Tradable Impact
The way we finance social and environmental outcomes and invest in impact-linked assets is being revolutionised. Impact – from carbon reductions to educational gains – is becoming a digital asset that can be bought and sold. By tokenising impact and trading it like a commodity, we can inject much-needed capital into social, environmental, and climate projects more efficiently, to produce more impact. This emerging tokenised impact economy promises to cut costs and complexity in impact financing, while directly linking those who produce positive impact (projects and communities) with those who invest in or benefit from it (including investors, donors, and communities). This shift means we can “count what matters and value what counts,” turning real-world impact into the currency of our future prosperity.
Cutting Costs and Complexity
Transforming impact into digital tokens that represent verifiable outcomes isn’t just a gimmick – it carries powerful technical advantages. Trading impact as digital assets reduces the frictions, costs, and delays that plague traditional impact financing and impact-linked investing, and it increases the quality of data that gets generated through verifiable mechanisms. Intermediaries like brokers, banks, and certifiers can be streamlined or even eliminated. Blockchain networks allow peer-to-peer transactions and automated smart contracts, greatly reducing overhead and transaction costs, and even removing the need for third-party middlemen to verify transactions. In traditional impact finance (such as social impact bonds or carbon credits), multiple intermediaries and layers of verification often eat up funds. By contrast, tokenised impact travels through leaner and faster “capital supply chains” from funders to projects.
Used correctly, Web3 protocols produce high-definition data that is like gold for AI applications. Historically, social and environmental projects and investments have struggled to measure, report and verify their impacts. By contrast, tokenised impact travels through more transparent and verifiable "data supply chains" from projects to funders.
Impact tokens are backed by verifiable data – based on verifiable claims, which may include remote sensor data, and processed with the help of AI, with proofs recorded immutably on a blockchain. This means anyone can verify that a claimed ton of CO₂ was truly removed or that 100 students were in fact taught. A 2019 review of blockchain-based impact projects found that most aimed at digitising marketplaces, reducing transaction costs, and accelerating measurement, reporting, and verification processes for social and environmental outcomes.
In other words, tokenisation automates trust: once an impact is measured and converted into a token, investors can trust its validity and value without redundant bureaucracy.
Perhaps most importantly, tokenised impact creates a direct link between impact producers and impact consumers. Projects on the ground (an afforestation effort, a clean water initiative, a job training program) can issue digitally certified impact tokens once they achieve results. Investors or donors purchase these tokens, providing immediate funding to the project. This peer-to-peer model cuts out layers of charities or banks that traditionally sit in the middle. As a result, investors can engage more directly and meaningfully with projects – gaining real-time visibility into how funds are used and the results that have been achieved.
Likewise, project creators and even the end beneficiaries gain a stake in the process; communities can potentially hold tokens that represent the improvements in their own lives, aligning everyone’s interests. By removing unnecessary intermediaries and forging a transparent link between those doing the work and those paying for the results, a tokenised impact marketplace unlocks new efficiencies and trust.
Early experiments bear this out. For example, at IXO which has been a pioneer of blockchain for impact – we have shown that validating impact data on-chain can dramatically reduce costs, while giving funders and service providers instant proof of results.
In our R&D program and pilot with UBS, we demonstrated how a local ed-tech provider (Chimple) could distribute tablet devices financed by the UBS Optimus Foundation in Switzerland, which generated verifiable claims on the IXO Impact Hub blockchain, linked to the achievement of learning outcomes; these claims were validated, evaluated and verified by an independent outcome evaluators to unlock funding from impact investors through a tokenised Development Impact Bond. By combining data with trust through blockchain, IXO and similar platforms demonstrate how tokenised impact can optimise financing for sustainable development – ensuring money flows only when results are achieved, and cutting out the costly guesswork in between. This technical foundation sets the stage for a new ecosystem where impact itself is a traded asset.
