Why four routes, not one
Different buyers want different proofs from the same underlying thing: clean kilowatt-hours that actually happened. A utility under U.S. RPS compliance needs a REC that the state's compliance system will accept. A hyperscaler running a 24/7 carbon-free energy programme needs a certificate stamped with the hour and the grid zone. A household in a rented flat needs a way to participate in someone else's clean generation. A voluntary-market buyer chasing real avoided emissions needs a tonne that survives an additionality audit.
Trying to compress all four into a single instrument either over-promises (claiming compliance-grade attributes from voluntary methods) or under-serves (offering the same paper REC to a 24/7 buyer who needs hourly resolution). EDMA splits them into four protocol routes, each with the verification quorum, evidence schema, and retirement semantics the buyer actually needs.
The architecture beneath is shared. Every route runs through the same PoV Gate, reserves keys in the same One-Claim Ledger, and pulls attestor signatures from the same Attestor Registry. The protocol primitives do not change between routes; what changes is what the route proves and to whom.
The four routes at a glance
Each card below is one route. Asset is what generates the evidence; resolution is the time grain the route operates at; the buyer column is who pays; the stacking column shows what the One-Claim Ledger allows to coexist with the route.
Compliance and Granular are about your own generation. Community-Share is about pool-level pass-through where you don't host the asset. Additionality is about voluntary-market carbon tonnes that require a stricter gate than the other three.
R1 - Compliance credits
R1 (Compliance credits) is the path to RECs, SRECs, GOs, STCs, and other compliance-grade certificates. The producer's revenue-grade meter signs at source; METER_OP and AUDITOR sign the evidence; the PoV Gate evaluates; ETTs mint at 10 kWh granularity; 100 ETTs roll up into one Energy NFT (1 MWh); retirement on Ethereum L1 carries the lineage and optionally bridges to traditional registries (PJM-GATS, NEPOOL-GIS, M-RETS, EU AIB GO hub, Australian REC Registry).
R1 is the default path for any renewable generator that wants a compliance-grade certificate. Read the R1 page for the full seven-stage flow and registry bridge details.
R2 - Granular & Flex
R2 (Granular & Flex) upgrades R1's flow to hourly resolution with grid-zone binding. The quorum is tightened: METER_OP + GRID (an ISO/RTO data integrator) + AUDITOR, giving an effective three-role quorum. Every ETT carries start_timestamp, end_timestamp, grid_zone, and fuel_type as on-chain metadata. Retirement requires a buyer-side consumption attestation for the same hour in the same grid zone; mismatched temporal or spatial parameters revert at the contract level.
The flex half of R2 covers verified demand response: meter-attested load reduction during specific hours, minted as Demand Response Tokens with a distinct fungibility class. The design is aligned with the EnergyTag Granular Certificate Scheme Standard. Read the R2 page for the diagram, the standards alignment, and the demand-response side.
R3 - Community-Share
R3 (Community-Share) is a programmatic pass-through service for households and small sites that cannot host renewable assets (renters, apartments, heritage buildings, shaded roofs) or that can host but earn very little in clean-grid markets where attributes clear at low prices. The pool aggregates real assets (C&I rooftops, community solar, community-scale BESS), pre-sells the output under corporate 24/7 attribute contracts, retires the attributes in external registries on the buyer's instruction, and passes a published percentage of the revenue through to participating slot-holders.
R3 is not a fund, not a CIS or AIF, and not a security: participants do not fund assets, slots are non-transferable, and distributions follow a published formula with no discretion over invested capital. Read the R3 page for the pool-level seven-stage flow and the disclosure requirements.
R4 - Additionality Tonnes
R4 (Additionality Tonnes) issues verified ex-post carbon tonnes from energy projects, but only after a binary additionality gate, only with the emission factor hierarchy locked at issuance to prevent vintage drift, and only when overlapping energy attributes are retired or immobilized first. The gate filters for projects that EDMA financing caused or materially enlarged, and for storage that demonstrably shifts clean energy into high-marginal-emission hours.
