies (2% seller, 2% buyer), of which 50% burns in $EDM until the 100 M circulating supply target.
The seven-stage diagram below shows the full path.
Anatomy of a slot
A slot in an R3 pool is a non-transferable service entitlement. Each slot has:
Admission prefund. Computed by the published formula: min( max( 0.02 × (Projected 3-month share of pool distributions), $20 ), $1,000 ). The participant stakes this in $EDM at activation; it doubles as the gas buffer for claims. The $20 floor protects small participants from gas stalls; the $1,000 cap prevents over-commitment.
Pro-rata share. The participant's share of pool revenue is 1 ÷ active_slot_count, multiplied by the pool's pass-through percentage. Both numbers are published before the cohort opens.
Disclosure pack. Asset list (specific C&I rooftops or community solar arrays, plus any BESS), corporate buyer counterparties (with attribute coverage details), reserve policy, waterfall, calendar, expected payout range as min-likely-max, first claim date. Monthly pool report after the pool runs: actual asset performance, retirements executed, flex events, reserves, burn ledger.
Earnings Vault. Per-participant stablecoin balance that accrues from distributions. The participant claims on demand. Claims fail cleanly if $EDM is short; no auto-swaps from payout.
Where the money comes from
Pool revenue has three potential sources, each visible in the monthly report:
Attributes. The pool's pre-sold attribute contracts with corporate buyers. The pricing depends on the attribute type (compliance REC, voluntary I-REC, hourly granular, 24/7 matched) and the market. Hourly and location-matched attributes typically clear at a premium over annual attributes.
Flex. BESS assets in the pool participate in ISO or utility flex programmes (capacity payments for availability, event-driven dispatch payments). The flex revenue depends on the local market structure and the asset's capacity.
Carbon. Only where the methodology allows (high-EF grids, storage-shifted dispatch, and similar additionality-qualifying cases) and only after the overlapping energy attributes have been retired in S05 of the R3 flow. The carbon revenue depends on voluntary-market pricing per tonne.
Per-slot payout ranges in different archetypes vary widely with pool size, asset mix, corporate offtake pricing, flex value, carbon eligibility, pass-through percentage, and slot count. The protocol docs describe directional ranges (illustrative, not guarantees) of $150 to $1,200 per slot per year depending on the pool archetype. Each pool publishes its own min-likely-max before the cohort opens.
Integrity: external retirements + One-Claim Ledger
Every attribute issued from pool assets is anchored to a real-world external registry. On buyer instruction, the pool transfers and retires units in I-REC, GO, hourly 24/7 systems and records the Issue and Retire IDs on-chain. The ETTs that backed those units are then marked consumed and non-transferable. The same kilowatt-hour cannot be retired across two registries; the One-Claim Ledger reverts at the contract level.
When carbon tonnes are issued from pool assets (the optional R3 + R4-style carbon path within the pool), the protocol requires the overlapping energy attributes to be retired first, with the external registry IDs anchored. Carbon issuance never proceeds before this step closes. The same kilowatt-hour cannot fund both an attribute claim and a carbon claim.
Monthly pool reports list every Issue and Retire ID, every flex event, every reserve transaction, and every burn hash. An auditor or buyer can walk back from any pool-level distribution to the specific underlying registry retirements without going through EDMA's own infrastructure.
Stacking with other routes
R3 is structurally non-overlapping with R1, R2, and R4 because R3 operates on pool assets and never on the participant's own assets. A household that uses R1 on its rooftop solar can also subscribe to an R3 pool slot; the two are independent revenue streams.
If the participant later qualifies for R4 on their own rooftop (additionality, high-EF grid), they can route those ETTs to R4, but those ETTs must retire any overlapping R1 or R2 attributes first. The R3 slot is untouched by that operation.
The legal form is also separable. The R1 or R2 certificate revenue is the producer's own income from their own assets; the R3 slot distribution is a pass-through service payment from a pool the producer subscribes to. They are reported separately.
Where it stands
R3 is built on the existing PoV Gate and One-Claim Ledger infrastructure (the per-asset ETT mint inside S02 uses the same R1 or R2 base flow as the standalone routes). The R3-specific work is in three areas:
Pool operator role. A POOL_OPERATOR role admitted to the Attestor Registry with onboarding criteria covering asset acquisition discipline, counterparty vetting, disclosure obligations, and reserve management. The role is held by a regulated entity that runs the pool as a service.
External registry bridges. Bridge attestation contracts for the major attribute registries (I-REC, GO via the AIB hub, hourly schemes including EnergyTag-aligned issuers), so the pool's retirements in those registries can be anchored on-chain with verifiable IDs.
Distribution mechanics. The Community Treasury contract, the per-slot Earnings Vault contracts, and the published distribution formula. Stablecoin rails through regulated payout partners with KYC and AML compliance per jurisdiction.
R3 readiness depends on regulatory clarity in target jurisdictions on whether the pass-through service structure clears local rules (it is designed to fall outside CIS, AIF, and securities definitions, but each jurisdiction's regulator has the final word). The protocol is built to geofence by jurisdiction until the relevant legal opinions or licensing are in place.
For the protocol-level architecture R3 depends on, see Proof-of-Verification, One-Claim Ledger, Attestor Registry, and the sibling route pages: R1 Compliance credits, R2 Granular & Flex, and R4 Additionality Tonnes.