Funding the Commons
Alongside these technical breakthroughs, a growing community of innovators known as the “Funding the Commons” movement has been developing novel financing models to better fund public goods and positive impact. These technological and ideological innovations aim to make funding more democratic, efficient, and aligned with social value. Key examples include:
- Quadratic Funding (QF) – A funding mechanism designed to optimally finance public goods in a democratic way. In quadratic funding, community contributions are amplified, so that a project with broad support from many people gets far more match funding than one with the same total donations from only a few wealthy donors. It has been called “the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods” because it boosts donations from a large community over those from a small group of big spenders. Popularised by Gitcoin and originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, and Glen Weyl, QF has directed millions in matching funds to open-source projects, climate initiatives, and other public goods – prioritising what people value most rather than what a single grantmaker favors.
- Retroactive Public Goods Funding – Instead of betting on proposals, this model rewards projects after they have proven impact. Pioneered by thinkers like Vitalik Buterin and implemented by programs such as Optimism’s RetroPGF, the idea is that “it’s easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful”. An appointed community or “results oracle” evaluates which projects have delivered significant public benefit (say, a widely-used open-source software or a successful poverty alleviation pilot) and then allocates reward funding retroactively. This incentivises entrepreneurs to tackle public-good projects with the promise that if they succeed and create real value for society, they can later be handsomely rewarded. It essentially creates a futures market for impact: impact certificates or tokens could be issued for completed projects and traded among investors who believe the project’s value will be recognised.
- Regenerative Finance (ReFi) – An emerging movement in Web3 that aligns finance with climate and social regeneration. ReFi uses decentralised financing mechanisms to fund and scale projects that restore and enhance social and environmental well-being, rather than just extract profit. The goal is to build an economy that goes beyond “do no harm” and actively improves ecosystems and communities. For example, ReFi projects include tokenised carbon credits that fund carbon removal, biodiversity tokens that protect forests, or community currencies that uplift local development. In essence, “regenerative finance integrates financial practices with social responsibility, sustainability, and regeneration”, creating economic systems focused on restoring environmental health and reducing inequalities. This contrasts with traditional finance’s short-term profit focus by emphasising long-term circular and inclusive models (think of funding schemes where returns are measured in trees planted or lives improved, not just dollars).
- Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol and Grants Stack – As part of the Funding the Commons toolkit, Gitcoin (a platform known for QF grant rounds) has developed the Allo protocol and an open-source Grants Stack. These are modular blockchain-based tools that let any community or organisation run their own transparent, democratic grant programs. Allo is a set of smart contracts for on-chain capital allocation, originally powering Gitcoin’s QF rounds. The Grants Stack builds on Allo to provide a user-friendly way to create and manage grant rounds with configurable funding mechanisms. In practice, Gitcoin’s Grants Stack “allows anyone to easily run a quadratic funding round,” powered by Allo’s smart contracts that enable novel forms of democratic fund distribution. This means a city government, a DAO, or a philanthropic alliance can deploy their own version of Gitcoin’s grant program to fund local public goods or global causes, with all transactions transparent on-chain. Innovations like Allo are spreading the impact of concepts like QF and retroactive funding by making them accessible and customisable for diverse communities.
Together, these innovations are redefining how we fund the commons. They reflect a shared ethos: outcomes that benefit everyone should be financed by everyone, in proportion to the value delivered. Whether through matching funds that favour broad participation (QF), rewards for proven impact (retroactive funding), financial systems that heal rather than harm (ReFi), or open grant platforms (Allo), the Funding the Commons movement is building the social and technical infrastructure for an impact-driven economy. These tools complement tokenised impact markets by ensuring not only that impact can be traded, but that it can be equitably produced and funded in the first place.
Is Tradable Impact Going Mainstream?
Once a fringe idea, this concept of tradable impact is quickly moving into the mainstream of policy and finance. On January 15, 2025, the World Economic Forum released a report titled “Tradable Impact: An Emerging Framework for Growth Through Social and Environmental Value.” The authors posit that we can “transform how we value and finance positive social outcomes” by treating them as tradable assets, much like carbon credits in carbon markets. Just as carbon markets have turned emission reductions into a commodity, impact markets would allow verified improvements in education, health, livelihoods, or environmental quality to be bought and sold. Imagine an exchange where a verified increase in literacy rates or a decrease in local air pollution can be traded and scaled via private investment – the WEF report suggests this vision is now within reach. By economically valuing outcomes we “hold dear, such as health, education, equity and environmental sustainability,” these markets could unlock new flows of capital for impact at a global scale.