Most rooftop generation in clean grids does not pass R4's gate and is routed to R1 or R2 so the producer still earns. R4 is the strictest of the four routes by design; the discipline is what makes the tonne defensible in a voluntary-market audit. Read the R4 page for the additionality criteria, the EF hierarchy, and the ex-post verification flow.
Stacking: what the One-Claim Ledger allows
The One-Claim Ledger enforces a single rule across all four routes: one kWh, one claim. The same kilowatt-hour cannot fund a REC and a carbon tonne. It cannot fund two RECs in two different registries. It cannot fund an hourly certificate and an annual certificate. The protocol reserves keys at mint and at retirement, and the same key cannot be finalised twice.
Within that rule, several stacking patterns work. R1 + R2 on the same generator is allowed if the ETTs are split between the two routes (some hours go to R1's vintage-window flow; others go to R2's hourly flow). R4 alongside R1 or R2 is allowed if the relevant energy attributes are retired or immobilized in S04 of R4 before any carbon tonne is queued. R3 alongside any of R1, R2, R4 is always allowed because R3 operates on pool assets, never on the participant's own assets.
What cannot stack is double-issuance of the same evidence: you cannot mint a REC under R1 and also a carbon tonne under R4 from the same kWh, unless the REC has been retired. The One-Claim Ledger reverts at the contract level if anyone tries.
What's shared across all four
Every route runs the same protocol stack:
Attestor Registry. The on-chain registry of roles (METER_OP, AUDITOR, GRID, INSPECTOR) and the firms or entities holding each role. Roles are admitted under published onboarding criteria; signatures are verifiable on-chain. See Attestor Registry.
PoV Gate. The smart contract that evaluates every mint and every retirement against three checks: quorum (enough role-diverse attestations), equality (all attestations reference the same evidence hash), exclusivity (the One-Claim Ledger has not already finalised the claim). See Proof-of-Verification.
One-Claim Ledger. The cross-protocol primitive that prevents the same evidence from being claimed twice. Keys vary by route (device_id + window for R1, device_id + hour for R2, batch_id for R3, ETT_id at retirement for R4), but the rule is uniform. See One-Claim Ledger.
Ethereum L1 anchoring. Every retirement, every burn, every PoV pass is anchored to Ethereum L1 via EIP-4844 blobs. The receipts are auditable from outside EDMA's own infrastructure.
Routes differ in what they prove. The infrastructure that does the proving is the same.
Where it stands
R1 (Compliance credits) and R2 (Granular & Flex) are built on the existing PoV Gate, One-Claim Ledger, and Attestor Registry already deployed for Trade settlement. R3 (Community-Share) adds pool-operator role infrastructure and external-registry bridge attestations; R4 (Additionality Tonnes) adds the additionality gate, the emission-factor accounting contract, and the ex-post verifier integration.
Route readiness goes hand-in-hand with attestor onboarding, registry bridge build-out, and external standard finalisation (the GHG Protocol Scope 2 update for R2, voluntary carbon market standards for R4, regulated pool-structuring frameworks for R3). The protocol is designed so that adding a route does not require modifying the underlying PoV or One-Claim infrastructure; each route is a configuration of attestor roles, evidence schemas, and retirement semantics on top of the same primitives.
Beyond the four energy routes, the same architecture extends to four carbon routes (R5 ARR, R6 REDD+/IFM, R7 Blue Carbon, R8 Soils & Biochar) and four complex routes (R9 Diesel-Solar Microgrids, R10 Renewable Thermal, R11 Methane Avoidance, R12 Tech Removals). ETT (the atomic 10 kWh proof receipt) and the Energy NFT (1 MWh aggregate of 100 ETT, the path to RECs, GOs, and Carbon Credits) anchor the evidence chain; CLE is the consumer currency for the prosumer economy, minted in parallel from the same production trigger. See the ESG menu for the full route map.