Crucially, the WEF report notes that tradable impact markets build upon a decade of innovation and pilots. This isn’t just a theoretical idea dropped from the sky in 2025 – it stands on the shoulders of pioneering projects and partnerships over the past ten years. For instance, development finance institutions and social enterprises have experimented with outcome-based funding (OBF) contracts worth over $185 billion, proving that linking finance to results can work. Corporations like SK Group have created internal impact credit systems (Social Progress Credits) to incentivise social value creation. And importantly, blockchain-based impact platforms, such as IXO, have been trailblazing many of the core concepts of tradable impact since the mid-2010s.
The WEF report cites IXO as an example of innovation in this space. Founded in 2017, the IXO Foundation and its successor–the Impacts Venture Cooperative (governed as a DAO on the Impact Hub network) has essentially been building the “Internet of Impact” – a blockchain protocol and digital public good infrastructure for intelligently coordinating, financing, verifying, governing, and trading tokenised social and environmental impacts. Years before “tradable impact” became a buzzword, IXO was using blockchain (now with AI) to verify sustainable development impacts and turn them into digital assets that could unlock funding. In partnership with organisations like UNICEF and local governments, the IXO protocol has been used to create impact tokens for outcomes in domains such as early childhood development, primary education, and renewable energy access, cutting out inefficiencies in financing flows. By proving that high-quality impact data could be collected, verified, and monetised on a ledger, IXO pioneered the approach that is now gaining global endorsement. The World Economic Forum’s recognition of tradable impact as a framework for growth is, in many ways, a validation of what these early innovators demonstrated: that social and environmental value can be quantified and transacted to drive resources toward what matters.
Of course, moving from pilots to a full-fledged impact market ecosystem will require supportive policy, standards, and trust. The WEF report acknowledges challenges – from ensuring robust verification systems and standards (so that an impact token in one marketplace means the same as in another) to preventing perverse incentives or the neglect of immeasurable benefits. Governance will be key: communities must have a say in defining what “impact” is worth trading, and safeguards are needed so that market mechanisms uplift (and do not exploit) vulnerable populations. But with the groundwork laid by pioneers and increasing buy-in from institutions, tradable impact is poised to move from an exciting idea to a scalable reality. It represents a convergence of the trends we’ve discussed – blockchain tokenisation, outcome-based finance, and public good funding innovations – into a new market paradigm where investing for impact is directly rewarded. As this paradigm goes mainstream, impact will stand alongside profit, as well as generate financial returns, as a driver of investment into sustainable growth.
An Abundance of Impact
What’s next for the tokenised impact economy? Two transformative forces – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Web3 – are increasingly intersecting to supercharge the scale and effectiveness of impact markets. Web3 plus AI can accelerate the tokenisation and trading of impact in several ways. First, AI can substantially improve how we measure and verify impact data. Machine learning models can analyse satellite imagery to verify reforestation, IoT sensors combined with AI can track water quality improvements in real-time, and natural language processing can sift through reports to gauge project outcomes. This automation of impact verification reduces costs even further and allows impact tokens to be issued faster and more reliably. In fact, the IXO platform recognised this synergy early on – incorporating AI to help optimise and validate sustainable development data streams. As AI technology advances (with cheaper sensors, better computer vision, etc.), the feedback loop from real-world impact to token issuance will become seamless and instantaneous. Investors see impact metrics updating in real time on a dashboard (much like stock prices), as AI oracles certify new impact tokens on-chain the moment positive change is detected.
Beyond verification, AI can also help match and allocate capital to impact more efficiently. Consider AI algorithms that identify which investments are likely to yield the highest impact as well as financial returns on investment, or that personalise impact investment portfolios to an individual’s values. In the Web3 realm, AI agents might actively trade impact tokens on behalf of investors or even predict future impact needs (for example, anticipating a disease outbreak and funding preventative health measures in advance via tokenised contracts). This paints a picture of an “intelligent” impact market where AI is continuously optimising the flow of funds to where they can do the most good, and Web3 provides the transparent, trust-minimised rails for those transactions.
The combination of AI and Web3 also points to a deeper, more radical possibility: the emergence of an “abundance economy.” As AI drives the cost of producing goods and services toward zero, many traditional economic scarcities could fade. Futurists like Calum Chace describe a potential Star Trek-like abundance economy, where basic needs like food and shelter are so readily met that they become essentially free. In such a world, what becomes the basis of value and wealth? If AI and automation handle most labour and production, human attention shifts to higher pursuits. Contemporary AI thought leaders suggest that society will begin to value what machines cannot create – human relationships, creativity, and social impact. In Sam Altman's view, as AI and robotics produce more of the world’s basic goods and services, people will “spend more time...working toward social good”. In other words, impact itself could become a primary measure of value when material scarcity is largely solved. We may stop measuring growth in terms of GDP and start measuring it in terms of improvements in well-being, equality, and sustainability.
This vision aligns closely with the tokenised impact economy. In an AI-enabled future, impact tokens might emerge as the most important assets people trade or hold – far more meaningful than stocks or commodities today. Investors might brag not about the size of their financial portfolio, but the size of their impact portfolio (how much carbon they've helped offset, how many lives they've improved through the tokens they hold).
“What if growth could be unlocked not by creating more material goods, but by recognising and valuing what matters most: human connection, societal health and environmental sustainability?” ask World Economic Forum experts. That question hints that we are moving into an era where impact is the new gold. AI can help us count what matters by analysing and verifying the nuanced effects of our actions, while Web3 helps us value what counts by creating markets for those effects. Together, these technologies could usher in unprecedented abundance – not only of material goods, but of social and environmental prosperity.
The Currency of the Future
Peering ahead, we can foresee a time when tokenised impacts become the dominant value system for humanity. As we climb the ladder of progress – satisfying basic human needs and moving up the hierarchy – we enter an upward spiral where higher-order needs and ideals grow in importance. Impact becomes the currency that measures how well we are meeting those higher needs. In this future, a company’s worth might be judged not just by its market cap, but by the quantified social value it delivers. An individual’s wealth may be seen in terms of the positive impact they’ve contributed to society (with impact tokens in their wallet to prove it), not merely the balance of their bank account. Nations might compete and cooperate on Impact KPIs as much as on GDP, fostering a race to the top in delivering health, education, and environmental restoration for their people.
This is a visionary shift: value is no longer an abstraction divorced from reality, but firmly rooted in the outcomes that truly matter for human and planetary well-being. By tokenising and trading impact, we create feedback loops that reward altruism, sustainability, and innovation aimed at the common good, whilst generating economic rewards and driving sustainable economic growth. Investors earn returns in financial terms and in the knowledge of tangible social returns. Entrepreneurs build “impact unicorns” that achieve billion-unit improvements in quality of life. Communities gain direct voice and benefit in the economic system that surrounds them. In sum, the impact economy enables humanity to reach the pinnacle of self-actualisation and even collective transcendence – not as a luxury for the few, but at scale for the many. As basic needs are met more easily, the pursuit of purpose and legacy (the desire to leave the world better than we found it) becomes a driving economic force.
Realising this future will take ongoing innovation, collaboration, and enlightened governance. But the trajectory is set. Each piece – from blockchain protocols that measure and monetise impact, to new funding models for public goods, to AI that augments human decision-making – is aligning toward an economy that prizes impact over output, quality over quantity, sustainability over short-term gains. The tokenised impact economy offers a framework to encode our highest values into the flow of capital itself. By counting what matters and valuing what counts, we empower markets to deliver on humanity’s deepest aspirations. Impact, tokenised and tradable, might very well become the currency of our collective prosperity – fueling an upward spiral of positive change for generations to come.
The IXO mantra over the past decade has been “Count what matters and value what counts.”
Counting what matters and valuing what counts is no longer just an ideal – it is becoming an operational reality. By embracing tokenised impact as the currency of the future, we can ensure that doing good and doing well converge, driving us into an era of true abundance and shared prosperity. Every tokenised tree planted, child taught, or disease prevented is a step toward this future. And in that future, impact will not only be traded – it will be treasured as the ultimate measure of value in society.